Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is September 21, 2020, and I could not be more excited to have back for a 1, 2 4th appearance on Mormon Stories podcast. Shannon Caldwell Montez. Welcome, Shannon.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:00:31] Thank you. Excited to be here again.

John Dehlin [00:00:34] For those who have been following us closely, we've had Shannon on three previous times recently. They've been out of the park. Smash. Grand slam interviews. We started out with Shannon talking about the rise and fall of Mormon historian, general authority and church historian B.H. roberts, talking about how he became aware of deep problems with the Book of Mormon and its historicity as a general authority, as a church historian. And how that led to a meeting in January of 1922 where B.H. roberts called the First Presidency, LDS Church, together with the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and all the Quorum of the Seventy, to discuss the problems of the Book of Mormon's historicity. And it was a super important interview. Go back and listen to it. This is all from Shannon's master's thesis at the University of Nevada at Reno called the Secret Mormon meetings of 1922. But that was the first episode kind of about the rise and follow B H Roberts, of course, once he called this meeting, put the brethren on notice that the Book of Mormon had all these deep problems in terms of historicity. He was sent on a mission and kind of put out to pasture. And as soon as he died, the church has done everything they could to erase him down the memory hole. That was interview one. Interview two was about Shannon's own story. It's an epic, heartwarming, touching story. Go listen to it. The third interview was specifically about whether or not BH Roberts lost his testimony in the Book of Mormon's historicity. I think we, we left little room for doubt that BH Roberts lost his testimony of the Book of Mormon's historicity by the end of that third interview with you. And surprisingly, we've gone all these hours and all these episodes, Shannon, without actually talking about the main focus of your master's thesis, which, which is the secret Mormon meetings of 1922. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. Is that right?

Shannon's Master's Thesis Research Journey

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:02:50] Yeah. Finally, each time we're like, we're going to talk about your thesis. But then we're like, hold on first, let's talk about this thing. So here we go.

John Dehlin [00:02:59] Well, people totally love you and your work, and so it's an honor to have you back on Mormon Stories.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:03:04] Well, thanks Glad to be here.

Background and Context of the 1922 Meetings

John Dehlin [00:03:06] Okay, so let's give a little bit of background first. Last we left off beats, Roberts got this letter, wrote these responses, wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages of his analysis of problems with the Book of Mormon. Parallels, super uncomfortable parallels to View the Hebrews by Ethan Smith, which was another book that Oliver Cowdery had access to, as well as Joseph Smith. B. H Roberts noted all the problems with, you know, linguistics and Native Americans, of horses, of silk, archaeological problems, like, by the 1920s. B.H. roberts is like swimming in all the problems with the Book of Mormon. He holds these meetings with the First Presidency, the Quorum of the Twelve, and all the general authorities. And how helpful were they, Shannon?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:04:03] How helpful were they to BH Roberts? Yeah, not helpful enough. He. Yeah, there was one meeting where Anthony Ivins came back with a bit of a rebuttal, but Roberts was like that, nope, that's not helpful. What you're using as evidence has been disproven as evidence. You're using faulty sources. This isn't gonna fly. Like, if anyone digs any deeper than what you're saying, this won't work. So, yeah, so apparently. And I was the one to discover this. Well, so there was, from what we knew, there was a. A committee meeting after that. There was Heber J. Grant said, okay, we'll appoint a committee to go over this. And it was. It was James Talmadge, B.H. roberts, and I believe Witso and might have been Lyman as well. Anyway, they met once, and this is the meeting where they. Where they stared blankly at each other. And B.H. roberts is like, well, I've attempted an answer to this letter. Here's what I have. And then they basically voted to accept that letter and send it. And we have that letter that he sent to. Back to Ryder and basically gave some, like, kind of answers. But he knew it wasn't sufficient for the thinking man, according to what he told Wesley Lloyd later. So we know from Talmadge's journal, there was several other meetings. They were at the Moyle home. And everyone had assumed that these meetings were this committee of apostles. But one day when I was looking through the journal of Richard Lyman, I saw on one of those dates that he had a list of people that were at this meeting. And so I was like, well, those. You know, there's only like two other apostles and everyone else is, you know, some other name. I wasn't familiar with most of these people when I saw the list. And so then, so then I started looking at who these people were and realized that they were all very highly educated intellectuals. And then I found in one of those people, John Schodel, I found in his journal a list of people that came to the second meeting, or it might have been. It was the first meeting. So Lyman noted who was at the second meeting and Shotel noted who was at the first meeting, I believe. And. And so between those two journals, I was able to come up with A list of 17 people who were at these meetings and who had discussed Book of Mormon difficulties. So that is what I was looking into for that. My thesis ended up discovering who these 17 people were, why they were significant, and how. How they each dealt with this information.

John Dehlin [00:07:23] And so your. If you were to summarize, number one, who was sort of in charge of these secret Mormon meetings? I mean, I guess. Let me back up. So, so, so we're thinking, well, no, let's start. Who is in charge of these secret Mormon meetings of 1922, in your guess?

Who Attended and Why the Meetings Were Secret

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:07:39] Well, my guess is either B.H. roberts. You know, apparently he had the information to share. And my other guest is James Mo, whose home this meeting was held at. So I don't know if Robert said, hey, can we hold a meeting at your house? Or if. Or if he'd talked to Moyle. And Moyle said, let me get some friends together. I'm not sure how these meetings came about. I was never able to find that information, but that's my guess. It was at home and Roberts was there with his information.

John Dehlin [00:08:14] And remind us what James Moyle's calling, if he had a calling or a position.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:08:18] James Moyle was not in church leadership. He was actually the leader of the Democratic Party. He was so. So he was good friends with Anthony Ivins for that reason. And B.H. roberts, they were all Democrats. He ran for governor at one point, did not win, but he was a lawyer, he was very well connected. So I think he was just like a close personal friend. And I think it's significant that these meetings were held in Moyle's home because it kind of signaled that this was not a church meeting. This was not a leadership meeting. This was an intellectual meeting. And they were there to discuss intellectual issues rather than, you know, church issues.

John Dehlin [00:09:01] And James Moyle is the father to Henry D. Moyle, kind of who. Who was active in the first Presidency, as I understand it. He must have become an apostle.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:09:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:09:13] And an active member of the first presidency in the late 50s and early 60s. Right.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:09:17] He was actually called as an apostle, I believe, a few years after his father's death in 1945, I think, is when Moyle died. Anyway. Yeah, he. Shortly after, you know, 10 or 20 years after these meetings. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:09:38] Okay.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:09:38] Henry Moyle is James Moyle's son.

John Dehlin [00:09:41] James Moyle is Henry D. Moyle's dad.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:09:44] Right, right.

John Dehlin [00:09:45] Okay.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:09:46] And he, James Moyle's the first, like, Mormon lawyer. He was the first one allowed to go abroad. Abroad meaning out of state to get his law degree.

John Dehlin [00:09:57] Okay, so we're thinking it's. And Ivan's is an apostle, right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:10:02] Yeah, he's in the First Presidency. Evans is, I think he's the second counselor at this point. He may be the first counselor.

John Dehlin [00:10:12] Okay, so. So these meetings are probably led by, by Roberts, Ivins and Moyle or some combination of those three. There are Apostles involved. What do we think? Is there an explicit intention and is it written anywhere like what the explicit intention of these meetings are?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:10:33] Why are they so like James Pack. He also not James Pack, Frederick Franklin Harris, who was the president of byu. His, his journal also confirms that these meetings were held. And his, his journal didn't really give any details, but he said he went to meetings on the Book of Mormon in the homes of James Moyle. So we know it was definitely to discuss the Book of Mormon. And I believe Talmadge also. Oh, yeah. In the meeting, in the evening, attended a small gathering in the home of Brother and Sister. James H. Moyle called for further consideration of matters relating to the external evidences of the genuineness of the Book of Mormon. So he specifically says that this meeting is to relate to the external evidences of the genuineness of the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:11:37] So basically the Apostles and First Presidency know that they've got no good answers regarding all the problems that B.H. roberts calls their attention to. And they literally say by the end of those, that, that those, those meetings at church headquarters, those three, those three full days of meetings, we don't want to deal with this.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:11:56] Get a little committee. You figure it out.

John Dehlin [00:11:58] Yeah, okay. So, you know, so that shows, you know, what got me so fired up about those three full day meetings at church headquarters, is that it kind of shows that the Brethren have known for a long, long, long time about the problems with Book of Mormon historicity, not to mention the Book of Abraham stuff that the New York times publishes in 1912, where they have Egyptologists, you know, interpret the facsimiles, and the New York Times just exposes the Book of Abraham as a total fraud. Now the Brethren, that's 1912. By 1922, ten years later, B. H Roberts is exposing the Book of Mormon as a historical deep problem or concern. And just to give a little bit more context, what your thesis also talks about, which I think is interesting and important, is there's also these movements of sort of organic evolution and biblical or historical criticism that are emerging in the teens and twenties that are also emerging threats to Mormon orthodoxy. Is that. Is that fair to say?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:13:11] Yeah. I mean, we have the 1911 controversy where four BYU professors are being asked. I mean, they're basically being dismissed for teaching about evolution or even believing in evolution. Some of them hadn't even taught it, but they admitted to believing that evolution was a deal, like something that we can't avoid. So there was a controversy in 1911 about this. This whole issue. So it was. It was there kind of brewing in the background. They kind of tamped it down for a bit, but of course, those kind of things don't go away.

John Dehlin [00:13:58] So I want to just briefly welcome all those who are joined us on our live streams through Facebook or. Or YouTube. I want to invite you all to post your questions or comments in the. In the comment section of whatever channel you're joining us from, and we'll do our best to incorporate. I've already got one. I've already got one that I want to share with you from Carl. Carl says this sounds more like a scripture study than a committee meeting. Just a nice Mormon thing. Like, they don't exactly sound official. So basically, Carl's saying that if it's not an official meeting at church headquarters where minutes are taken, that it must not be relevant or meaningful. It must be Mormons getting around studying the Book of Mormon for uplifting purposes.

Evaluating the Significance of the Meetings

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:14:49] Yeah, and that's like, that's something that I had to kind of fight when I was going through this. I was like, I mean, how do I know this isn't just a book club? Like, you know, maybe this isn't a big deal. And. But the more I looked into it, you know, they were talking about definitely discussing Book of Mormon problems. You know, that's what Richard Lyman says. You know, we went to the home of James Moyle to discuss Book of Mormon problems. And had we also not discovered that B.H. roberts had written this whole big document just months before, I don't think I would have thought it was a big deal. But the fact that he had this document and it was very troubling to him, apparently, according to all of the things that I read. So if they're discussing Book of Mormon problems and he's just written this document and he's in the process of writing his second document, the one with the view of the Hebrews parallels and internal problems. I just have a hard time believing this wasn't a big deal. And yeah, so that's partly why I felt like I had to look at all the lives of the people to understand what happened. And it was kind of interesting in my committee meeting when I was defending my thesis, one of my professors said the same thing, like, why is this, why did you have to go and look at every single person in this meeting? And we realized that it's almost like become this kind of a black hole. And the only way you can tell there's a black hole is the way it affects everything around it. All the energy that is being drawn or pushed or the way it affects things around it can show the presence of something big. And that's what my thesis is doing, is showing that this is the presence of something big. When I look at some of the before and afters of this meeting, the way people were talking before and after, I feel like it did have some kind of seismic shift for most of the people involved.

John Dehlin [00:17:00] Moonman55 writes, I think it is a silly argument. Official meeting or not, it does not make the issues of the historicity of the Book of Mormon any less. And yeah, I think to try and argue that that three full day meeting in January of 1922, January, February, where the entire church leadership is put on notice that the Book of Mormon is deeply fraught. To think that there would be, I mean, yeah, it's possible that there'd be no response, meaning pretend that those meetings never happened. I mean, certainly that's within the realm of what's conceivable. But I think what's probably more conceivable is this is going to come back and bite us again. We need to figure this out, but we don't want to make a big deal about it. We don't want to make this a formal thing. Let's have it be under the table, let's have it be private and let's get our best minds together to try and figure out what to do. Because this is surely not. This is surely going to keep coming up as it has for the next at least 100 plus years.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:17:59] Right, right, right. It was, you know, if you look at who was invited and the great minds that were there and you know, the. I didn't find any other evidence. I mean a few of them I could find connections between, but it seemed like the thing that these people were called, their different areas of expertise, it Definitely seemed that this was called as a meeting to figure this out. And so it was a big deal. And that's. I mean, that's obviously what my whole thesis is trying to prove, is that these meetings were a big deal. So, I mean, people can disagree, but that's, you know, spent 160 pages trying to show that these were a big deal.

John Dehlin [00:18:40] Isn't it fair to say that if you've got three apostles and the church's architect, arch apologist, slash historian in the presidency of the quorum of the 70, doesn't that just by the very nature, make it a pretty big deal?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:18:58] Right. And like all the PhDs, they could gather ones that have experience in archaeology and linguistics and all of the issues that they're trying to discuss here. So it definitely seems like it was a big deal.

Documentation and Structure of the Meetings

John Dehlin [00:19:12] So is there, Shannon, is there any agenda, you know, minutes from the meetings? Do we have any documentation as to what was actually. What the structure of the meetings were and what was actually discussed?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:19:26] Just that they discussed Book of Mormon problems. And so I'm assuming that that's no minutes or notes. Again, this was kind of a black hole.

John Dehlin [00:19:38] Exactly.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:19:39] It felt like somebody had been coming along before me and gathering any information that I was looking for and had put it in vaults, like diary entries. They were. It was really hard to find information besides what I found. A lot of them were in, say, the First Presidency vault, which, you know, only the First Presidency has access to. Not even church employees could. You know, the historian that works at the church that's helping me, they're like, well, I can't even vet that for you, that there's no way you're getting those journals or those diary entries. I did find. It looked like somebody had been given access. James Allen had been given access because. And then footnotes of one of his articles later, they called it the TWL collection. And it had minutes of meetings and First Presidency meetings and journals. So, you know, I would love to know what was in that collection, but those are all things that I was denied access to.

John Dehlin [00:20:50] And. And when we know about, like Joseph Fielding Smith's ripping the inconvenient 191832 account of the first vision out of, you know, Joseph Smith's own journal and hiding it for decades, or the fact that they hid the Seer Stone for well over a century,

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:21:10] that I found very. I mean, I'm trying not to be conspiracy theorist here, but Gordon B. Hinckley wrote a biography of James Moyle shortly after he died. He was using the biography that had Been started by John Henry Evans. But, you know, Gordon B. Hinckley had access to all of those things. And I'm fairly certain he was aware of these meetings. It's possible his father was in these meetings because there was a Professor Hinckley that. I couldn't determine whether it was Gordon B. Hinckley's father or his uncle. But the fact is, it seems pretty likely that Gordon B. Hinckley was aware of these meetings. He works on this biography. He has access to all these documents. Seems pretty easy to think that anything that would be damning, he got hidden.

John Dehlin [00:22:07] Yeah, yeah. And it's. And you're right, it sounds so conspiratorial, but the fact that there are no meeting, no minutes, that three plus apostles are involved, a general, a member of the 70 presidency, and all these important people are all called together and no meetings exist. No, no. No minutes exist of the meetings, no notes. That's super suspicious.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:22:32] Right. And that's why I was looking through everyone's papers who was involved, and I thought maybe I could find something. I started wondering if there was some kind of oath of secrecy that is, you know, oaths of secrecy are not unheard of in Mormon belief. Everyone there had been to the temple and everyone had taken vows of. I mean, yeah, I would say Mormons are very practiced at keeping their mouth shut about certain things. So if they said something to the effect of, this doesn't leave this room, I'm pretty sure people were careful not to let it leave the room. So, yeah, I don't know. It was a mysterious black hole. And I, you know, my professor and I kept going back and forth. I kept trying to minimize it and be like, I don't know. I mean, maybe this was just a book club. Maybe it's not a big deal. Maybe nobody mentioned it because it wasn't important. And she's like, no, I. I don't think so. I mean, look at, you know, she kept reminding me, look at all these people. You know, as you go through this, what do you think? And as I looked at everyone's lives and the sorts of issues they started bringing up, that it just started to really seem to me like it was a big deal. And there's a quote, let's see if I can find it, that really. It was from Amanda Porterfield, who's. She did a history of the Rev just after, like, basically around the second Great Awakening, American history. And she says something to the effect that I found it.

John Dehlin [00:24:10] You want me to read it?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:24:11] Okay, yes, please.

John Dehlin [00:24:12] Tell me if this is it. Doubt about God.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:24:16] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:24:17] You write in your thesis, as historian Amanda Porterfield observed, doubt about God could be guarded against and even denied, but not extinguished. Efforts expended against doubt reflected its feared strength.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:24:33] Right.

John Dehlin [00:24:34] Is that the quote?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:24:35] Yes, yes. And so I found the efforts expended against doubt definitely increased in the period after these meetings. And so, you know, before these meetings, everyone was like, you know, BH Roberts is talking about how the Church has to defend. They can't prove a negative. They have to be really bold and, you know, prove the positive. And after these meetings, those kinds of quotes go away. So those guarding against doubt seems to become a lot stronger after this point. So. So again, yeah, the. The efforts to fight against it kind of show the feared strength.

John Dehlin [00:25:20] And I just. You know, your. Your. Your thesis is full of so many incredible moments and quotes and stories, but I'll just read one. It's. It's a comment from. From B.H. roberts. And you have B.H. roberts quoted as saying, quote, young man, don't ever write a thesis on a Mormon subject. If you do, you'll be cut off from the church. Half the people in the church would apostatize if they knew the true history of the Church. So that's BH Roberts. And it tells us two things. It's that he knows that the Brethren cut you down, they decapitate you socially if you ever say anything that harms the church. And number two, it shows how afraid they are, how terrified they are that the truth will get out there.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:26:11] Right. And that was said about 10 out 10 years after these meetings. I think Roberts by then had kind of been like, yeah, there's things that we can't talk about, apparently. And before, I think he was completely more open and, like, excited and saying, we just need to take what comes along and we don't have anything to fear. He said that many times before, just, we have nothing to fear. Let's face this with, you know, dignity, and let's just be prepared. But that kind of rhetoric stopped happening, and you don't see that anymore. They kind of say, you know, with faith. Or they always qualify those statements, that knowledge is important. They always bring faith into it as well. They don't just. It's not as straightforward as it was at that point.

John Dehlin [00:27:01] Yeah, okay, so with these secret Mormon meetings, we. We have a good sense for who was there. We have a good sense for what the main topic was. We don't have notes about what was actually the structure or what was actually said, do we Know how many of these meetings there were? Approximately?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:27:20] We know there were at least three and possibly four. Just based on like Harris's journal, he went to. It looks like he went to four of them. One of them was after BH Roberts left on his mission. So that's an interesting point.

John Dehlin [00:27:38] And again, it's pretty clear that B.H. roberts was sent on a mission to the New New York, New England area just to sort of get him away. I know we're. But is that, is that decently fair to say?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:27:53] Yeah, so apparently there were three. April 28th, May 25th and June 29th.

John Dehlin [00:28:00] Okay, three, three meetings.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:28:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:28:03] April, May and June.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:28:04] That there were three meetings. April, May and June. And I think there was also. Well, they knew. Historians knew about April and May and when in I believe, February. And that was the first committee meeting. So the, the one in February was a committee meeting with just apostles where they wrote that letter to writer. And then the, the other three. April, May, April 28, May 25 and June 29 were meetings on the Book of Mormon at the home of James Moyle.

John Dehlin [00:28:41] Okay, okay, so. So April to June kind of time frame. 1922. Is that what she said?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:28:51] 1922.

John Dehlin [00:28:52] 1922, three meetings. Okay, so. So if you don't, if you don't have the minutes or the structure, tell people what your. Your thesis ends up being about. If it's titled the meetings, and this is asking you to repeat yourself a bit, but even though it's titled to be about the meetings, the truth is the thesis, the meat of the thesis isn't about the meetings. What is it about? Because it's still super fascinating and important.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:29:23] Well, first of all, the thesis is that these meetings happened and who was there. So that's what I know, that they did happen. And I know who was there at least for two of the meetings. And then because I don't have a lot of what was in the meetings besides the B.H. roberts papers, which we assume he discussed. I go through each of these people and talk about why they were significant reasons why they may have been invited to this meeting. What makes them part of the intellectual. I call them the intelligentsia of Mormonism at that time. Utah's like top minds. So I spend the rest of the thesis talking about each of these person, people in detail and how. How they may have been called, you know, asked to give information, why. Why they were significant and how. And by the end I realized it just kind of painted this really interesting picture of mormonism in the 1920s. We have women at these meeting, you know, there's more PhDs in these meetings than there are in the First Presidency. So that are in the all of the apostles, I think there's three PhDs. But in this meeting, everyone except for BH Roberts and Anthony Ivins and the women have PhDs. So that for that time it was extremely unusual to have a PhD. And for all of these PhDs to be in one place at this time was extremely significant because there weren't very many of them.

John Dehlin [00:31:11] Right, right. Okay. So just to explain to our listeners and viewers what they're going to hear now, what we're going to do is we're going to profile somewhere between, let's just say 7 and 10 of the participants of these meetings. And I want to tell you that almost every single one of these profiles for me had at least one bombshell, something super significant. Shannon, you didn't just like randomly profile the participants you found mind blowing for me, bombshell, like moments in each of their stories. Is that fair to say?

Profiling the Key Participants

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:31:48] That's why I like, by the end of this, I was like, okay, this is really awesome. I was, I'm really proud of this because it really did not only paint a picture of mormonism in the 1920s, just some, some really fascinating aspects that people don't really realize. It paints such a cool picture, like, you know, of polygamy, of women's rights, of science and faith and how those go together. So between, like the whole thing put together just ended up being so cool and every single person I just loved for different reasons by the end of this. So it's, they're my people, I love them.

John Dehlin [00:32:34] So, so listeners and viewers, seriously hold on to your hat for what you're about to hear. Every one of these stories has a punch that, that has the potential to blow you over. So should we start with Anthony Ivins?

Anthony Ivins: Polygamy and Church Leadership

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:32:47] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:32:48] All right, let's tell us about him and what are some cool things we learned about Anthony Ivins?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:32:55] Okay, so Anthony Ivins, I'd say of all the apostles at this time, he's my favorite. He's in the first presidency. He kind of grew up ranching. He's kind of like this cowboy awesome dude, but he was really, seemed to be really open minded and really pro education and pro science. And he was just, he was pretty great guy.

John Dehlin [00:33:29] He was a cousin. I've got a couple things and I'll let you look to. He was a cousin to Heber J. Grant. He was a Democrat. He's just, I kind of wrote religious pragmatist down. He loved truth. He wasn't a polygamist. I think I remember you saying that.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:33:50] So he wasn't a polygamist, but most of the leadership at this time was. And he was actually the stake president in Colonia Juarez, I think basically in Mexico. He was the one that was basically tasked to do all the post manifesto marriages. And the interesting thing about him is. So he's. He was actually running for, I believe it was governor.

John Dehlin [00:34:17] He was governor in 1895. He was running for governor.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:34:20] He was. Okay, he was running for governor. He was like in the lead. And the church decided that was the best time to call him on a mission to Mexico. And so he drops out of the race and everyone.

John Dehlin [00:34:34] Scummy. They literally send people away for scummy reasons.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:34:39] Right. And I think in some ways this was kind of a test. Would he put church before politics and then when he's in Mexico.

John Dehlin [00:34:49] But it's more than that. It's the, it's a theocracy. And the church wanted to literally control the politics of the state.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:34:56] Right, right. They, they wanted Republican parties to win, and he was threatening that. And so he. Yeah, he was called to Mexico and then the Republican won. Easy enough. So keep going. 1890 is when the first manifesto comes out. They say, we're going to stop practicing polygamy. He gets called there. 1894, I believe, 1895. He was there from 1895 to 1907. So he, as the stake president, where they say in Mexico it's not illegal. Well, actually it was still illegal in Mexico, but it just wasn't as prosecuted. I guess he would. People would come to Mexico with their bride, their polygamous bride, and they'd have a note from the first presidency that was like carefully worded and had a secret code somehow that said, you know, we give you permission to marry these people. So in the beginning, he wouldn't marry anyone that didn't have a note from the first presidency. So he's doing these weddings. People are asking him to do it and he would not do it unless it was approved by the first presidency. And eventually the first presidency says, look, we want. You can just make the decision. Like, so they stopped doing the coded messages things. But the interesting thing is in the Reed smoot hearing in 1904, he, he's asked to testify about. You know, they're saying polygamy is still happening, and everyone's saying, no, they're not. No, it's not. And you know, he's someone that had proof that they were Happening. He had proof that the first person presidency was permitting this. And he still didn't say anything. He kept quiet to help the church. But there's an Interesting. In 1921.

John Dehlin [00:37:10] Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Can I read something?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:37:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:37:13] So you write, I think this is a cop. This is copied from your thesis. So let me just, let me just restate. So Utah is trying to become a state. Beats Roberts is like elected, I think to the U.S. senate. Right. But he's rejected because Mormons are still practicing polygamy.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:37:30] So you talk and Roberts is a polygamist. That's why he gets right, they won't see him.

John Dehlin [00:37:37] So part of the, part of the, you know, manifesto, the 1890, you know, first manifesto was to try and like tell the world, okay, we're stopping this polygamy stuff. I mean obviously we were getting thrown in jail and our assets were being seized. But also at some point, I think we saw it as advantageous to be admitted to the, to the union. And so, you know, 18 in 1890, the church and all its leaders are telling the whole world that they're no longer practicing polygamy, but obviously they still are. And Anthony Ivins is our sort of public witness number one because he's down there and he's receiving letters from the apostles saying, perform this marriage after the manifesto. Perform this marriage after the manifesto. And word starts leaking out to the point where there are these Smoot hearings. And tell me if I'm wrong, but the Smoot hearings is basically the church being put re on trial saying you did this manifesto back in 1890, but you're still practicing polygamy, you're just lying about it.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:38:44] Right? That when the second manifesto comes out and that's when they're like, okay, we're going to start prosecuting people. And they excommunicate a couple of apostles who, you know, have irrefutable proof that that's happened happening. So they're like, oh well, these guys, okay, well we'll not allow it anymore. That's when they get serious, supposedly, right.

John Dehlin [00:39:08] The church does. But you got to check out this quote. So Joseph F. Smith, so as prophet president of the Mormon Church, gets called in front of the Smoot hearings and is asked to testify.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:39:22] Right, right.

John Dehlin [00:39:24] And let me see, I think I'm reading this from your thesis. Church leaders insisted that people who had practiced participated in polygamy since 1890 had been acting alone against leadership's wishes. So that was the church's position that any post manifesto polygamy Was people.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:39:43] They were rogue. He's saying they didn't. We didn't know about it, but. But they did.

John Dehlin [00:39:49] And then you've got, in the words of President Joseph F. Smith at the Smoot hearings, so lying before Congress under oath, Joseph F. Smith, total liar, complete and total liar, says, quote, there never has been a plural marriage by the consent or sanction or knowledge or approval of the church since the manifesto. Close. Quote, that's our prophet and president Joseph F. Smith, completely lying under oath to Congress. And Anthony Ivins is witness number one, first and foremost, that Joseph F. Smith was totally lying.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:40:32] Right. And there's another Richard Lyman's journal talks in 1921. There's a. He. He writes a journal conversation in which Ivan's admitted to the difficulty of having been, quote, instructed to tell the Mexican government he was not there to perform plural marriages. And at the same time, he was instructed by church officials to perform plural marriages. So he, you know, he's telling Lyman, yeah, that was really rough back then when, you know, I had to tell Mexican officials I wasn't there to perform plural marriages, while at the same time I was explicitly there to perform plural marriages. So, you know, kind of rough to be in the position that he was in.

John Dehlin [00:41:21] Yeah. But it just shows. It's just another example of the church's history of lying to its members. Bald face, egregious, obvious, outrageous lies to the membership, to the government. The church just has lied for so long. It's a lying church and a lying leadership with lies.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:41:45] You know, I would say Joseph Smith lied about having plates, and then he lied about not practicing polygamy, and he lied about, you know, so, I mean, it's par for the course, but it's definitely not something that is well known. You know, they hide the fact that they're lying, but it's definitely a cultural practice for the leadership to lie.

John Dehlin [00:42:07] Yeah. When the. And this is so egregious. We'll get to this in one of the. One of the profiles that we do, but even the missionaries going to England, there were rumors about polygamy in England as we were trying to recruit women, to traffic women back to the United States so they could be brought into polygamous marriages. We're trafficking women, lying to them in England, publishing pamphlets, denying that there's any polygamy going on back in the church while everyone knows there is polygamy going back in the church. And these women that are converted to Mormonism and trafficked to Utah get caught up in Pl. And, you know, and Illinois, you know, and wherever.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:42:50] Right. John Wives and John Taylor. It's not just missionaries saying, oh, that's not happening. Is John Taylor, who himself has 12 wives, is saying polygamy is not happening. He's got 12 wives. He knows it's happening. So you can't pretend that he was just ignorant to that fact.

John Dehlin [00:43:14] Yeah.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:43:14] So, yeah, this kind of comes up later.

John Dehlin [00:43:16] But so again and again, just to restate, you just read a quote that basically said Ivins was explicitly told by church leadership to lie to the Mexican government, too, to tell them that there's no plural marriages being practiced while Ivins himself was being instructed by the First Presidency of Quorum of the twelve to perform plural marriages.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:43:39] Right. Yep.

John Dehlin [00:43:41] And that's got to be hard for Ivan's to just. To be complicit in the lies.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:43:46] Yeah, I'm sure it did. I'm sure it was really hard. And, you know, the Smoot hearings, he had evidence. He had these notes, these coded notes that, you know, First Presidency definitely knew about them and sanctioned them. While Joseph F. Smith is saying. Or fielding, I don't remember which one. Joseph F. Smith is up there saying, well, no, we didn't know about any of this. Everyone's just disobeying the rules, which is a lie, blatantly.

John Dehlin [00:44:23] So as I'm reading through my notes, I wrote, religions make good men do evil things. But Ivan's goes on to be made an apostle, right?

Speaker C [00:44:34] Yeah.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:44:34] And I think part of the reason he was made an apostle, two reasons. First of all, he'd shown his loyalty by keeping his mouth shut and lying as he was. And lying and lying. Right. He kept their secrets. And.

John Dehlin [00:44:49] Can I just say. Can I just say. And I'm sorry, I'm so outraged everybody. But we think that somebody's called to the highest levels of Mormon leadership because of righteousness, because of worthiness, because they're super honest and super moral and super good. What you find with dudes like Moyle or freaking LeGrand. Is it LeGrand Richards? What's his name? No, no, the other guy. The Clark J. Rubin. Clark or Ivins, you're con. You're called to be an apostle. And if you're willing to lie and hide and protect the church over being honest and truthful, like, it's almost like obedience and deception is what qualifies you to the work.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:45:40] Great. It. I wouldn't say deception. I would say that they would say they're. They're looking for loyalty at all. At. You know, your loyalty is to the church, period.

John Dehlin [00:45:51] Loyalty Is do you hide things?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:45:54] Right.

John Dehlin [00:45:54] Do you keep things secret?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:45:55] How do you prove that you're the church's top? You lie for them, you hide for them, you sacrifice for them.

John Dehlin [00:46:04] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so outrageous.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:46:08] So the other thing I was going to say, number one, he proved his loyalty by lying and keeping their secrets. And number two, he was not a polygamist. And after 1904, you know, they couldn't call people in who were polygamists, especially because so many of them since 1890 had had gotten mo. Like I think Mike Quinn points out, I think almost half or a quarter to a half of church leadership took. Had marriage, post manifesto marriages. So for all of those guys and, you know, stake presidents on up, they were, most of them were polygamists. So by the time they decide to stop calling polygamous people, Ivins is in the minority as a non polygamist. So I think that kind of gave him a leg up on becoming part of church leadership. That and the fact that his, one of his best friends, his cousin was an apostle, maybe the prophet at that. No. Yeah, an apostle. But by the time Heber J. Grant became the church president, Anthony Ivins. Yeah. Was called to be shortly after this to be in. In. In the quorum.

John Dehlin [00:47:34] Yeah. So some other things I have about Ivan's. He helps with the writer response. He was invited to the Moyle meetings. You wrote that he was the foremost authority on Book of Mormon geography, Is that right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:47:51] Yeah. So I think we'll go into this later. But the Book of Mormon geography meetings, I think we'll talk about these in a little more detail.

John Dehlin [00:47:58] Those are different than the 1922 secret Mormon meetings.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:48:04] Yes. So this is one other meeting that I feel like we probably need to spend some time talking about. But it was in January of 1921 and they were going to make a map. We talked about this a little bit before about the limited geography thing coming up at this point. So in December, In January of 1921, there was this meeting. Do you want me to talk about this now or when we talk about Jan Shotl the fact is he. Yeah, Ivan's was somebody who is seen as an authority on Book of Mormon geography. And he was probably the first person to advance a limited geography theory.

John Dehlin [00:48:44] Yeah. So when we, when we talk now about the small limited geography theory, which is basically, if you talk to Joseph smith and for 100 years everyone knew the laymanites were. It was all the Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. There was just no question. And the Book of Mormon itself doesn't allow for other populations to be intermixed. The Book of Mormon says the Book of Mormon was preserved for the population that the Lord brings over. It mentions no other populations to have been mixed with outside of the ones that were, you know, from the Jaredites or the, you know, Mulekites or whatever, and from. And from the Lehighes, basically. But once the linguistics and the archaeology and the DNA and all the archaeology and geography are showing that the Book of Mormon is deeply fraught largely because of these B H Roberts meetings, what you have is this apologetic tactic of shrinking the target. We gotta shrink the target. If we can shrink the DNA sample to just a small group of people in Mesoamerica, then of course their DNA disappeared when it got drowned out by all these pre existing Native Americans that came from Asia. Or if you could shrink the geography to just this small unlocatable bit of land in Mesoamerica, then of course, of course you're not going to find swords and shields and helmets and and, you know, horses and all the things in the Book of Mormon because it was just in this tiny small group of land.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:50:25] One little village. Yeah, that's what they're kind of saying now is it could have just been some undiscovered village that had horses and silk and swords and all the things that are anachronistic.

John Dehlin [00:50:39] Right. And so that's what the Church's position is now. That's Terrell Givens, that's Richard Bushman, that's Patrick Mason, that's Spencer Fluman, that's. That's any Daniel Peterson, that's any notable Book of Mormon apologist ever. Well, what's super important is that's not a new argument. It's an argument that dates all the way back to the 1920s. And maybe Anthony Ivins.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:51:05] Right, right. Well, and Colonel Willard Young, who was a son of Brigham Young. And this again goes back to these meetings in 1921 that they were trying to. They were, they were. There was a new edition of the Book of Mormon coming out and they, they wanted to put a map of Book of Mormon lands and say, oh, this is where bountiful was and this is where, you know, all these cities were. But in this meeting, Willard Young and Anthony Ivins argue that descriptions in the Book of Mormon that talk about journeys, they would require basically superhuman speed and endurance to be possible. You know, they're saying people are walking and there's no way they could have walked across the entire continent in this amount of time. So they're saying the the most somebody could walk in this amount of time is, you know, this far. Therefore, this is as. As wide as we can have the kingdom of, you know, the Nephites. So then they started. Colonel Young and, and Anthony Ivins, both in this 1921 meeting, discuss reasons why they believe they, they are in certain places. One other thing to really, to really think about is as of 19, before 1921, as part of these meetings, they end up taking footnotes out of the Book of Mormon that place that, that kind of speculate where different things happened in the Book of Mormon. So when we say that, oh, they couldn't, they couldn't believe, you know, oh, they were just misunderstanding that it's a limited geography. The fact is most of these guys had grown up on a Book of Mormon that says in the footnotes, you know, that, that certain things were like Lake Ontario and yeah, they said Ripley Ancombe was supposed to be Lake Ontario. And you know, it placed Book of Mormon lands in the Americas in the footnotes. So most of us would assume Book of Mormon footnotes are accurate and inspired. And so to say that they should have just rejected their, the knowledge that they'd had since 1879 is. So in my appendix, in my, in my thesis, Appendix C lists some of those footnotes that were removed that had been put in in 1879 and then in 19, in the 1920 version of the Book of Mormon were removed. And I believe that's as a result of these 1921 geography meetings. But yeah, they were saying, you know, different things were on different, you know, the shores of the eastern United States or this was ancient mounds in North America. You know, there was a lot of these footnotes that really kind of made it solidified in all the minds of these people that the Book of Mormon was a hemispheric thing. It was all of the United States and South America and at least Central America up to the United States. I mean, the Hill Cumorah where the plates were found was assumed to be part of Book of Mormon lands. And you know, Joseph Smith talking about Zelf finding him in a mound and he was a white Nephite, you know, therefore in North America there definitely should have been Nephites. So it took an entire generation of people who believe the Book of Mormon was in North America to pass away before they could even begin to advance a limited geography theory publicly and widely. So, you know, I've heard apologists talk about how D.H. roberts just misunderstood the Book of Mormon. And I just think that's a little Disingenuous because his Book of Mormon from 1879 on solidly placed it as well as all the things that Joseph Smith said solidly placed the Book of Mormon in North America. So, you know, of course he believed it was a hemispheric theory. Everyone did until that point. This is where they begin to even doubt that because we've got a map maker, Colonel Willard Richards, who's been educated outside, you know, abroad. And he was one of the first engineers and he made maps. And so he's like, okay, well all of these things, this is how he'd make this map. And when he goes to do it, he's like, the farthest we can walk in one day is this. So we can't, you know, these are, there's some parameters we can't overcome as far as what the Book of Mormon says. So that's where I think 1921, we start having some doubts about, you know, the wide geography. And I really think that in 1921 that started B.H. roberts wondering about this stuff. And by the December of that year, that's when Couch wrote, or writer wrote Couch's questions and MBH Roberts made the entire big old document that we've been talking about. So there's that episode that I think is really closely related to all of this stuff.

John Dehlin [00:56:45] So a couple quick things my, one of my really important supporters, Gerardo wants me to mention to you and I think it makes sense. There's a really amazing sort of legendary Mormon stories episode. It's episodes 149 to 152. We interviewed a fellow named Damon Smith who worked at church headquarters, did a lot of study on les correlation and bureaucracy and the Church and deception. I'm sharing a link here but but it goes into detail on how dishonesty within high level Mormon leadership was not just accepted, it was encouraged and promoted and even celebrated. The episode's called LDS anthropologist Damon Smith on post Manifesto Polygamy Correlation and the Corporate LDS Church and Mammon. So definitely check that out if you want more in detailed exploration of the history of just egregious dishonesty with top Mormon church leadership. I also just want to invite everyone who's joined us livestream to share your comments and questions and perspectives in the comments of wherever you're sharing. I, you know, and I do just want to reiterate that prior to, you know, the DNA findings and a lot of this stuff, the Book of Mormon was about a history of the, the ancestors of the Native Americans and we all knew Hill Cumorah There was one Hill Cumorah, and it was Joseph Smith's Hill Cumorah. And anyone who. Most Mormons have never really thought about the problem, you know, if the Book of Mormon's held in Mesoamerica, which is the only place that there are ruins and civilizations advanced enough to really justify a lot of the stuff and the geography of the Book of Mormon, you know, why would Cumorah be in North America? It just makes no sense. And so that's where you get emerging in this apologetics. When Beats Roberts and others uncover so many problems. You get these theories about smaller geography, limited geography, and, and two Cumorahs, and it's all so outrageous. It's revisionist history. But, but it's just, you know, your, your thesis is just so beautiful in that it helps us see the beginnings of the evolution of the Church, rewriting, revising its own doctrine, its own theology, its own history in a way that really gaslights the membership. And it does. It sort of. The church figures out between B H Roberts and now, and probably from before, how to make dramatic changes in its theology and doctrine and history, and the members are just asleep at the wheel and never really notice.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [00:59:37] Right. And that's what I'm saying. It took a generation to even publicly try to say something about a limited geography because their scriptures didn't allow that. And in these meetings, BH Roberts gives reasons why we can't have a limited geography, or, you know, we can't, we can't place certain things specifically because of what Joseph Smith said or because the scriptures say this was an uninhabited land or things like that. So, yeah, there's definite reasons why these, the gaslighting is slow and meticulous and, and careful, because if they just came out right then when they're like, oh, this doesn't work, that, you know, first they remove the footnotes and then they don't talk about it for a while, and then they start saying perhaps South America might be a site and perhaps, you know, so they do this gently and slowly, but it's still, you know, they know about it way beforehand and they kind of keep it quiet.

The Quorum of the Twelve and Institutional Authority

John Dehlin [01:00:45] We have a question from Stephen Mitch. He asks, and we covered this before, was the relationship between the quorum of the 15 and the 70s similar to what it is now in 1920, or were there major differences?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:00:59] The quorum of the 70 was definitely more closely aligned with the 12. Like most people would know who they were, especially the Presidency. So. So BH Roberts was quite on par with an apostle at that point.

John Dehlin [01:01:15] In terms of power, right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:01:17] Yeah. In terms of power and influence, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:01:19] Yeah. Okay. I have to just continually kind of restrain myself from going on these huge rants. But if you want to learn about the origins of all the awful gaslighty Book of Mormon apologetics, even though Ivan seems like a decent guy, what your thesis shows is that a lot of these apologetics begin with him, with. With Brigham Young's son and with a lot of these participants in the. The secret Mormon meetings in 1922.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:01:51] I think the reason I said that Anthony Ivins was one of my favorites is there's a quote that his son talks about his dad, Anthony, and Heber J. Grant having a conversation, and Grant's getting, like, annoyed with all of the dissent and different, you know, people just not obeying. And he's just like, we should just cut them off of the church. And then Anthony's like, they are the church. You know, he. He kind of reminded Heber J. Grant that leadership is not the church. The people are the church. And I just. I loved that quote, quote, and I loved his attitude that the church is everyone, not just the leadership.

John Dehlin [01:02:37] Amen. Okay, anything else you want to mention about Anthony Ivins? Are we ready to move on to James Talmadge?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:02:45] I think that's good.

John Dehlin [01:02:46] Okay. All right, so that's just one, guys. That's just one profile, and we have several to go. I hope that was interesting enough. But it gets even better. I promise. We're gonna, you know, at some point, we're gonna have sex. We're gonna have excommunication. We're going to have adultery, we're going to have police involved. It gets even better. All right, so, Shannon, what's interesting about James E. Talmadge, he's known as a famous, you know, Mormon, you know, Mormon apostle and scientist. What. What. What's interesting to know about James E. Talmadge from these meetings?

James Talmage: Science, Faith, and Apostleship

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:03:21] Okay. James Talmage, I believe, was the first PhD apostle. He was a geologist from. He was teaching at the U. At the time of his call to an apostleship. So it was shortly after that, that 1911 controversy. So I think it was in some ways to show. Hey, no, no, no. We're cool with education. You know, look, we're calling a scientist to the. To the 12. So. So he. He. He's like their first highly educated PhD guy. But he. He kind of runs into some problems trying to manage faith and religion. But he kind of. The problem is. The problem is he's junior to Joseph Fielding Smith, who was called when he was in 1930, he was, he was called. When he was 34, Joseph Fielding Smith was called to an apostle by his father, Joseph F. Smith, when he, at the age of 34. And then several months later, James Talmage was called. So Joseph Fielding Smith had like seniority and seniority is super important.

John Dehlin [01:04:48] And he gets that through nepotism, which is so gross. Right. Joseph F. Smith calls his own son Joseph Fielding as an apostle in his 30s.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:04:58] Yeah. And there's like a tradition of them doing that. It's just that most of the time these guys died before they became church president. Like they had like really low. It was almost seemed like a curse. But Joseph Fielding kind of overcame that. But yeah,

John Dehlin [01:05:18] Hinckley calls his son as a general authority. Jeffrey Hollins called his son as a general authority. Like, you know, Eyring son is president of byu Idaho someday will be a general authority like this.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:05:31] Yeah. Mike Quinn goes over all of this in I think Extensions of Power. Um, but yeah, he. She shows how everyone's basically related in church leadership. Like you kind of don't get in unless you have family. Not always. BH Roberts didn't have family, but. And there's.

John Dehlin [01:05:52] He was just smart.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:05:53] Right. There's some interesting letters that I found out that are kind of, that were people talking like Ivan's son. He was talking to a friend and they're kind of like, yeah, well if you're not in the right family, you know, you can only go so far.

John Dehlin [01:06:07] No, but that might explain B.H. roberts his courage. Because so, so much of the silence and the deception and the COVID up and the corruption is from these multi generational Mormon families. You don't want to offend your mom or your dad. You don't want to offend your kids. You don't want to lose the inheritance. You don't want to shame, bring shame to the family. And so it's these multi generational flesh family connections that really contributes to a lot of this egregious behavior. Whereas someone like BH Roberts is just like, I'm just gonna be honest because like I love truth and I, I think evidence matters. And I don't have the parents or the grandparents that are all weighing on me and pressuring me to shut up and stay silent and just fall in line.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:06:55] He's now protecting his uncle and his dad. You know, he. It's not a family legacy that for BH Roberts, but it is for Smith and Smith. So Joseph, Evan and Joseph Fielding, you know, they are directly related to the prophet and Hyrum and So you know, this is their family, this isn't just their religion and their church. So you know, if he finds journal page that kind of makes his ancestor look a little unsure, he kind of cuts it out and makes sure that doesn't get out. It seems his protectionism is a little bit more strong based on his family history and connections.

John Dehlin [01:07:44] Totally, totally. So back to Talmadge. He goes to Johns Hopkins. Right. Again, that, that wonderful term you use, go abroad. He's sent abroad meaning outside of Utah.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:07:56] Right.

John Dehlin [01:07:57] To, to go to college. And I, I, I wrote that what you found in his journal was that he really questioned his beliefs as a, as a grad student. Right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:08:08] Yeah, he was kind of like, shoot, how do I manage? You know, there's a lot of skepticism toward faith and university and what am I going to do? You know, he's becoming very aware of Darwin and he's a geologist, so he's finding fossils and you know, the wearing of rocks and he's realizing that this cannot be a 6,000 year old Earth. So he's, this is a real challenge for him because he, you know, he can see that there's just no way that it's a 6,000 year old earth and, and the way things evolve and different fossils. And yet here he is as a Mormon who's supposed to believe those things. So he's trying to kind of make his, some kind of middle way for himself. Yeah, I think you're probably talking about his, I mean, when he decided to go abroad, he said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna show the world that you can have both. You know, he said it was his mission to redeem the sciences from infidelity, infidelity and skepticism. That was his idea when he was going away to school.

John Dehlin [01:09:22] How'd that go? I love the quote you write quote, I am between two fires in my own conscience. What shall I do? Rely upon my priesthood as a touchstone to detect at all truth from error.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:09:38] Yeah. So he's like, if I have to choose one, I think I'm going to have to choose faith. He's going to use his priesthood to kind of help him discern is what he's saying.

John Dehlin [01:09:50] And in, in Mormon culture that's so honorable, to ignore evidence and to dismiss truth for faith. But I think, I think that's so unfortunate because what is faith worth if it's not based on truth? What's the value of faith if it's based on lies or misinformation? Why have faith in things that aren't true and I think that really strikes to the core of so much of what we do is we're basically saying you want to have faith in something that isn't true. You want to base your life in something that makes you feel good, but it just isn't true.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:10:38] Exactly. So I think he's trying to kind of work that out. You know, he kind of sometimes condemns preachers saying, you know, Darwin is an idiot because he's like, you. First of all, you don't even understand him. And once you do, you realize that he's not an idiot. So he's. He. There's a point, a part in his journal that he's kind of like, these preachers are making themselves look like idiots for trying to, you know, attack science. But then, you know, once he becomes a general authority, he stops attacking science. You know, he. He kind of leans completely on his faith. But I think the interesting bombshell type thing that you're thinking about with Talmadge is. Comes later when his son and Joseph Fielding Smith get into a big argument, and we have these letters over age of the Earth. And.

John Dehlin [01:11:43] Well, really quickly, let me just say, and I'm just reading from my notes here, I think it's interesting that he's promoted to the quorum of the 12 after there's this huge academic freedom controversy at BYU in 1911. Do you want to just give a quick overview of what that was?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:12:00] The academic freedom controversy?

John Dehlin [01:12:02] Yeah.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:12:03] Yeah. These professors, you know, said they believed in evolution, and the church was like, we don't want you teaching stuff that we don't believe. And they're like, well, this is what the science says. And they were threatened with removal. And it was a big controversy. I think over 90% of the students signed a petition saying that they want to be taught this stuff and that they need to be prepared to go out in the world because this is current knowledge. And, yeah, it was like a big deal. And the BYU students were completely up in arms about these professors getting fired or threatened to be fired over this issue.

John Dehlin [01:12:47] Yeah, yeah. And so he's promoted. You know, he's promoted because he has a PhD from Johns Hopkins, because he's a scientist, because he's not a polygamist, I'm guessing. But then you also write that many intellectuals felt abandoned by him once he becomes an apostle. Why would. Why would you say that, Shannon?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:13:11] Well, they. He stopped defending. Publicly stopped defending evolution. He just kind of stopped talking about science at all, really. He mostly just talked about faith. And, you know, his devotion was to the church. He gave up his job as a professor and he 100% dedicated himself to church. So he made a choice. And after that point, he did not. He wasn't outwardly the champion of science, although I think we can see behind the scenes he was still pushing for, for this. In fact, there's a part where he, you know, Joseph Fielding Smith is talking about how evolution's not a thing. And he points out that this altar in Adam on Diamond that supposedly Adam had, you know, the first man, and there was no death in the world until Adam was kicked out of the garden. In this altar that they, that Joseph Smith had identified as the altar in Missouri that Adam had prayed at has fossils in it. So this rock is, has fossilized plants in it. And therefore death had to have existed before Adam had built that altar because there was fossils and that camp. So, you know, so he, he was definitely kind of conflicted here, but he didn't, he wasn't publicly saying these things. They were all behind the scenes. So a lot of the intellectuals of the church kind of, of felt a little abandoned by him because they knew he knew better, but wasn't speaking up publicly in defense of science.

John Dehlin [01:15:04] And so what we learned from that is that Mormon apostles and general authorities prioritize loyalty and. The church's reputation and power, influence over truth. In other words, if evidence and truth conflict with the church's authority, the church's power, the church's reputation, we know that the brethren shelve their allegiance to evidence and truth and sacrifice that on the altar of authority and obedience and the church's power and reputation. And that's something we should all know. And it's, it's evidenced by the life of James E. Talmage. However, he was still a complicated figure. And you were going to be reading to us a bit about this because he's, he did engage in battles with Joseph Fielding Smith over matters of science and evolution. He just did it through his son, which is kind of interesting.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:16:14] Right? Yeah. And that's again, when I was talking about the altar. He's pointing this out to his son. His, his son has this letter that. To Joseph Fielding Smith and is like, you're wrong. You know, it's pretty strongly worded. You know, talking about how you're, you know, you can't do this. This is pseudoscience. You can't, you know, he talks about. So it's, it's. These Letters are in 1931, and he, he kind of brings out the science saying, you know, you talked in a conference talk about how the Earth Stood Still. And. And Joseph Fielding Smith had tried to say, oh, well, this is a. He kind of brought in some pseudoscience and said, this is maybe how that could have happened. And he's like, if you're going to use science, you can't. You know, if you're going to explain it with science, then use good science. But he's like, if. If the sun stood still and the moon stayed until this battle ended, Smith told Sterling, who's Talmage's son, is like, you know, if the Earth were to stop for several hours, there would be like major winds from a like thousand mile per hour winds. And like, just like, this is insane. This kind of thing scientifically could not happen. You know, the winds would be six times greater than the most violently recorded hurricanes. Like, come on, if you're gonna use science, let's use good science. And it's just these letters. There's an article about it in Sunstone. I would totally send everyone to that article because it's just so much fun to read the. Their. The back and forth between Sterling and Joseph Fielding Smith. It's in that letter too, that. That Smith talks about. You know, if there's a. I don't. I don't have any loyalty to science, and if there's any conflict, I choose faith. And in fact, I'm. I will destroy things that, you know, I'll destroy the science that conflicts with faith.

John Dehlin [01:18:40] You said that.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:18:42] So, yeah, it's Joseph Fielding Smith. He says. So this is kind of a Let. This is in the letter. I think we quoted it earlier too. But I. He's just kind of like, when I think I find something that. Which tends to destroy the faith of the youth in these revelations or which is hurtful to this truth, I have opposed it with vigor and have freely expressed my views. I believe I'm willing to modify my views if evidence indicated that my interpretation has been wrong. But, you know, he's like, if there's ever, you know, faith. First period, end of story.

John Dehlin [01:19:24] Yeah. Okay, so that is. Anything else about talents we want to mention?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:19:31] No, he just. I felt bad for him because he. There was an incident when he was young that he blinded his brother and he seemed to have, you know, he just accidentally hit him with a gardening tool. And then the other. I also went blind, so his brother was blind. And he seemed to be stricken with guilt for his whole life. And it kind of. His son believed that that was why Talmadge was such a workaholic. He was like, famously workaholic. Would sleep in his office for days at a time. So he just, he was a bit. He worked really hard. I think he was looking for redemption from what he'd done on accident as a child. But he was hoping to make up for it. And I think that was a big reason behind his faith was looking for redemption.

John Dehlin [01:20:24] Almost like scrupulosity. Those who feel so much guilt and shame and pain become hyper religious as a way to self medicate the anxiety they're experiencing.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:20:38] Exactly. Yeah. I would definitely suggest it looks like he did suffer from scrupulosity as a result of that incident. That's, you know, his son kind of said that.

John Dehlin [01:20:50] Yeah. Okay, so now we get to some of the juicy stuff. And this is not the only juicy profile we have, but I think it's time to go to. So I don't know how to pronounce it.

Speaker C [01:21:04] John.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:21:05] I think it's shown. All right.

John Dehlin [01:21:07] Shotel.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:21:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:21:08] How do you pronounce the name?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:21:11] I. I'm not sure, but I, I call him Jan Shodel.

John Dehlin [01:21:15] John Shotel. His middle name is Matson. And I'm dying to know if he's related in any way to Hans and Brigitte Matson. He could maybe not.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:21:24] I don't know.

John Dehlin [01:21:25] I think he's from Norway, not Sweden, right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:21:30] Yeah, yeah, he is from Norway. Yeah. So the reason I think it's pronounced shotel is so in Richard Lyman's journal, it took me a while to understand. Like in the list of people he, he wrote some guy named Shirdall. Like he, he spelled it shirt all. And so I was like, what? Who's that person? I couldn't find anyone with that last name. And then like a month or two later, I kind of. I had come upon across shotl S, J, O, D A H L and thought, oh, I bet that said Shotl. And then for some reason it like clicked in my head that that's who Richard Lyman was talking about in these meetings. He just misspelled this guy's name. Shotel. Not sure at all. But yeah, so that's, that's how I came across him as one of these people. And then when I looked at his journal, he listed a whole bunch of people that were in these meetings. And his journal is the one that says Professor Hinckley was there. And I do, I, I personally think that the Hinckley he's talking about is Gordon B. Hinckley's dad. Because Shotl was very specific. If somebody had a doctorate, he called them Dr. So and so. And the Hinckley that was a professor at byu, was a doctor, while Gordon Hinckley's father, Bryant, he. I think he may have had a master's, but he was not a doctor and he was called Professor Hinckley. So I kind of think Gordon Hinckley's father was in these meetings. But again, I didn't profile that Hinkley because I couldn't be sure because there were two educated Hinckleys kicking around at this time.

John Dehlin [01:23:28] So Carl Youngblood says the correct pronunciation in Norwegian sounds like should all. Emphasis on the first syllable. Should all.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:23:41] Should all. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:23:43] That's what Carl Youngblood says. And Carl's not a dumb guy.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:23:48] Sounds good to me.

John Dehlin [01:23:49] What's that?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:23:50] Sounds good to me.

John Dehlin [01:23:52] Okay. Do you want me to give. I. I wrote some notes on the background of a shit all. Do you want me to.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:23:57] Yeah, it's in the weeds because I have too much. Okay, you do better at summarizing.

B.H. Roberts and His Role in the Meetings

John Dehlin [01:24:03] All right, so let me. Well, you're phenomenal, but I'll do my best. So. So he's. He's living over in Norway. I think he's excommunicated from the Baptist church for adultery.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:24:16] He's actually, he went to divinity school. He. He's like highly educated. He went to. He was a pastor in the Baptist church at the time. He gets excommunicated.

John Dehlin [01:24:29] Yeah. And. And, yeah. So he's excommunicated for adultery from the Baptist church. Highly educated. He joins the LDS Church in 1886 and eventually makes his way to Utah. And he gets all these high level positions. Improvement era editor, you know, Deseret News. He's a devoted apologist. I wrote. And by 1910, he gets in trouble. So apparently his second wife dies. Do you want to tell us what happens after his second wife dies?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:25:07] Yeah, he. So he gets in trouble for adultery again.

John Dehlin [01:25:14] Well, possibly, quote, weaknesses of the human flesh, unquote.

Speaker C [01:25:18] Right.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:25:19] That's what his biographer says he's accused of. Well, so he. He owns a property, and it's a Negro club or a brothel and.

John Dehlin [01:25:33] Say that again.

Speaker C [01:25:35] He.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:25:36] He's the owner. He gets accused of being visiting a brothel. He was the owner and patron of a Negro club and brothel.

John Dehlin [01:25:47] A Negro club or brothel in Salt Lake?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:25:51] Yes. He owned this building that was a Negro club slash brothel.

John Dehlin [01:25:56] What is. What the heck?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:25:59] I didn't know that they were doing that there.

John Dehlin [01:26:02] What is a Negro club? I've never even heard of that before.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:26:06] That's what the newspaper said. I. I didn't. I didn't interpret it beyond just quoting.

John Dehlin [01:26:12] I'm gonna Google that. I want to know what that is. So he's, so he's part. So he's working for the church at a high level while he's owning and, or hanging out at a brothel. Okay, yeah, so that's, you know, you're like, oh, okay, big deal. John, what was the church's response when they find out that he's hanging out in brothels?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:26:36] He gets called on a mission to

John Dehlin [01:26:40] England, so they make him a missionary.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:26:43] So he's the editor of the Deseret News. He's like the top guy there. And yes, the, the like Norwegian newspaper breaks this story and they're like, shirt all's doing some bad things. He owns a brothel. Guys, this is not good. And within I think two weeks, he was in England, so called on a mission. And I'm just gonna tell for him to get out of town.

John Dehlin [01:27:11] You guys may think that, that this is ridiculous that, that top church leaders would call people on missions or even as mission presidents after doing something horrible and egregious. And I want you to know I know firsthand of at least one person who was called to be a mission president after it was discovered he had committed adultery. I also know that Ezra Taft Benson, as an apostle, was sent to Europe, and we're going to be talking about this in an upcoming interview. He was sent to Europe as an apostle because the Brethren were embarrassed by him and wanted him out of the country. And so this, this, this thing that the Brethren do sometimes if, if you're caught in a scandal, they promote you or they give you a new calling that's sometimes even high profile. This is something that's got a hundred plus year history with the church. It's crazy.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:28:09] Yeah, right. He's sent to work on the Millennial Star, which is the British newspaper where people aren't talking about this. And yeah, he, they don't announce he's leaving until after he's already in England. So September 30th is when it comes out in the Deseret News that Shotel has left and he's already in England by then. So August, I think, I say August 6th is when this accusation comes forward. And by September 30th, which, you know, takes. It takes several weeks to get across the ocean. By September 30, he's already been in England for a week.

John Dehlin [01:28:51] What do you think that means?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:28:53] I think. Well, I think he's guilty. Like, I think if he's getting out of town, I think there's something to be feared, you know, they're trying to make this go away by making him go away. I don't think he could hold his position as editor in chief of the Deseret News as the owner of a brothel.

John Dehlin [01:29:16] But it. When we talk about, you know, I'm just having this thought now, but when we talk about Lyman later and what happens to Apostle Richard Lyman, such a difference in how they treated a known adulterer. Right. I guess he wasn't an apostle.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:29:31] Right.

John Dehlin [01:29:32] I think we'll get the Lyman. I don't want to steal the thunder of Lyman, but. Okay, so he goes to Europe, but he returns to Utah by 1919.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:29:45] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:29:45] So nine years after this. No. So five years after this scandal, he's. He's brought back at the highest levels of church headquarters. True.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:29:54] Yep. Then he's doing, you know, he, I think he was just a really good newspaper editor. And so his skill set was just. And his loyalty were very valued. So he was good at defending the church and good at writing and editing and running their news organizations because the

John Dehlin [01:30:18] church values its media exposure and its PR potentially above all. I think it's like its authority and then it's media and priority presence. Those are like the two most sacred things in Mormonism.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:30:33] Seems to be quite important.

John Dehlin [01:30:37] Okay, so the reason. But the reason why we're mentioning him is not because of all that. It's because when he comes back, he's involved in. In P.H. roberts and, and. And all of these meetings around geography and Book of Mormon historicity. Talk about that.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:30:53] So, yeah, he's. His journal is the one that I find most information about the 1921 geography meetings. He goes into some fairly good detail about who presents what. And he was clearly fascinated with these meetings. And so that's why, you know, he wrote it down in his journal. And that's where we know about him. He was part of this committee to redo The Footnotes of Mormon 20 Book of Mormon. Right. Of that committee. They're trying to do a map. And as part of that map, they're doing this geography meetings. And I think as a result of these geography meetings, he's removing the footnotes that place Book of Mormon in North America.

John Dehlin [01:31:43] And I write. You must have mentioned this somewhere. I wrote in here that Roberts was uncomfortable with the large geography theory because Joseph Smith had said Lehigh landed in Chile and that Joseph Smith had identified

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:31:59] several locations with the limited geography.

John Dehlin [01:32:02] Right.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:32:02] Saying. Joseph Smith didn't say it was a limited geography, he said it was the entire continent.

John Dehlin [01:32:07] Exactly. So Joseph Smith believed in the large geography Theory that, that the Nephites and Lamanites went from the tip of North America to the tip of South America. Joseph Smith is saying that, that, that Lehi landed in Chile. And he also identified locations of Book of Mormon medals being in western New York. And so, you know, Roberts and these guys know that Joseph Smith, you know, Joseph would walk, you know, be walking around North America, see a skeleton or a, you know, an Indian mound and go, hey, that's Zelf the white, you know, the white Lamanite. Right. He was just for Joseph, you know, when he sent the missionaries out to the frontiers of Missouri, he sent them out to. Sent the missionaries out to preach to the Lamanites. Like, Joseph Smith was not confused in his mind about who the Lamanites were. The Lamanites were all Native Americans.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:33:07] All the brown people on this continent are a result of Lehigh and his folks coming over.

John Dehlin [01:33:14] But what we find by 1920, because of Roberts, because of Schedal, because of, you know, Ivins and others, is what you see is a backing away from what was certainty for over 100 years. All of a sudden, by the 1920s and 30s, there's like, whoa, let's not pin ourselves down on geography. Let's start coming up with new theories. And I guess should all was part of that. Is that right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:33:41] Yeah. So he records actually in his journal, B.H. roberts Discomfort with the limited geography. So Shuttle's kind of like, oh, this limited geography is kind of a cool idea. You know, I think we should kind of look into this more. And BH Roberts is like, hey, wait, wait, hold on, guys. I don't think we can necessarily do that because, you know, he talks about how there was a Joseph Smith had said that Lehigh had landed in Chile, and so we can't say he landed in Yucatan. And he's. He's like, the problem is this. This revelation where he says that they landed in Chile also is on the same piece of paper that a canonized revelation that is in the DNC is on. So if we have to. If we're going to say that, oh, some guy without any authority wrote this, we also have to say that he didn't have authority when he wrote whatever. It's I guess, DNC 7. But Shotel writes, Elder Roberts said a great deal depends on whether this revelation is revelation or not. He did not see how that question could be decided offhand. The enormous distances to travel present a serious difficulty. Furthermore, the contrast between the country Lehi came from and into which he entered is not mentioned, not once mentioned. And is, to say, at the least, very singular. If we were free, the speaker said, from that alleged revelation, it would be easier to reply to adverse critics of the Book of Mormon. So he's like, our problem is we have. We have this revelation. So, I mean, if we could say it's not revelation, then sure, maybe we could say that there's a limited geography. But problem is, Joseph Smith is saying it's not a limited geography. And so. And also in Shoto's journal, we're seeing that even then, you know, BH Roberts is like, hey, guys, I, you know, expressing some, pushing back on some ideas. So I. I liked that part of his journal.

John Dehlin [01:35:53] There's a comment from Gerardo that I love. He says, I think it is so important that BH Roberts was a skeptic of the limited geography theory because he knew it was almost impossible to say Joseph was confused about who the Lamanites were. He's the freaking translator of the Book of Mormon. So if Joseph Smith, and also Gerardo writes, he talked to Moroni personally. So if Joseph had personal brodowns with Moroni and literally translated the Book of Mormon and talked to God and had a seer stone, that he could find out everything directly from God. Modern Mormon apologists, starting from these dudes you're talking about in the 1920s to now, are basically saying they know more than Joseph Smith, and it's outrageously disingenuous and gaslighting.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:36:46] And again, their scriptures had footnotes saying, this is where these things happened. So, you know, it would require disregarding your scriptures, which people, you know, faithful Mormons, don't really want to do. So, you know, it took a long time for a limited geography thing to happen, partly because they had. They were so, so committed to the idea of the hemispheric model. It took, you know, 100 years for us to be able to even consider something else. And that's kind of what we're seeing in these 1921 meetings where Roberts is like, but we can't limit geography. Doesn't work. And, you know, just. It would take too much disregarding of Joseph Smith to let this be a new theory that works. So then I think they just kind of made it generic after that. And that that was kind of the first step was making it generic, taking out any of the footnotes and anything that that would place in it somewhere. And. And Anthony Ivins later, like five years later in a conference talk, says, stop trying to place this in any one place. We don't know for sure where this happened. You know, you're. Don't get too distracted by the details. Remember that the Book of Mormon is about faith.

Church Leaders and Plausible Deniability

John Dehlin [01:38:13] And these are not the droids you're looking for.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:38:15] Right.

John Dehlin [01:38:16] These are not the droids you're looking for. Gimpy geezer writes a Negro club, means that some great music could be heard there. I'm a big blues lover. So basically saying that maybe a Negro club meant a jazz club.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:38:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:38:30] That also was a brothel.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:38:32] Yeah. Roger wasn't. We don't know for sure.

John Dehlin [01:38:37] Yeah.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:38:37] We just know that he was accused of being a patron and a brothel owner and owning this jazz club. And. And once that accusation came out, he got out of town.

John Dehlin [01:38:54] Yeah.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:38:54] And never addressed it. Actually, it was never addressed in any way.

John Dehlin [01:38:59] But it just goes to show you that. That for the Brethren, severe moral indiscretions are totally pardonable. If they can contain the information, if they can keep it secret. If you're important to them, they'll protect you. If they can and totally ignore major personal indiscretions.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:39:22] Yeah. Joseph Bishop.

John Dehlin [01:39:24] What's that?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:39:25] Recently Joseph Bishop. You know, we have a recording of him saying that he was abusing girls in the MTC, and McKenna Denson let the Church know. Excommunicated. So this isn't just in the past. This is like, if they're loyal and they're high up, the Church will work to bury it and improve it. Just.

John Dehlin [01:39:49] And then if you're it, if you're going against the Church's authority and you just misstep a tiny bit, you can be out on your rear for super minor, minor offenses. Right.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:40:01] So, yeah, as long as your loyalties to the Church, they'll take you.

John Dehlin [01:40:08] And. And if the scandal doesn't hurt the Church enough, you know, to hurt its reputation. In other words, if they can bury the scandal and keep it secret, which is the job of many general authorities, to bury scandals and to keep them from. Because they're these. These general authorities. So the reason why so many lawyers are called as general authorities is because they're fixers. They're able to go to a scandal, make it secret, keep it quiet, and keep it from bubbling up as a scandal. And if you're enough of a fixer to be able to cover up enough scandals to help the Church not get embarrassed, then you become a candidate for apostle.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:40:48] Yeah. Plausible deniability. If they can maintain that they, you know, you can be a bad guy as long as they can pretend like they didn't know you were.

John Dehlin [01:40:56] Yeah. Roger, Lots of good comments coming in from our Listeners, Roger writes, remember Zelf, the white Lamanite proves that Joseph Smith said the Lamanites were in North America. Absolutely true. Let's see. Okay, that's. Oh. What I was going to say is that other things that I wrote that we've kind of already covered is that, you know, as a result of the Book of Mormon geography meetings that you mentioned about and the work that should all did and these committees to try and come up with the right footnotes and the right maps, I wrote that by 1922. And this comes out of your book. Talmage acknowledges so many wild theories about the Book of Mormon that the quorum of the 12 decided to not publish any map in the Book of Mormon. So, like, they're thinking about publishing a map in the Book of Mormon and then they. They're put on notice that there's so many problems, they all consciously and literally decide not to publish a map in the Book of Mormon.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:42:01] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:42:02] And I have myself writing, shouldn't this have been disconcerting? Like.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:42:05] Yeah. And removing footnotes that have been there for 30 years.

John Dehlin [01:42:09] Removing footnotes intentionally, not publishing a map. Didn't members deserve to know at that point, if the Brethren are scuttling maps and removing footnotes, isn't it a matter of ethics and honesty to say to the members, hey, guys, we're having problems with this Book of Mormon thing. You all should kind of know, since you're basing your life on it, giving 10%, you know, serving, giving your reputations and lives, you deserve to know this stuff that we're covering up. Right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:42:41] One would think. No. But, yeah, Ivan's. The closest he gets is just saying, hey, stop trying to place this in any one place. You know, don't look. Don't look too hard.

John Dehlin [01:42:55] And then I have in here that. That, yeah, I wrote the Book of Mormon. Footnotes used for 43 years identifying North American locations in the Book of Mormon were removed, and then by 1927 should all publishes an introduction to the study of the Book of Mormon limited geography theory. So that's. He formalizes.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:43:19] Yeah, he starts kind of putting out theories. He really like that meeting where Young and Ivins presented these limited geography theories. You could tell he just was like, fascinated and set on fire about this. And so that's kind of, I would say, the first prototype farms, like, oh, we can look at this geography, this archeology, and make it work for Book of Mormon stuff. So he starts going that way. Moyle is another person that kind of starts going that way, looking at existing archeology and trying to make it fit into the Book of Mormon, especially in Central America rather than North America.

John Dehlin [01:44:02] Denise, our listener, makes a wonderful comment. Denise writes, while they're, you know, while they're removing the footnotes in the map from the Book of Mormon, they should have removed the facsimiles, the Book of Abraham facsimiles, while they were at it. That's a good point. That's an unfortunate omission.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:44:17] Yeah, I.

John Dehlin [01:44:20] Seriously, I wonder why they didn't.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:44:21] I loved them because they were the only pictures in the Book of Mormon. Like, anytime when I was little, I would look at those all the time because they're on the. The only picture.

John Dehlin [01:44:28] That's the coolest part.

Speaker C [01:44:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:44:31] Okay, so that's. That's all I have to. To talk about. James Henry Moyle, other than the fact that his son goes on to be an apostle first presidency member, and he's the one responsible. Henry Moyle's the. The one responsible for taking the church's finances private. The church had gotten into so much debt by the late 50s that the church decides to take their finances private. I think it was Henry Moyle who was behind that. And then it was also Henry Moyle that was behind the baseball baptisms scandal of the early 1960s. This is where Jeffrey R. Holland served his mission. Marion D. Hanks was a mission president there. And those baseball baptisms for decades have influenced the church in this, quote, explosion of growth, statistical growth for the church that led to spread to Latin America and my mission to the Philippines. This was the impetus of my faith crisis. All these fraudulent baptisms where the church has maybe 5 million members worldwide, but claims 16 million. A huge percentage of those baptisms are these fraudulent baptisms that have happened in Japan, England, Latin America, the Philippines. Now they're happening in Africa. And Henry Moyle, the son of James Moyle, is sort of one of the founding architects of that sort of baseball baptism, cheeseburger baptism, soccer baptism, kind of, you know, fraud, basically. Missionary baptism fraud where you. Where you convince poor people to get baptized because they can join a baseball league or get a cheeseburger or, you know, swim in the ocean in Chile or play soccer, you know, at a soccer field in Guatemala. Yeah, that's.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:46:15] That's our explosive growth. And we got so proud of how it was taking over the earth. And it's explosive.

John Dehlin [01:46:22] Letting the earth.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:46:23] Yep. And stone.

John Dehlin [01:46:25] The stone being cut forth from the mountain without hands, consuming all nations.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:46:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:46:30] Okay.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:46:30] That growth was legit.

John Dehlin [01:46:32] Yeah. All right. So I think the next person that. Oh, My gosh, I just got these confused. So we were talking about should all. I want to go back to Moyle for a second. James Henry Moyle. I just totally misread my notes. So that huge rant I just went on is a preview of who we're about to talk about. So we've talked about Moyle a bit, but this is one of, for me, probably the most explosive. Probably the most explosive thing. Although there's a few more that I got from your thesis, and it's about James Henry Moyle's interview with David Whitmer. So do you want to give us a little bit of history on that?

James Henry Moyle: Witness and Biography

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:47:19] So when you were like, okay, we're done with James Moyle, I was like, wait, what?

Speaker C [01:47:22] But what about.

John Dehlin [01:47:22] We haven't started. Sorry.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:47:24] I really like the part where he talked to David Whitmer, and David Whitmer said he hadn't touched the plates.

John Dehlin [01:47:31] Okay. So no back up. So pull on your hats, listeners. Go ahead, Shannon, do you want to. Do you want to give us the background on this?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:47:38] He goes off to school, to law school, and on his way home, he stops in. Wherever that was. He stops and talks to David Whitmer.

John Dehlin [01:47:50] He finds one of the, you know, one of the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon founding. And clearly he has doubts. Clearly he's wondering. And this is just so fascinating.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:48:01] Don't let me, you know, if I am deceived, please let me know. Don't let me go through my life a victim of deception. So please tell me, what did you see? I want to know what you saw. Like how, you know, he was just really curious to see what Whitmer had seen.

John Dehlin [01:48:23] Yeah. So this is on page 76 of Shannon's thesis. Moyle is an attorney. He's completing law school. It's June of 1885. And clearly this is one of the reasons why the brethren don't want, you know, didn't want or were afraid of higher education because it would cause people to develop critical thinking skills and to value evidence. Because grad school, reputable grad schools tend to value evidence. And so Moyle's graduating from law school. He decides to pass through Missouri. He meets up with David Whitmer, one of the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon. Right. Like, you can't get more og, you know, central to the church's founding. And apparently he's clearly having doubts about the. The Book of Mormon and its historicity. Back in 1885, he's, you know, this is like 55 years after the Book's published, he's graduated from law school, he's questioning the, the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. So he meets with, with David Whitmer and he's able to sort of interview him.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:49:38] Right, right.

John Dehlin [01:49:40] And you write, while he found that Whitmer truly believed he had seen the plates, Moyle wrote in his journal. And this was so brilliant that you found this. Right. Wrote in his journal that he was disappointed to discover Whitmer's description to be,

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:49:55] quote, tell us the word unsatisfactory.

John Dehlin [01:50:00] You write that the elder man was, quote, somewhat. You want to, you want to read it? Do you have the quote there?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:50:06] Sure. Somewhat spiritual in his explanations and not as materialistic as I had wished. David Whitmer did not handle the plates. He only saw them.

John Dehlin [01:50:18] So that's someone who interviewed Whitmer firsthand, face to face, talked to him, and then wrote down in his journal what he remembered. And tell us again what David Whitmer told him.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:50:31] He did not handle the plates.

John Dehlin [01:50:33] What does the Church teach us about the three witnesses?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:50:38] Well, they definitely, at least as far as this goes, there's several quotes that James are attributed to James Moyle saying, david Whitmer told me he held and handled the plates. And here he's saying he did not handle the plates, he only saw them.

John Dehlin [01:50:58] I'm just saying we are all taught that the primary criteria of the three witnesses is that they got to touch and handle the plates themselves.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:51:08] That's what I believed. Yeah. They, they said, look, I mean, how are you a witness if you don't see the actual thing? Right. If you imagine something, are you really a witness to it?

John Dehlin [01:51:20] But we're taught that they handled them and saw them. That's what the Church has taught us for over 100, whatever 100x number years. Right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:51:30] Right.

John Dehlin [01:51:31] And here Moyle is quoting Whitmer saying, and you go on to write, you want to keep reading. For Moyle, this lack of specificity was

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:51:40] likely quite unsettling, as it would have been for any Mormon who believed the plates to be a physical reality rather than something that could only be seen with their spiritual eyes. While the beginning of Mormonism was full of folk magic and the occult, by Moyle's time, most Mormons were and often still are unaware of this fact.

John Dehlin [01:52:00] So this is why I've been focusing on folk magic and treasure digging so much with the new YouTube channel Understanding Mormonism and with my. With Mormon stories. It's because all these witnesses, Whitmer, Martin Harris, Oliver Cowdery, all the Whitmer brothers, Joseph Smith Sr. They're all A, the three and the eight witnesses to the Book of Mormon and B, they're all freaking superstitious, superstitious global treasure diggers that would follow Joseph and others to these treasure dig sites, see treasure in the mountain when there wasn't any dig for it. Then, you know, Joseph as the scryer, would get to the point where he'd get to the treasure in theory, but then say, oops, I'm sorry, the angel took the treasure away. And then Joseph Smith Sr. Or David Whitmer or Martin Harris or the Whitmer brothers, or they would all still believe that the treasure was really involved. And Joseph Smith admitted that he said all of his treasure seeking was damn nonsense. That all of his scrying, all of his peeping into the stone, all of that treasure digging Joseph Smith himself said was damn nonsense. Yet all these dudes still believed in the treasure and they still believed in Joseph Smith's power. So they're super non credible dudes that are gullible and superstitious. And so that's bad enough to then say that you're going to base your testimony of the Book of Mormon on these three and eight witnesses. But then, and this is Grant Palmer that first woke me up to this fact. If you want to read an amazing book, read an insider's view of Mormon origins. He goes in and talks about how later in 1838, they all admitted that they only saw the plates. What? How? Shannon.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:53:47] Spiritual eyes.

John Dehlin [01:53:49] With their spiritual eyes. Right, right. And then apologists will, will trash Grant Palmer. The church will ex, you know, ex. You know, they basically wanted to excommunicate Graham Palmer, so he resigned. But they'll basically excommunicate Grant Palmer for telling us all this. And now we found out that one of the church's, you know, insiders had a one on one conversation with David Whitmer and he confirms what Grant Palmer told us, which is that Whitmer himself did not handle or see the plates.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:54:21] Right.

John Dehlin [01:54:21] Saw it in a vision.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:54:23] Right, right. Yeah. It wasn't as materialistic. You know, he's, he said he saw him. And I think, I really think that. So actually the next paragraph, I talk about how magic and religion and science kind of all converge, especially when people are uneducated, as, you know, a lot of people in Joseph Smith's day were. You know, they're not magic and religion and science, they're all combined. And so when they're doing a spell, they feel like they're actually doing science. When they're doing scrying. They think it's scientific. Historian Richard Kaikoffer. I just loved this quote, so I'm going to read it. Magic is the crossing point where religion converges with science and popular beliefs intersect with those of the educated classes. So I think back in Joseph Smith's time, it wasn't a big deal to see it with your spiritual eyes. It was just as real. It was a vision from God. And that was all fine and good, but by the, you know, mid late 1800s, spiritualism comes up where. And that spiritualism starts in the same place as Joseph Smith, but where this becomes almost a religion. And the church kind of is definitely trying to say, no, we're not. We're not like that. We're not about spirits, we're not about magic. You know, so they kind of distance themselves from these magic practices. But back in the. In Joseph Smith's day, this was a feature, not a bug. Like the fact that he could do magic and that he could see things. That was amazing. So for David Whitmer, he's not. That doesn't put any doubt in his mind. The fact that he saw it in a vision, that's completely valid to him and people who believed like him. But for James Moyle, who had grown up with a lot more solid, metaphysical, scientific view of Mormonism, where they had, like, expunged the magic part for him, this was a little troubling. But for people in Joseph Smith's day, I don't think it was. But Moyle is an example of a modern Mormon who's like, wait, what? Seer stones? Like, he didn't know about seer stones, but he. He definitely knew that David Whitmer did not claim to have handled the plates in his hands or touched them in any way.

John Dehlin [01:56:59] Yeah, but the fact that they were more gullible and superstitious 150 plus years ago, for me, doesn't add to the credibility of the story and the truth claims. It kind of takes away from it.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:57:12] Right, right. Yeah. No, it's stuff that most Mormons today would reject. As far as somebody saying, oh, well, you know, I imagined this thing, therefore it's as real as anything else.

John Dehlin [01:57:26] As if I touched them and saw them and felt them. So there's a really important. And by the way, everyone, the scandal is yet to come, as far as I'm concerned, with this particular story, because it's outrageous enough, you know, that we have, you know, this clear account by James Henry Moyle, this, this prominent Mormon insider that David Whitmer didn't actually touch or see the plates. Right. But, but it's the COVID up. It's always the COVID up. And so I'm gonna. There's a comment from one of our listeners. Keith writes, this is fire. This shows the reason for what you posted earlier. So I was super angry, grouchy today. Shannon's thing got me all fired up, basically. I shared earlier I did an interview on Mormon stories a while back with Ted Lyon. So Ted Lyon was a professor of mine at byu. Love the guy. Spanish professor at byu. His dad was T. Edgar Lyon, a famous Mormon historian that was buds with Lowell Bennion.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [01:58:29] He went to divinity school, too.

John Dehlin [01:58:32] Yeah. And, and Ted Lyon told me that while he was serving as a mission, he was a mission president in Chile, Then he was a temple president, then was the MTC president. But he was Elder Holland's interpreter when the, when the baptisms were so incredibly fraudulent in Chile and the baptism numbers were so ridiculous, you know, missions baptizing over a thousand a month. And it was all fraud, right? Or mostly fraud. Elder Holland sent down for three years to figure out what's going wrong in Chile. I don't know what's going wrong. So he goes down there, lives there for three years. And Ted Lyon, my professor, BYU is, is his interpreter. Because prophecies and revelators now don't use their seer stones, so they need interpreters. So Ted Lyon tells me that Jeffrey Holland makes an offhanded comment to him, which is that we as apostles in, you know, this would have been, let's just say, 2000 and whatever, right? Holland admits to Ted Lyon that apostles, modern LDS Church apostles, are instructed not to keep journals. In fact, I read that they are told to destroy any past journals and they're forbidden from keeping any journals going forward. And they sign some massive legal agreement that if there are any personal records, the church owns them all when they die. Now, we are about to tell you another outrageous reason for why the church has moved to this policy. So let's talk briefly about, about the biographies of James Henry Moyle. Shannon.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:00:17] Okay, so Moyle, you know, after he's got this journal that says this was unsatisfactory to me as he, he starts writing his biography in his old age. And I, so I knew, I knew this fact about him. And so I look at his biographies and I want to see how they treat that episode. And neither of the biographies mention that, surprisingly. So there's one biography that is written by John Henry Evans, who works for the church a lot as far as writing. And he does a series of interviews. Moyle and Evans do a series of interviews so that Evans can write a biography. And. And Moyle starts to worry that Evans isn't going to tell the whole story. So he actually starts writing his own notes to kind of clarify some things or to just have memories of. So he's got, you know, the Henry, the Evans biography. Evans dies before he finishes, before the biography is finished. And then after Moyle dies, Gordon B. Hinckley takes John Evans biography, finishes it and publishes it. The other biography written is based on. On Moyle's notes. It's kind of a combination of the notes that Royal. That Moyle wrote as he was talking to Evans. And in addition to the Evans biography. So that one is written by Jean Sessions and that one, the second one is a lot more transparent than the first one. But that one is only available to family and there's a few copies in library. But it was. It was mostly written for Moyle's posterity. But even then it still doesn't address this issue specifically. They do talk about both biographies, talk about Moyle meeting David Whitmer, but they both say it was a testimony building experience, that it solidified his testimony.

John Dehlin [02:03:01] And so tell me if I'm wrong, but what I read from that is, is that beloved prophet Gordon B. Hinckley, when he writes the biography of James Henry, Moyle covers up and misleads people about James Henry Moyle's interactions with David Whitmer.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:03:20] Yeah. And the reason I know that is because right. Like right before he dies, Moyle gives a talk at church and he talks about how he talked to David Whitmer. David Whitmer said he hadn't touched the plates and that for a while it bothered him. But then it kind of ends on a positive note saying, this is why I think it's okay from this talk. Let me just quote it. There was one thing I did not find satisfactory. I had difficulty then, as I have now, to describe just what was unsatisfactory. I wrote in my diary immediately upon my return home that in describing the scene in the woods, he was somewhat spiritual in his explanation and not as materialistic as I would have wished. That was my description then, and I cannot make it any clearer now. He said it was indescribable, that it was through the power of God. Then he then spoke of Paul hearing and seeing Christ and his associates did not, because it was only seen in the spirit. I've wondered if there was a special significance not clear to me. In the language used by the three witnesses is in their testimony referring to the gold plates. And they have been shown unto us by the power of God and not of man. So he's kind of saying in the three witnesses, they kind of admit that, but, you know, we didn't realize that. And he says, the eight witnesses say the plates were shown unto them by Joseph Smith, and that I call materialistic, the other spiritual. I could not get any more out of it. But so, you know, right before he dies, he gives this talk saying. Saying that David Whitmer didn't touch the plates and that it had bothered him, but that, you know, I think. I think that's okay. And David Whitmer was really firm in his testimony at the time of Joseph Smith, although he believed Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet. But all of this nuance was basically cleaned out of both biographies and no mention of this talk that he gave later that says, you know, that it's bothered me then and it bothers me now that it wasn't materialistic. So, yeah, I found that. I found that to be interesting. And then there's another episode that I found that in the very beginning of the second biography from. From Mo's notes, he talks about Heber J. Grant pulling aside James Henry Evans or what's his name, John Henry Evans, and saying, hey, what are you guys? What's Mo talking about? Can you, like, inform me if there's anything troubling? And let's see, where is that? But it's. It just seemed like the First Presidency was kind of very involved in wanting to make sure that whatever Moyle said was kosher.

John Dehlin [02:06:33] But it's almost. It's almost as if Hinckley was like, we can't let this story get out. We can't let this. You know, it's just this whole damage control, hide the truth, mislead the membership sort of pattern. It's like Hinckley's. Like, we can't let. Okay, whoa. We've got. We've got someone who spoke directly to one of the three witnesses who clearly was a prominent member of the church. Now he's talking openly about being disappointed about what David Whitmer really said. So we've got to do damage control and rewrite history, hide the truth, create and manufacture a misperception, and then spread it broadly amongst the membership. And Hinckley, we all know, is a p. Was a PR master. This is the guy who gets on Larry King and says polygamy was. Isn't doctrinal. This is the One who denied that we taught that man could become gods and that God just wants a man. And then when he goes back to the General Conference, laughs and, and says, you all know that I'm not confused about what's going on, you know, in church doctrine and theology. He was a, he, he, he was beloved. And he appears to have been a master manipulator of, of information and truth to protect the church at the expense of truth. Really?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:07:56] Yeah, that's my conspiracy theory. I can't, you know, I don't have Hinckley's notes. I don't know what Hinckley knew. But you know, looking at this episode, looking at the way it was treated, looking at the. There's one talk of Moyles that gets included in the appendix of the biography and it's one that he gave in, supposedly gave in 1908. And in it, however it was transcript transcribed, it says that David Whitmer handled the plates. And then you also hear there's also published a bunch of second hand accounts of different apostles talking about how James Moyle used to go around and tell people, oh, I, I talked to David Whitmer and he said he handled the plates. So they kind of drown out this admission that he didn't handle the plates. And put in all of these instances where James Moyle supposedly said that David Whitmer had claimed to have handled the plates. It just was, I don't know. It's a. Kind of a lot to go into, I definitely.

John Dehlin [02:09:12] But that's why they could read your thesis.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:09:14] My thesis, but yeah, I don't think we covered it all here.

John Dehlin [02:09:18] But it's brilliant, important, groundbreaking, shocking stuff, makes your stomach churn. But I'm just glad you did this work, Shannon.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:09:30] Thanks.

Speaker C [02:09:31] So.

John Dehlin [02:09:34] So we're not going to talk about pack other than. I'm just going to say that it just really feels like it talks about how his mom. There was a point where it's talking about Pac and it talks about how his mom was almost sex trafficked to. Do you remember that at all?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:09:52] Yeah, she was 17. She left, you know, she left England and joined, you know, got to Utah and within a month she was married to a man who was, I think he was like 56 or something. He was older than her mother. He was about her mother's age. Her mother comes one year later and her daughter is already married to a man that's, you know, her mother's age and has a baby already. And I'm going to read this.

John Dehlin [02:10:24] His mother. Mary Jane, do you want to read that. I'll have you read it.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:10:28] No, you go ahead. I don't know where you are.

John Dehlin [02:10:30] Okay. It's on page 94 of your thesis. It says, his mother, Mary Jane Walker, emigrated from England in 1852 when she was 17. The journey lasted seven months and she traveled alone. She was married within a month of her arrival in Utah, the fifth wife of a man who was 26 years her senior. Like you said. When Mary Jane's mother arrived in the deserts of Utah a year later, after an arduous journey of her own, she. She found her only daughter, just 18 years old, with a new baby and married to a man her mother's age. Right. To compound the issue, it was unlikely that either woman knew that polygamy was a Mormon practice before leaving England. Missionaries in England vehemently denied the practice of polygamy until 1853, even though some had up to a dozen wives at home. So this is. We already refer to this. But Mormon missionaries are in England as polygamous, lying that Mormons are lying that they and Mormons back home are practicing polygamy. They convert all these attractive, young, vulnerable women in England back to Utah. And then when they get here, they're poor, they're uneducated, they have no connections, and they're vulnerable. And literally the only way they can eat food and have shelter and clothes is to become the pluralist. The 18 year old, 17 year old, 4th and 5th wives of 50 year olds.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:12:14] Yeah. And you hear there's quotes of like, people saying, hey, missionaries, stop marrying these girls before they get here. Let us have a chance at. At them. Like, stop choosing all the pretty ones and sending home. You know, it's just, it's gross because they are definitely recruiting girls, not telling them the full story. And once they get here, they have no other option. There's no welfare. There's, you know, they're basically like, well, and the girls can't even get a job. This is at a time where women don't get jobs. You can't support yourself. You have to be part of a family. And they've left their family and now they're here alone. So the way they get a family is they marry into one. And the boys, you know, meanwhile, they can get a job as a farmhand or whatever and live in a bunk house. But girls can't do that kind of thing. Back in the day, a good girl does not live in a bunkhouse. She's, you know, she's joining a family as soon as possible. And polygamy makes that possible. And we know that. So she left in, in 1918 52. And it wasn't until 1853 that they admitted that polygamy was happening. And if you look at the footnote, I just found it so interesting when they admitted in 1853 the Church in England, which had had 30,000 members more than Utah at the time. They had 30,000 members there, Utah only had. The rest of the entire world had 21,000. So the church was actually more in England than it was in, in the United States. But after, after a few years, at least half of those it was, the church membership was down to 13,000. So I mean, some of those were from people immigrating to America, but a lot of it was people saying, wait, what polygamy done, I'm out. Like a lot of people left the church when they found out that polygamy wasn't just a rumor that anti Mormons were spreading.

John Dehlin [02:14:33] Yeah. And, and so this guy that we're talking about, his name is Dr. Frederick James Pack. He had a PhD from Columbia and you mentioned he was a geologist and you mentioned him because he, he becomes one of the really early pioneers in sort of what I call middle way Mormonism, which is non literal. You know, okay, the Bible may not be historical, or even the Book of Mormon may not be historical, but the church is still good. You can find value in the myth and the story. There's a brilliant account you have of some people speaking in tongues.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:15:14] Prayer meeting was super interesting. I'd never read anything like that. So his biography talked about before going on a mission, he was promised a testimony and that he talks like the whole thing, he talks about how they had to fast before going. And then the, the person who was holding the prayer meeting had to clean their house, change all the linens, like completely like prepare for this meeting. And then they would have this meeting, they broke their fast together, then they sat around, kind of had a testimony meeting and then they started speaking, speaking in tongues. And that this was just a very special and important experience to him. But it's something that we just don't see anymore. Like this spiritual, you know, outpouring, the spiritual gifts, this kind of evangelical Pentecostal type of religion. Just, that's not familiar to people raised as I was in the, you know, I just found it so interesting to read his account of this prayer meeting.

John Dehlin [02:16:25] And that's another example of revisionist history. We're, you know, we read the Articles of Faith where it says we believe in the gift of tongues and Interpretation of tongues. And I asked this as a teen. I'm like, well, why aren't we doing it? Because I had friends who were, you know, evangelical, who were charismatic, like, even Assemblies of God. And I'd be like, well, if we. If it's in the articles of faith, why aren't we practicing it? And so the spin would be, oh, no, we mean something different when we talk about speaking in tongues and interpretation of tongues. What we mean is that's when a missionary can learn a language really quickly and can even understand what people are saying when he doesn't quite know the language yet. That was the apologetic that I was explained.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:17:12] And that's what we. Yeah, if someone was speaking in tongues in a. One of our church meetings, we'd be like, what are you doing? Go away.

John Dehlin [02:17:20] Stop it. You know.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:17:21] No, speaking in tongues has to do with actual language, not gibberish language. But.

John Dehlin [02:17:26] Yeah, but what you write here is that, you know, about this beautiful meeting or this weird meeting where somebody gets filled with the spirit and. And they start.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:17:38] His face is so bright that Pat can't even look him in the face because he's shining like the sun. And people are speaking in tongues.

John Dehlin [02:17:47] An unknown tongue, right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:17:48] Yeah. Yeah. And then somebody else interprets what that other person said.

John Dehlin [02:17:54] Yeah. When he had finished, we sat for a moment in total silence, then went with an assurance possessed only by one inspired by the of deity. Apostle Taylor said to his wife, Nelly, you have the interpretation. Arise and giveth it. So the wife of an apostle stands up and interprets the gibberish that somebody else had just got through saying, and she gave an interpretation what had been said by the patriarch.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:18:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:18:25] The statement containing exhortation to diligent performance of our labors promised us something very vague. Right. Promised us success and warned us that we should be tested. Tested, tested. So this is a Mormonism that has been totally whitewashed from our history. And now speaking in tongues has been relegated to missionaries learning languages a little bit faster than normal or understanding things when they don't quite have the language done yet.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:18:57] Yeah. And that was 1896. You know, he's 21. He was newlywed. His wife went on and the mission with him. She was in this meeting. Everyone in the meeting was in tears. It was a beautiful experience and something that he just, you know, thought about for the rest of his life. And that's what I love Pac, because he's kind of like from his mother joining, you know, basically being trafficked. I didn't say that in the thesis, but I mean, it quacks like a duck right there. From his mother joining the church and through frontier times, and he's, he's a witness of these prayer meetings, speaking in tongues. But then, you know, he also goes and gets a science degree and ends up, yeah, he's like a PhD. He's not just, not a, not just a degree. He's extremely educated and extremely smart and he ends up writing a book that, you know, as you were saying, kind of becomes the Middle Way Bible for a lot of the intellectuals. Like. And I believe these meetings kind of threw him into this position.

John Dehlin [02:20:06] Right. I want to read a sobering quote from one of our listeners. Jan Parks writes. But before we get to the Middle Way stuff, Jan Parks writes, I'm an English convert, age 14, came to America age 18, married in the temple six months later. It was a mistake, but a hundred years earlier it would have been so much worse.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:20:27] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:20:28] Jan, thank you for sharing. That's very sobering. If you want to message me, I will interview you for Mormon stories. I want to hear your story if you're comfortable sharing it. But I'm kind of like catching my breath because that's pretty sobering that this is still kind of happening, right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:20:43] Yeah. At least polygamy wasn't her only option.

John Dehlin [02:20:47] Yeah.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:20:47] Right. As it was back then. Like, that just breaks your heart to think, you know, this 17 year old girl shows up and it's just not what she thought.

John Dehlin [02:20:58] Yeah.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:20:58] And what do you do at that point when you're here and you have no other option? Make it work.

Frederick James Pack and the Science-Religion Debate

John Dehlin [02:21:05] So as we're talking about Frederick James Pack, you write about how he really is this optimist, that science and religion can be harmonized. They don't need to be thought of to be in conflict. That if you've got science that conflicts with faith, you need to revise your faith, you know, or you don't understand the science. But if you just think hard enough and have enough faith, everything's fully reconcilable. And I know there's a lot of

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:21:34] Mormons that truth is truth. It's not going to conflict with another truth. You know, truth is truth. So whatever it is, we just need to find the most truth and go with that. I don't think God will give us lies.

John Dehlin [02:21:49] But what's kind of mind blowing for me is that this guy was picked to be in these meetings, right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:21:55] Yeah. Well, he's got a PhD in geology, he from Columbia.

John Dehlin [02:22:02] What's that?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:22:02] Yeah, he understands the science. And if they're wondering about what the archeology is going to say. He might have some ideas. He's a good resource in the. In these meetings.

John Dehlin [02:22:12] Yeah, so you're right. Pack was a proponent of the harmony between science and faith while retaining his faith in God. He wrote that biblical literalism was a problem. So the dude that the apostles are inviting to the meeting to discuss the problems, the Book of Mormon does not believe that the Bible, or at least major parts of the Old Testament were even historical. So I'll go on to read, at

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:22:37] least by the time he writes his biography. I don't know exactly what position he held in 1922.

John Dehlin [02:22:44] Right, okay. Thank you for that disclaimer. But I mean, you would have been thinking about this stuff in grad school, right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:22:50] Yeah, well, he says, actually he talks about when he went away to school, and I'm just gonna real quick. He. So he talks about how, you know, he'd grown up with such a strong faith and he'd never questioned it. But then he started to think that his faith and his new scientific belief were not harmonious. And he says what an awful experience it is. He says, the distress that came to me can only be understood by those who've had a similar experience. It is difficult to tell just what the outcome would have been if I had not had the good fortune to overhear one man say to another that two truths are never at variance and that in cases of seeming disagreement, difficulties always clear away when sufficient time is given to their consideration. So he's kind of like, okay, if I don't understand it yet, that's okay, but truth will prevail. And, you know, if we don't understand it yet, it's just because we haven't let it sit for enough time.

John Dehlin [02:23:57] Right.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:23:57] But he, you know, he talks about what a difficult, heartbreaking distress it was to think that maybe his faith wasn't accurate and wouldn't work with science.

John Dehlin [02:24:11] Right. So you write in your essay, he goes on to write that biblical literalism was a problem. As an example, you write, Shannon, he showed his reader that Noah's flood story could not be literally true. Now think about this for a second, Mormons. You know, our theology isn't just like standing independent of history and science. We're believing that Adam and Eve led to Noah. Adam and Eve were the first humans on the earth. There was no death before the fall. Six thousand year old Earth, Noah was a descendant of Adam and Eve. But then all the humans die. So then all the humans have to come through the lineage of Noah because All humans died besides that. And then of course, this whole idea of Aegyptus and the dark race and Hamilton, all this Mormon theology comes from one of the children of Noah. And so a lot of this racist garbage that ends up in the book of Abraham and all the stuff that was used to justify the curse of Cain comes from a literal belief in Adam and eve and a 6,000 year earth and in a literal Noah and by the way, the Tower of Babel and the Scattering and the Jaredites or the Mulekites or whoever it is that comes over to the, you know, north and south and Central America from those early biblical times. All of that, all of that Mormon theology is dependent on a literal Old Testament, 6000 year old Earth, literal Adam and Eve as the first humans, literal Noah, literal Noah's flood, etc. And you here you have one of the dudes they're inviting to these meetings, at some point in his life stops believing in all of it. And I'm going to guess it's before the meetings. But you go on to write. He showed his reader that Noah's flood story could not be literally true. In addition to the impossibility of an ark housing that number of animals, the flood itself was impossible. I love this. In order to cover the highest mountains five miles above sea level, the rain would have to fall for 40 days at 25ft per hour. The most severe storms ever recorded were scarcely one tenth of that volume. And there was not enough water on Earth to accomplish the task to evaporate. Even if the water had been boiling, it could not have disappeared in the time stated. But he contended, yeah, where did all the water go when it receded? Where did it all go?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:26:48] My son's seminary teacher actually said that the water went to Mars. So I mean, this is like a few years ago. People are still saying the flood is literal. The water disappeared to Mars.

John Dehlin [02:27:02] This whirlwind swirl of water, right, lifting out of the sky and traveling to Mars.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:27:10] Just like the water receded. It's not like, oh, there was a miraculous water miracle thing happening where it all disappeared.

John Dehlin [02:27:20] You're right to evaporate. Even if the water had been boiling, it could not have disappeared. But he contended that did not mean the story was useless. Most theologians looked for hidden truths to be learned through the account. So this is really interesting because this is where Mormonism is headed. Mormonism is headed that the Book of Mormon isn't a history, it's not a revelation. It's a revelation that the Bible isn't defensible anymore as a historical document, but it's still got myths. That's where Mormonism is headed as well. With the Book of Mormonism, Mormon and the, you know, number one, some of the origins of this thinking come out of the figures invited to these beats Roberts meetings. Number two or three, the apostles are comfortable incorporating these sorts of thinkers into their secret private meetings. But of course by 2000, 2010, 1993, the church is excommunicating people who speak openly about these sorts of things. So that's interesting the double standard.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:28:22] And Pack writes this book, it's called Science and belief in God where he's talking about what you're saying this, that you know, the flood can't be literal. That's 1924. Like he wrote this in 1924. So. And he didn't get excommunicated for this. People were like it was very widely read, people loved it. He, you know, a lot of people really appreciated what he said and it was kind of clear, you know, he could write this book. Nobody excommunicates him. Lots of people love was it was fine to have this view for a while. He was, you know, a member in good standing. Everyone liked him. He, the book was well received. He was not punished in any way for presenting some kind of non literal interpretation. And yeah, 1924, but later on it would be a problem.

Mormon Theology, Evolution, and Intellectual Suppression

John Dehlin [02:29:21] That's part of why I'm so out of my mind outraged. Because here we have these deep rich scholars and thinkers at the interacting at the highest levels of the church hierarchy. The apostles not only know them but they are incorporating them into their secret private meetings. And Then by the 1940s and 50s, Woodstow, Talmadge, Roberts and Eyring, all these dudes die. Joseph Fielding Smith wins out and then he publishes doctrines of salvation that I read as an effing missionary. Like oh, you know, so I'm the, the curriculum that I was taught by the 80s in my seminary class through correlation is that is that it's a 6,000 year Earth, a global flood. No death before the fall of Adam and dinosaurs were bones transformed from other planets by Satan to tempt members of the church. And that everything's literal and that if you believe in evolution you're effing evil. And it was like Mormon prophets, seers and revelators and apostles that silenced the scholars and scientists that hid the information and then misled and miseducated us for decades and decades and decades afterwards intentionally because they knew that these, this evidence, this science was going to be anathema to faith and tithe paying and devotion to the church. So, like, our generations grew up being suspicious of science, of, of, of not believing in evolution and of having just intellectually bankrupt views on the world and its existence. And it was all. It was all known back in the 20s and that it was hidden from us. And we were, we were misled. And it makes me so angry.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:31:23] I. I saw a study and I. I think I quote it in here, but I'm not sure what. Where it is. But it was talking about how, you know, earlier, like around this time, the majority of members believed that, you know, evolution could be a thing and that, you know, it. I wish I could find it off the top of my head, but, you know, that it was like 75% of BYU students believed that evolution legitimate. And by 1970. Yeah, yeah, 25, 75% believed that evolution was not legitimate. So we went from mostly believing that, you know, we could make it work to this very, like, fundamentalist view that you're not allowed to believe in evolution. It was, it became the minority view. It had at one point been the majority. You.

John Dehlin [02:32:24] And I'm just. It. It's harsh language, but it's prophets, prophets, seers and revelated revelators that we trusted are the ones who lied to us and misled us.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:32:35] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:32:36] And that, that is what's so outrageous.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:32:38] Building Smith, I think for him personally, he's the only one I've researched as far as that the whole controversy goes. I think his problem, and probably most of the others were that they were basically uneducated, that they had, you know, I think Joseph Fielding Smith had two years of high school, whereas then you've got Talmadge, who's got a PhD who's, you know, just right underneath him in seniority, but, you know, two years of high school versus a PhD in geology, which. Which one has a better, like, more complete view of the world? Although Joseph Fielding Smith got extremely militant about these views of the earth. And he was. I would say that he is the one that really kind of caused the church to go in this fundamental, fundamental direction where, yeah, once BH Roberts, Talmadge, Witso, like, everyone with their scientific knowledge dies. They're gone. And they don't really start calling scientists and, you know, I don't know, it starts to become business people and lawyers. I don't know. It's just. It's just interesting that for a while this was like, fine to believe like PAC did. It was mainstream. But then a turn happened after These meetings, and I guess I believe that there was some kind of. These meetings brought up a defensiveness that didn't exist before. So it's this defensiveness, you know, BH Roberts kind of shook their confidence that everything they had was on the up and up. And this defensiveness, like I said, the efforts to guard against doubt kind of show its feared strengths. You can see extreme efforts made after this point to guard against doubt. Even doubting the literalness of the Bible becomes a problem where in 1924 it was warmly embraced.

John Dehlin [02:34:51] Chad, one of our listeners, Chad Childress, writes, Joseph Felix Smith was one of the worst, racist, liar, extremist, not a good guy. My friend Carl Youngblood writes, Joseph Smith was. Joseph Feeling Smith wasn't lying. He was ignorant, stubborn and persistent. Not much better, but different. But remember, Carl, Joseph Feeling Smith is the dude who hid the seer stone and allowed others to say that we didn't have a seer stone and didn't correct the record. Joseph Feeling Smith is the dude who ripped the 1832 account out of Joseph Smith's own journal and hid it for decades so that we would all be misled about the first vision. So, Carl Jungblood, I think Joseph Fielding Smith was a liar and a really bad one. And he was stubborn and persistent and ignorant. But I don't think he was ignorant. I think these dudes believed that you lie to protect the church. You do anything to protect the church. You lie.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:35:48] We have that quote saying that Joseph Fielding Smith. Smith, his dad or Joseph F. Yeah, I would. I would lie to protect, you know, I have no problem lying. It's kind of what he said to protect the church or my brother or whoever.

John Dehlin [02:36:05] So I. Let's do. At least. Let's do two more. Three more. There's so many I want to do. Oh, my gosh. But let's. Let's go ahead and Talk quickly about Dr. George William Middleton.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:36:21] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:36:22] Is there something else you wanted to say about. About Moyle or Pack?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:36:29] No, I just thought he was such an interesting example of somebody who was marrying science and religion and had found a way to do it and was warmly accept. You know, everyone loved his book and the people that didn't, you know, it didn't really bother them. It's seemed like we could have gone in that direction and stayed there. We did go in that direction for a while, but as you were saying, it got moved back.

John Dehlin [02:36:59] Right. Lisa Sears writes, I served on Temple Square and was told all of these lies and unknowingly repeated these lies to thousands of Visitors, That's a big deal. Missionaries perpetuate the lies when they're not even given a chance to know the truth. And the church has known better for a long, long time.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:37:16] Yeah.

George William Middleton: Science and Doubt

John Dehlin [02:37:18] Okay, let's talk about Dr. George William Middleton.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:37:22] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:37:23] I've got some great quotes from him. But. But is there anything you want to say?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:37:26] To begin, Middleton. So Middleton was somebody that was BH Roberts, or actually Richard Lyman, sent him a letter with a copy of Couch's Core Questions, and Middleton wrote back and presented a defense of, you know, Book of Mormon historicity. You know, said, well, these are the reasons that we still think it's ancient. But then within a couple years, he had kind of changed his view on the historicity of the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [02:38:06] Yeah. So he's. He's thinking about Couch's questions. Right. And he makes the. He makes the incredible statement that if Couch had really thought through this, he would have come up with much more serious questions than the one he asks. Right. Ones. He asks.

Speaker C [02:38:24] Right.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:38:25] He may be smart, but I'm smarter. I. I could come up with better ones.

John Dehlin [02:38:29] In other words, I could come up with way worse problems with the Book of Mormon than horses and stuff. Steel and scimiters and silk. Right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:38:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:38:37] But he ends up losing his.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:38:39] Kind of. Is like, oh, but this is no big deal. We can answer these. These are easy. But.

John Dehlin [02:38:43] Right, but he. But he. But he ends up giving really lame, apologetic responses. Yeah, but. But some of his quotes were just really interesting because by the end of his life, I think you kind of make the case that he loses his faith. Is that right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:39:00] Yeah. He talks later about the inhabitants of, you know, ancient Mexican cities being clearly pagan.

John Dehlin [02:39:11] Pagans and not. Not Christians. Right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:39:14] Yeah. But before he was saying, oh, no, definitely, you know, Book of Mormon stuff. And again, keep in mind that they all believed that all native people were Lamanites. He was part of that group. Like, nobody questioned that until 1921 in these geography meetings. And Middleton, I can't remember Middleton might have been in those meetings.

John Dehlin [02:39:39] Yeah. He writes, whatever science may prove or conjecture about the people who built and occupied this slumbering city, a Mexican city. He writes, I think the evidence is indisputable that they were a pagan race given to the worship of serpent gods and other vagaries. The same may be said of all the other ruined cities visited in Mexico. This is a dude traveling to Mexico with apostles, right?

Speaker C [02:40:02] Yeah.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:40:02] He went with Richard Lyman, like, a year after them, these meetings. And so he's there with other church members. And you Know, some people are like, oh, yes, this is clearly Book of Mormon lands. And he's like, nah, I don't think so. Yeah, and he talks about saying, he's like, I, you know, I'm not very. I kind of stand apart from man made religion. He kind of just kind of distances himself from religion. In his biography, you said he doesn't

John Dehlin [02:40:38] even really mention the church, right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:40:40] Yeah, he says he stands apart from all. Yeah, I've got a quote. He doesn't mention the church at all. But then even religion, he kind of distances himself.

John Dehlin [02:40:53] One of the quotes you include is, now, in my experience, I've come to think that the happiest people in their religion are the ones who do not think, but accept things on authority without any questions. So he's saying those are the happiest people and there's a dude hanging around the apostles. Right. As I perused my religious thoughts further, I eventually came to realize that if everyone had lived by blind, unquestioning faith, the world would have made no progress. There are revolutionary times when old creeds are shaken to pieces and new ones must appear. That's kind of cool, right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:41:28] Yeah. He's like, this is like, we need to question it and make changes and then shake things up once in a while because blind faith just causes nothing.

John Dehlin [02:41:42] And he goes on to write, eventually the early simple spirituality is. Okay, so he's talking about spirituality in the church and with leaders, and he's

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:41:52] talking about the life cycle of religion.

John Dehlin [02:41:56] He says, eventually the early simple spirituality is superseded by a complexity of organization which honest people put forth in a conscientious effort to keep their system potent in the face of accumulating indifference among the people. But a complex machine, and he's talking about the church. A complex machine is harder to keep going than a simple one. And every new feature that is added, instead of being any permanent help, adds that much more to retarding the process. Finally, there's a revolution. And here's what he says. We need our Savonarolas and our Martin Luther's to correct the errors of the ages. Who in the heck is Savonarola? Savonarola.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:42:41] So he was a priest that was speaking up against church leadership in the Catholic Church, who was basically, they defamed him, said he's an apostate, and I think they killed him. Okay, it says he was speaking up against corruption in the church.

John Dehlin [02:43:04] Church giroloma savonarola, died 1948 in Florence. He was an Italian Christian preacher, reformer and martyr, renowned for his clash with tyrannical rulers and a corrupt clergy. After the overthrow of the Medici in 1494, Savonarola was the sole leader of Florence, setting up a democratic republic. And he was killed, right? Yeah, he was burned at the stake.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:43:35] And I think he was opposed by

John Dehlin [02:43:39] the Arabayati, supporters of the Medici, and by Pope Alexander vi, who attempted to restrain his unusual interpretations of scripture and his claim of prophecy. Savonarola was tried, convicted of heresy and hanged and burned in 1498. So here we have a dude hanging around Mormon apostles who's saying we need Savonarola's and Martin Luther's to correct the errors of the ages. And he's kind of predicting Fawn Brody, the Tanners, the September six, you know, Grant Palmer, Jeremy Runnels, and just pick your modern reformer. Back in the 1920s and 30s, we have this cool dude, George William Middleton, who's hanging around apostles saying that our church is basically corrupt. Like, like the medieval Catholic Church, basically.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:44:36] Yeah. And I think Moyle also brought up Savonarola. I don't know how you say it, but I think he also kind of claimed to be a modern day Savonarola, whatever its name is, that he was thinking who was, I think Moyle was also like a friend had told Moyle that he was one of those, this guy as well, who speaks truth to the leadership and calls out, you know, their issues and that, you know, it's, it's good for the vitality of the organization to have your Martin Luther's and these guys that are saying, hey guys. I mean, yeah, that's, that's what a lot of us are trying to do is speak up against, you know, the things that are the problems. Like John de Lin is a modern day Savonarola who's, you know, speaking out against things that are wrong and then gets cast aside and put put away because they don't want to hear this. But this is what, you know, Martin Luther, same thing got, you know, they don't like it when you speak up, but it's important to the vitality of a religion. And I guess that's what he's saying there. And a couple of guys at this time are kind of claiming to be that type of character.

John Dehlin [02:45:53] Yeah. And you write at the end that Middleton's. You write. He seemed to show the clearest evidence of a stark before and after positions following the Moyo meeting. So it's your view that his eventual complete loss of faith for not just Mormonism, but for religion overall was probably tied to his participation in these. In these meetings. Right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:46:16] Yeah. He's like. By the time he writes his biography, and I can't be sure when he wrote it, because it got published in 1975, like, 40 years after he died, it was shelved.

John Dehlin [02:46:28] You write that it was shelved for 40 years?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:46:31] Yeah. So, yeah, he wrote this, but nobody bothered to publish it for a long time. But I do think if you especially look at right before the meetings In December of 1921, when Richard Lyman writes him his letter, and he. He writes a letter back saying, you know, oh, well, the Book of Mormon's ancient, and here's why. I think so. And then two years later, he's in Mexico looking at all this stuff and saying, yeah, these guys were definitely pagan. That's a huge change in a short amount of time.

John Dehlin [02:47:09] Yeah. All right. Anything else you want to say about Middleton before we talk about the lineman's? I think the lineman's. We'll end with the lineman's. I think there's others I want to talk about. I want to, you know, Franklin Stewart Harris, you know, BYU. BYU president. BYU for a long time tried to make, you know, BYU, you said, had like, two PhDs. When he became president, the U of you had 23. BYU is really a high school compared to the U of U back then. And. And the way Franklin Stewart Harris tried to. And make BYU education more credible and, you know, what he had to do to fight that. And he ends up leaving and. And becoming the president of USU because of all the attacks he got from Heber J. Grant and specifically J. Reuben Clark.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:47:59] Right, right. Yeah. They made it really difficult. A lot of people say that Franklin Stewart Harris's presidency was the golden age of byu. Like, it was really open and academic freedom was at its height, and people loved it, and it was like a really good university. He got in all these PhDs and taught all sorts of things and world religions, and, you know, it was a lot more open. And then, you know, the powers that be started trying to shut him down and made it too hard for him to continue, and he ended up leaving.

John Dehlin [02:48:40] Yeah. So that's a really cool story, but let's just dive in to Amy Brown Lyman. Let's do them together. Let's do Richard and Amy Lyman. How's that?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:48:51] Okay, so you want to get back

John Dehlin [02:48:55] right now Richard Lyman, or you want me to read my notes?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:48:59] Well, I just want to say I love that there were women there that we don't talk about very much, but Amy Brown Lyman was there. She was educated. She was like the, the godmother of social services in Utah. She brought social services here. And also BH Roberts wife Margaret was a doctor. So even the women in these meetings were highly educated. And I believe that they're, you know, that they were active participants in this meeting, which I loved that I think again, this 1920s early Mormonism or you know, modern. It was the early modern period of Mormonism, I would say. Women had more power and they had stronger voices and then the stuff starts to change. And Amy Lyman is a really good example of, you know, the woman who has a voice and by the end she loses it.

John Dehlin [02:50:03] Yeah. Okay, so you could, you could probably call them a power couple. Richard Lyman was a third generation apostle, so his grandpa Amesa Lyman was an apostle and his dad Francis Lyman was an apostle, so he's a third generation apostle. He is the second apostle with a Ph.D. civil engineering from Cornell, an Ivy League school. He was the founder of the engineering department at the U of UM and, and he's involved in all this stuff with, with B.H. roberts and the meeting. So let's talk about that then we'll talk about his wife and then we'll talk about their undoing. And this is the most scandalous of all the scandals. We saved the juiciest scandal for last. Okay, so, so what, is there anything you just want to tell us about his involvement with BH Roberts and the secret Mormon meetings and all that? Just that he was involved, obviously.

Richard and Amy Brown Lyman: Faith, Reform, and Scandal

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:51:06] He was, you know, he wrote letters to Chamberlain and Middleton saying, hey, what do you know? Give us your answers to Couches questions. And so he was obviously involved in that. I can't remember if he was in the geography meetings, but he, you know, he's just really had a PhD. He was one of the other, you know, besides Talmadge and Witso. Lyman was the other PhD. There were three in the, in the Quorum at the time. So in these meetings, actually two of the PhDs were there. Widtso was not. And I think, I don't know. Widtso is an interesting person. I don't know much about him. He's kind of a black hole and all his papers are inaccessible. I just wonder what's going on there. Anyway, he's, he's one of the people in this committee that, that official committee that. With Talmage and Roberts to answer writer's letter. So he does that. I don't know. What, what do you want?

John Dehlin [02:52:25] Yeah, I mean, the truth is you don't, you don't have a lot of info about them, their participation, other than the fact that they participated. So it's just, it's relevant to know a major apostle, power dude, PhD from Cornell. Apostle participating in the BH Roberts stuff. Right.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:52:44] He's also the one that Roberts writes to in 1927 and sends him the parallel. So I think Roberts sees Lyman as of part, probably the most nuanced, you know, science friendly or maybe it's, you know, as a. I was going to say a close friend. But also Lyman is also the one that Roberts has kind of a beef with because he says rather flippantly, why are we going to pursue this if it's going to make our problems worse?

John Dehlin [02:53:15] So, yeah, perhaps we shouldn't look into the problems if they don't help solve the ones we already have. So basically it's Lyman who's the Cornell scientist. When Robert says there's a lot more problems here, it's Lyman who. That's kind of a little bit.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:53:31] I think he's an engineer, right? Wasn't he?

John Dehlin [02:53:34] Yeah, yeah. Civil engineer. Yeah, yeah. Still, engineers valued science and Right. Tells BH Roberts, okay, if there are more problems, unless they're going to solve the ones we already have, don't look into them further. So it's this conscious. The point is, we like to, apologists, like to convey this narrative that Mormon church leaders didn't know the problems. You know, they're just busy bishops and then stake presidents and then general authorities, and they never even become aware of the problems. And so they're victims, just like us. And we had to educate the apostles because they were so busy doing ecclesiastical work that they never got a chance to learn the problems with the church's history. But here we have an apostle saying, I don't want to know if there's more problems. I don't want to know. Don't look into it further. And let me, by the way, let me send you on a mission. I mean, that's the way these apostles work.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:54:35] Although I think Lyman felt more conflicted about that kind of stance than any other or than most of the others. I would say Talmadge as well, felt more conflicted with a black and white view of everything. And I think you pulled this out earlier. But Lyman wanted, you know, a variance of views. He says, in 1929, talking about a meaning of the 12. He says perhaps the most important matter discussed at a meeting of the 12 was my appeal for greater charity toward our church members whose views are not strictly orthodox. I say if 100 of the most successful church Members are being pushed out of ward activity, if not out of the church, then there may be something wrong with the leadership somewhere. So he's advocating in 1929 for, you know, don't push people out if, if you, if their views don't match yours. Exactly. I think we need to be a warm and welcoming place for everyone, including the educated, the non orthodox, the people who just want to be there for whatever reasons they want to be there.

John Dehlin [02:55:48] Yeah. And I love that quote. If, if a hundred of the most successful church members are pushed out of ward activity, if not out of the church, then there may be something wrong with the leadership somewhere. The fact that it, you know, and that's really important to this story because what happens to him later, you are arguing is in part because even though he, he wasn't the defender of science and truth, like maybe I would have wanted, he was a defender of open mindedness and science and progress in the church. And that quote and others sort of exemplify that. But then what I think you make the case for in your article is that that leads to problems for him later with the brother. Is that right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:56:35] Yeah, yeah. I think if we want to compare. Yeah, it seemed like later when we. I guess, I don't know if you want to.

John Dehlin [02:56:47] Okay, so. Yeah, so yeah, let's. So let's talk about his wife. So his wife, Amy Brown Lyman, she

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:56:55] was the General Relief Society president and she'd been in the General Relief Society presidency since the time she was like 34. So she is like always super or on the board at least since, you know, she just was always super involved in Relief Society and just in social work and charity and she was really working a lot with, again I said, she's like the godmother of social work in Utah. She was working towards getting clean water and sanitation and, you know, food for the poor. And like anything you could think of, she was really trying to improve the lives of the poor and everyone in Utah. She was very involved.

John Dehlin [02:57:44] You wrote that she was the 23rd of her father's 25 children from three wives. So Amy Brown Lyman is the descendant, you know, she's the daughter of a Mormon polygamist of a third wife of a Mormon polygamist. You write that her nickname was Ready, Aim, Fire, that she was a real spitfire. You said that she served in the Utah legislature for two years and that she was an officer on the National Council of Women. So she was kind of a feminist.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:58:14] Oh, yeah, she was. She definitely was. She felt that women were capable and needed to be actively involved in community welfare, not just church welfare, but community. She was very involved in the community and trying to get the church as well. You know, I mean, that they used to own hostages, hospitals and things like that. She, she was working for the temporal welfare of everyone as the relief. I think that's what she believed that Relief Society was. You know, the men would handle the spiritual welfare and the women would handle the temporal welfare and they would do clothing drives and food drives and hospital founding and you know, they were super involved in just trying to make everyone's lives better.

John Dehlin [02:59:04] Yeah. Okay. So she's. So they're this power couple. It's probably hard to find a more power couple than a third generation apostle with his wife being the president of the Relief Society General Board. And by the way, this was a time when the Relief Society was very different than it is now. Do you want to talk about that? You did a little bit.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [02:59:26] They, they were an independent organization. The, the Relief Society president, she once, she was called. It was a lifetime calling, just like an apostle. And it was just right before Amy became president that they, that people stepped down, not due to death, but due to health or other reasons. And then shortly after that they started saying, oh, well, we're just going to put them in for like a five year, ten years. So the, the women used to. This was a lifelong calling. This was their, like what they would do for the rest of their life. They had their own budget, they had their own like, buildings. They had, they were a separate organization. It was a voluntary organization. People would pay dues and join the Relief Society and they'd have their own meetings and their own, in their own buildings on some day of the week and they organized all sorts of charitable things.

John Dehlin [03:00:35] Right, okay. And so, and so what is, particularly here's where kind of the scandal comes in. So there's, I want to say there's two parallel things going. The first strand that I think you want to argue in this paper is that Lyman, Richard Lyman, being someone who loves science, being someone who fights for tolerance and open mindedness towards scientists and progressives, at least behind the scenes, that that's starting to annoy some of the brethren. And what you seem to be arguing is some of the brethren, and I think it's specifically Harold B. Lee and J. Reuben Clark and one other apostle that you mention, are uncomfortable with Amy Brown. Lyman's sort of example of a working woman, of a competent woman, of a strong woman, and is an independent woman. They're not liking that role model and they're trying to kind of disempower the Relief Society. And you seem to kind of make the case that Amy Brown Lyman isn't having any of that, and she's pushing back on their attempts to sort of downsize and disempower the Relief Society. So is that. Is that one sort of narrative that you're basically upholding in your thesis?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:02:13] Yeah. So I think she kind of bridges this gap where the women, when they were under polygamy, they were kind of left alone, and the guys didn't have the ability to control their wives because they didn't even live with their wives a lot of the time. So the women had a lot more autonomy in a lot of cases there. I mean, they still didn't have the ability to get jobs and earn money very well. But it seems like once polygamy went away, the patriarchy really felt like, okay, well, we need to definitely control our women and we need to make sure that they are, you know, in line with us. We can't. No more benign neglect of what our women are doing. Because now if we only have one wife, we can definitely keep her. Her under control. And it just seemed that that kind of is what happened between the beginning and end of Amy Brown Lymon's tenure in the Relief Society.

John Dehlin [03:03:16] Okay, so now let's go ahead and just reveal part of the scandal. But it's not even the most scandalous thing. I don't think Richard Lyman's adultery as a Mormon apostle is nearly as scandalous as the reaction, as the church's reaction. But it turns out Richard Lyman, third generation Mormon apostle, was what. Tell us, Shannon.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:03:40] Well, he had an adulterous relationship. He. So what happened was he. He met this woman who had been. Who had been in a polygamous marriage. And, you know, they were. They were coming down on polygamy and trying to root it out of the church. And so it was discovered that she was polygamous and, and rather. And she got excommunicated. And her husband, you know, she divorced him. And that was in 1921. And then she wanted to rejoin the church and she started being counseled by Richard Lyman. And they've just been. Became really good friends. He felt really bad for her to have, you know, been excommunicated and to be in this situation. And she was, you know, by the time they became close, she was older. She, she's like, now what? Like, I'm not sealed to anyone. I don't, you know, my. What am I going to do? And so he says, well, you know, after this life, we can be sealed. I'll, you know, you can be my other wife in heaven. And so they had come upon this agreement that once one of them dies, the other one will get sealed. You know, they'll seal them by proxy so they'll be together in heaven. And he's just like, the problem is, I didn't wait till we were in heaven to consummate this relationship. So, like, the problem isn't that he wanted to be polygamous. The problem was that he did it on earth. And so they started this relationship and it went on for several years.

John Dehlin [03:05:31] So when we talk about, I mean, when we talk about the power of discernment, you have a man serving in the quorum of the twelve apostles meeting weekly with the first presidency. And none of the other apostles or anyone in the first presidency enjoys the spirit of a discernment to know that one of their fellow apostles is engaged in a five year extramarital affair.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:05:55] Right. So 13, I think for 13 years, they believed themselves to kind of be spiritually about to get married. You know, that they were going to be. It says after 13 years of chaste meetings and considering each other prospective spouses, he went. He. He'd gone on a mission to Europe, and when he came back, they were just too happy to see each other. And the relationship became sexual. And then for the next five, six years, seven, I don't know, in 1943 is when it was discovered. So 38 to 43 was the dates of this relationship. Even though they, for 13 years had known each other, had decided that they would be married on some level and had not done anything physical, but again, they did. So he, He. Yeah, so this part gets a little crazy in on November 11, 1843.

John Dehlin [03:07:11] Okay, so let me just ask you, do you think in his mind, okay, is there any chance, someone's asking, is there any chance he was actually sealed to her, that she was sealed to him as a polygamous wife while they were alive?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:07:23] So he talked about it being kind of a personal. Like they themselves had talked about this, but there was no, like, actual marriage. He believed that they were like, married on some level, but it was more spiritually than. I don't think there was any kind of temple thing. I don't think they talked to anybody. I think they knew by this time that the crackdown on polygamists happened after like 1833. They started going re. Or 1933. They started going really hard against polygamists and excommunicating and Doing all these Ray, like really trying to root it out. And okay, so underground, like Secret Service type things, trying to find out who was polygamous.

John Dehlin [03:08:13] So in your mind, they weren't sealed in, you know, in this life, but in his mind, spiritually, they were sealed.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:08:20] They. Yeah, they had an understanding that they would be sealed for eternity, but they couldn't do it yet.

John Dehlin [03:08:28] And by the way, one of my favorite Mormon stories episodes of all time is with a dear friend of mine named David Christian. And he tells the story of his mission in Australia where, and this is episode 557, he was on a mission in Australia and his mission president was Orson Wright. And the mission president called several of the sister missionaries in and told them that they were all going to be his polygamous wives. And he used this mission president, Orson Wright. This is the Australia Sydney Mission, 1979, 1981. He uses the doctrine of polygamy in DNC Section 132 as a justification to abuse, to be a sexual predator, to abuse these sister missionaries. And, you know, this goes back to Carolyn Pearson's argument of the. The ghost of polygamy, you know, the ghost of Mormon polygamy, that as long as we've got this teaching on the books, leaders and members are going to be victims to ecclesiastical abuse. As priesthood leaders use the teaching of polygamy as a justification, either in their own minds or as a justification to the victims to sexually abuse the victims. Is that fair to say?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:10:02] Yeah, the polygamy is a toxic belief. And here he, you know, these guys are just one generation out. I mean, B.H. roberts is 13 years older than Richard Lyman, and B.H. roberts is openly polygamous, no big deal. But here, Richard Lyman has a relation, you know, and they come from polygamous families. This is like a brand new thing that you can't just look at some lady and be like, hey, we really connect. I think we need to be married. And even though I already am married, that was kind of a, you know, I think what. And he. Here he is saying, well, okay, we are married. Just we have to wait till we're in heaven to be married. Because polygamy is still a doctrine on the books. He's just saying, yeah, we have to wait till we're in heaven. Nobody had a problem with him saying that they'd be sealed. The only problem was that they consummated it physically here, not just in heaven.

John Dehlin [03:11:05] One of the listeners writes, and I'll post it here, RR writes, who is the affair with? I missed the name. So her name was Anna Jacobson.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:11:17] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:11:18] She had been excommunicated in 1921 to two roles of polygamous wife. Lyman was asked, I guess, to be a counselor to her. And between 1921 and 19, whatever, 40 or whatever, they kept their relationship going. And it eventually turned into a sexual relationship in 1925. 1938.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:11:42] It was 1925 that she's saying in her 50s. I'm really sad because there's no way I'm going to be sealed to anyone. I'm going to be alone. And that's, you know. Third. Yeah, 1925 is when he's promising to be sealed to her.

John Dehlin [03:12:03] And then you say that.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:12:04] Oh, that would be great. That would be wonderful.

John Dehlin [03:12:07] But then you say that by 1938. And by the way, that's a. That's. That's abuse. Because he's in a position of power. He is counseling her. He's an apostle. He's a prophet, seer and refillator, and a special witness of Christ. He's counseling her as a vulnerable, you know, excommunicant. And in his counseling, he's grooming her by saying, maybe you can be my. And I don't mean to be so condemnatory.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:12:36] She was grooming him. I think she was, you know, she was an adult.

Speaker C [03:12:41] She.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:12:42] I think they had a connection, and I mean, clearly they had a connection and they were very fond of each other. And maybe at some point before 1925, he should have said, you know, I don't think we can be friends. I don't think this is appropriate. But I mean, again, 13 years of a chaste relationship, even after they decided to get sealed to each other, they tried real hard. Yeah, well, polygamy just kind of undermined it all and said, yeah, well, we are going to be together. We believe this, and so what's the big deal?

John Dehlin [03:13:14] Yeah, well, yeah, it's a toxic belief, but also, that is an imbalance of power. Right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:13:20] It is. Right. And maybe that's why. Well, I guess, yeah, they don't want men to be one on one with women. Maybe that's why. But I guess bishops, he was an apostle. He was counseling her. And that still happens one on one.

John Dehlin [03:13:42] Well, let's go to what I think is the most scandalous part of. Unless you're something else you want to talk about. Let's go to page 112 of your thesis and talk about the unraveling of all this, which I think is far more scandalous than the affair itself. And I think the affair is pretty scandalous. Do you want to read on November 11? Yeah, top of page 112.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:14:05] On November 11, 1943, Lyman, who was in his 70s, was discovered in the bed of his secret plural life. It involved a police chief smashing down the door without even knocking of a 71 year old woman during the night. Lyman was brought outside in the, in November, in the November night in his sacred underwear in front of police, police and others, and brought by police to the church office building as if he had committed a crime, not a sin. There. He was given less than 10 minutes to explain himself. A notice was placed on the front page of the Deseret News the next day.

John Dehlin [03:14:46] Yeah, so there's all, all sorts of things that, that are wrong with this narrative. Do you want to, do you want to list them or do you want me to?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:14:53] Well, like, first of all, they involved the police. What the heck? It's, you know, he's a man in, you know, he's in her apartment. Shouldn't have been. But I see no reason why the police would need to smash down the door of this, this lady's door in order to catch them in bed together. And then they bring him outside, outside in the November night. Don't let him get dressed. They're humiliating him. They bring him in his garments.

John Dehlin [03:15:26] He's in the street in his garments

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:15:29] with the police chief and officers, like a whole, like busload of people. The police chief later says, you know, says to Lyman, I am so sorry. I had no idea who we were busting. I, we, I was just told that we were going to get a big wig. I didn't know it was you. I didn't know why. I just thought we were, you know, catching someone in a crime. And he just, oh, yeah, going after a big shot. And he felt really bad later. Like even the police had felt manipulated to be a part of this whole debacle.

John Dehlin [03:16:10] It kind of speaks to this idea of a theocracy, that Utah really is a theocracy, that the church leaders have so much power, whether it's in 2020 telling the legislature how to vote, whether it's at BYU or the Provo Police or the BYU Police are sharing private police records with the Honor Code office to get people kicked out of byu or whether it's the apostles getting the police to break down the door of Richard Lyman and yank him out of the building and haul into church headquarters to be shamed. And then, and then what do they do the next day in the Deseret

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:16:48] News, they print Some notice saying that he's, you know, being excommunicated and that he was. Yeah, that he's being demoted, like, that he's no longer in good standing. And, you know, this goes everywhere. He feels absolutely humiliated. He says later, you know, all of my colleagues from college, people who aren't Mormons, they all saw this notice. And, and you know, why? Like, why did you have to do it this way? Yeah. So he, he goes, you know, get taken by police down to the church office building and, you know, the church presidency is there. They say that hit, since the entire operation was namely, was spearheaded by apostles, namely J. Reuben Clark, Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B. Lee. I don't think it's an accident that those are the three most conservative fundamentalist apostles at the time, the ones that are the most militant against liberal ideas and belief. And.

John Dehlin [03:18:00] And okay, name them again. Which were the three.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:18:04] J. Rubin Clark, Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold Bailey.

John Dehlin [03:18:08] Okay, so this is something that is really interesting to me. It's that. It's that there's this huge battle about science and openness and respecting liberal thinkers, you know, B. H Roberts and maybe Lyman and others Ivins. And then there's this fundamentalist, orthodox branch of Harold B. Lee and Joseph Fielding Smith and J. Reuben Clark. Right. There's this concern with the feminist feminism and women getting too strong in the Relief Society. And you even have it that J. Reuben Clark goes to Amy Brown Lyman and says, I want to downscale what you guys are doing. And she resists, right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:18:56] Yeah. She tries to take away their magazine and say, oh, we're going to combine the women's with the children's. And she was like, no. And she pushed back and managed to get the Relief Society magazine for, you know, a couple more decades. But eventually, you know, there is no women's magazine now. So.

John Dehlin [03:19:17] So what you're proposing potentially is. And we think about should. All right, should all is caught in a brothel. Right.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:19:28] He's.

John Dehlin [03:19:28] Now, granted, he's not an apostle, but he's the editor of the Deseret News, which is the church's, you know, newspaper. It's its main way of communication. That's a high profile position. When he gets caught with his pants down, they call him on a mission and it's quiet. Nobody speaks of it, and it's discreet.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:19:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:19:50] And what you seem to be maybe asking the question is, is it possible that ideological differences with both Richard Lyman and his wife Amy were somehow motives for Joseph Fielding Smith, Harold B. Lee and J. Reuben Clark publicly shaming and ruining Richard and Amy Lyman. Because what does Amy Lyman do as a result of this scandal?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:20:18] She steps down. She's like, nobody's. She tries to keep going for a few months, but eventually she's like, everyone's pitying me. I'm a distraction. I can't. I can't be effective in my job anymore because everyone's so caught up in what happened with my husband. And they expected her. A lot of people expected. Expected her to leave him and say, you know, I don't. Actually. That was actually common practice. If you stay with the husband who's cheating and he's unworthy of the priesthood, if you stay with him, it's like you're cheating as well. You've condoned it, so you're almost as. As guilty as him. So it was kind of encouraged to leave a cheating husband, and she didn't want to. She's like, you know what? In every other way, he was an amazing husband, and I love him, and I don't want to leave him. And people found that to be a very shocking stance to take.

John Dehlin [03:21:18] Yeah, you wrote that Bergera and Priddis wrote somewhere that women could get in trouble in past generations by Mormon leadership for not divorcing their husbands when told to.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:21:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:21:37] Yeah.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:21:38] So it was kind of controversial that she stayed with him, but. And the fact is, they made it so public. You know, he says this. This quote from Richard Lyman kind of breaks my heart. He's. He talks about, you know, you guys said you were going to keep it quiet, and then the next day you published this thing. He says, does it not appear to you to have been a strange way to treat a friend after being in session with him all day under such conditions that at the slightest whisper he could have been held, that he would gladly and quickly have explained his conduct? They'd been in church meetings that day. And he's like, why didn't anybody take me aside and ask me about this? But he said, I say, it does not seem to have been. Does it not seem to have been the most unkind to have sent after him not an automobile full, but a bus as large as a streetcar, full of armed officers who split and smashed down the door as if they were endeavoring to capture the worst kind of wicked, armed and fighting criminal? You know, he's like, I saw you guys earlier that day. If you knew this was happening, why didn't you take me aside? Why didn't you ask me what's going on? Instead, you bring all of this, a whole busload of police so that all these people are going to witness my shame. How could you do this? You've known me for years. You know, I just, it just seems so cruel and so mean and vindictive and spiteful and just, you know, even the newspaper account would have been bad enough, but smash down the door and bring him outside in his garments and take him by police car to the church office building to meet with the brethren. Like that just was like.

John Dehlin [03:23:33] And then plaster a front page headline on the Deseret News the next day.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:23:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:23:39] Like, it shows a level of meanness and disloyalty or harshness that is just sort of incomprehensible.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:23:52] Yeah. And yeah, this is cruel cruelty.

John Dehlin [03:23:56] Thank you, Jen Parks. Cruelty. Very cruel.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:24:00] It was very cruel. And by that point, you know, Robert's like, he was kind of the last big standout of the, the previous liberal ish, you know, the people who were not against science. He was kind of the last standout by 1943. So you had Roberts and Talmadge dying in, in 33. And yeah, things just. And, and J. Reuben Clark coming in in 33. And that after that point, that's when everything starts to get completely shut down. Orthodoxy is completely emphasized. They have meetings with church educators. They're starting to, you know, seminary teachers and BYU religion teachers. They're starting to say the stuff that's like, you know, not all truth is useful type things. They, you know, I know that's a later quote, but they kind of said we need to be teaching through the lens of faith and regardless of what science says. So Lyman seemed to be the last kind of guy left that was holding out for that and, and high enough in the hierarchy that his, his words had sway. So it seems kind of like these three guys especially wanted to get him out of the way. And the way they did it publicly meant that it couldn't be pushed under the rug. It would be known and they couldn't, they couldn't just let him repent and move on or even just be demoted. They had to humiliate him.

John Dehlin [03:25:48] Yeah. Yeah. And you think it was, you think it might have been a revenge motive or, you know, a theological or ideological motive?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:25:59] It seems like it. There seems to be some kind of vengeance happening.

John Dehlin [03:26:04] You know, they could have just called him on it, made him a mission president.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:26:10] Right. They could have just lied about it and kept it secret like, you know, all of those post manifesto marriages.

John Dehlin [03:26:19] Right.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:26:19] They could have kept this quiet like they had no problem doing BH Roberts married someone after, you know, Post manifesto and nobody made a big deal about it. It was all quiet. This could have been kept quiet and swept under the rug, but obviously it was not and quite the opposite.

John Dehlin [03:26:39] Yeah.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:26:39] So it seemed to have some kind of vengeful, angry, vindictive, cruel intent.

John Dehlin [03:26:50] This is totally just a side note, but you mentioned that in your profile of Amy Brown Lyman, who. Well, you mentioned one. One thing you mentioned is that her legacy is a casualty of Richard Lyman's indiscretions. In other words, because, you know, and by the way, by 1970s or 80s, no one's ever heard of Richard Lyman or Amy Lyman. Like we. We didn't grow up learning that there was an apostle that just 30 or 40 years previously been excommunicated. That's how incredibly effective the brethren are at erasing our history. You don't talk about it, you don't talk about these people. You don't write about it. So even though he is publicly shamed in the Deseret News, the way our culture works is we have no organizational memory. And so by the 70s, 80s, 90s, not only has none of us ever heard of Richard Lyman, the excommunicated apostle, but unfortunately, Amy Brown Lyman's important legacy is completely forgotten.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:27:48] I think she's one of the most important and dynamic Mormon women that we've ever had. She. She brought some really amazing things to the church and to the community in Salt Lake. And unfortunately, she's not celebrated as much as she should be because of the embarrassment of that whole episode.

John Dehlin [03:28:14] Yeah, yeah. So, well, well, I guess I want to summarize.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:28:23] Can I also mention that they kind people the rhetoric around her. She was kind of made used as an example. Like this is what happens when a woman focuses outside the home. See, her husband strayed. It was kind of put on her. She is so busy that she's neglected her husband and therefore he went outside of marriage to find. To get his needs met. So, hey, ladies, go back home and take care of your husband so this doesn't happen to you. She was kind of used as an example, someone who because of her focus outside on the church, on really good, worthy community projects, but because she was focused on all these things, her husband strayed. And so, ladies, be humble, stay home, don't do too much, be sure to keep your husband's needs met. You know, she was kind of used as an example of a woman who had gotten too successful and this is their fault. Their public fall was used kind of as an example of why women shouldn't be successful.

John Dehlin [03:29:39] It's a. It's a cautionary tale against liberalism, against intellectualism, against feminism. What?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:29:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:29:47] Against feminism, against women working outside the home. Yeah. Now, really quickly, you. You do mention. And maybe you already referred to this, but I don't remember referring to it. You mentioned that they had an agreement where they slept in separate beds, where she basically said, told. Where Amy told Richard, at some point, we're done having kids, which means we're done sleeping together.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:30:10] Yeah. They lived in kids 12 years apart, and her secretary says this. So I don't know. You know, we don't know for sure, but it looks like they kind of, at that point, had had a plutonic marriage where she's like, look, no birth control. I don't want more kids. I'm really busy. I like my life. Kids are a lot of work. And, yeah, I'm. Yeah. She ended up actually raising one of her grandchildren because her. Their son died by suicide. And they. She kind of seemed to maybe hold some anger towards Richard about that. I don't know. I mean, it was a complicated story, but it's possible that, yeah, she had decided not to have a sexual relationship with him, and that. That may be partly why he decided to leave. But also, this could also be people using these stories to be like, well, this is what happens if you don't take care of your man. So I don't really like to focus on. I don't know. I. I think it's part of the story. But we don't know for sure if they slept in separate beds.

John Dehlin [03:31:30] Right.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:31:35] Oh, the other thing. The other rumor that. That we address is that people said that Amy also knew about this other woman and that they would have dinner together, and they were okay. She was okay with it. It's possible. We. We have no record of her saying anything to the. To that about that, but I can see that being possible, considering, you know, she grew up under polygamy. They're probably like, it's fine. You know, I'm outsourcing this to someone who wants to do it, and I. I'm too busy in my life to do this. She may have. She may have, but she may not have. I don't. I really don't know. She never spoke about this, like, ever. So we don't know what she felt about it. We know that she was heartbroken and humiliated and that she quit being the Relief Society president because of it. Just knowing that everyone was judging and pitying and, you know, that it was a distraction from the work.

John Dehlin [03:32:42] So I guess it's possible that he convinced her, just like Joseph tried to convince Emma. He could have convinced her that polygamy was still a doctrine in heaven and that this poor woman was going to be his wife and she would have potentially okayed that instead. Hey, you know.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:33:03] Yeah, I don't think it's even unlikely, you know, and they believed in polygamy. Nobody said polygamy is wrong. They just said, we're not going to do it on earth. But it was. I mean, we still think it can be done in heaven. So.

John Dehlin [03:33:17] But if she was the daughter of a polygamist, and I'm sure he was the son of a polygamist.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:33:22] Yes. Yeah, he was.

John Dehlin [03:33:24] They would have thought.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:33:25] It felt fine to them, I'm sure. And I think her focus was definitely. She loved her community work. And she. Although they were. They were very fond of each other. Like, Richard had so much respect for Amy. And I saw letters that was. That were just like, oh, I'm so happy my dear Amy is back in town. He, you know, he just. He really. They really had, like a meeting of the minds. They really loved each other, so. And, you know, she refused to leave him. She says he's a great husband. Like, they had a really strong intellectual, you know, companionate relationship. So I don't, you know, I don't know the details, the nitty gritty details on their sexual relationship, but they definitely loved each other. And polygamy is not out of the realm of possibility in Mormon belief. It was. I mean, it was a brand new thing to not be polygamous, especially at this level. You know, as an apostle, he was kind of unique and not being polygamous even before they outlawed it, you know, but it's not like he just came up with this weird idea and talked people into it. This was normal for them.

John Dehlin [03:34:50] Yeah. All right, well, I think we can sort of say those are the main people we chose to profile. There are several others that you profile. And this is just. I just can't tell you how important and enjoyable and well written and profound this thesis is. Shannon.

Reflections on 1920s Mormonism and What Was Lost

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:35:12] Thanks. Yes, it was. It was really fun to learn about and write. And I've said this before, but it just made me long for the 1920s Mormonism that was possible. You know, it gave me a glimpse of this wider, more open, more, you know, embracing science, kind of trying to embrace all truth rather than saying that, you know, what truth we have cannot be adjusted. They were saying we can adjust truth, you know, as we learn more, we do more. And it kind of. I just. I loved this view of how it could have been. But by 1933, things started, you know, with J. Reuben Clark. And as we're seeing Harold B. Lee and Joseph filming Smith, they kind of really tried hard to send a church in a different direction. And I think the church we have today as a result of their concerted efforts to root out unorthodoxy.

John Dehlin [03:36:23] Yeah, yeah. And for me, what's. Aside from the individual stories, for me, what's profound is that the Brethren have always known of the major. They've always, you know, like Carl Youngblood, who we're going to have later on Mormon stories, is trying to say that I'm not being generous enough with the Brethren, that they, you know, that, that, that it's not intentional, the deception that, you know, that, that I'm not being charitable with them. I think it's completely irrefutable that for over 100 years, at least 120 years, the brethren, the apostles, the first presidency, have known that the church is not what it claims to be. They've known that the Book of Abraham,

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:37:06] denial about that fact, even if they're really trying hard not to think about it, they know it's there under the surface. And those efforts to guard against doubt show its feared strength. They're. They may not intentionally be lying, but they're intentionally staying away from certain issues. They're intentionally shutting down people who try to get anywhere near them.

John Dehlin [03:37:31] There's this idea of willful ignorance, which is still inexcusable at that level. When you're claiming to be a, you know, a special witness of Christ, when you're claiming to have a direct line with God, when people are giving their money, their time, their marriages, their children, their lives, their reputations to the Church. Yeah, you have an extra burden of, of ethics and of responsibility and of morality. You know, these aren't tobacco executives just trying to protect their portfolio. You're claiming to be representatives of God, of Jesus himself. So the, you have an extra bird. That's why some people try and compare me to Joseph Smith or what I do to, you know, the church today. And, oh, John makes money, you know, how could you criticize the Brethren? Blah, blah, blah. But I don't claim to be a special witness of christ. I don't 10 of people's income. I don't tell you when to marry and how to marry. I don't, you know, like the, the Brethren have massive control over people's lives and their descendants and their money and their time and their reputation. They have a special burden to be honest and forthright and if there are problems to let the membership know about it. So we know for over 120 years, they've known that the Book of Abraham isn't what it claims to be. They've known that the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be. They've known that Joseph Smith was a treasure digger and had a peep stone and was treasure digging and so many of the Joseph Smith was a polygamist and had over 30 wives and practiced polyandry. They've known all that. They, they've known, you know, they were lying with post manifesto polygamy. They were lying when they sent missionaries out in England to convert people and then saying that there was no polygamy back at church headquarters. They knew by, by 1912 with the new York Times article that the Book of Abraham was fraudulent. They knew by the 1922 meetings that the Book of Abraham Book of Mormon was, was, was a scientific laughingstock. They knew by 1945 all about Joseph Smith with Fawn Brody and the stuff. They knew about the First Vision account in 19, you know, the, the, the 1832 version of the of Joseph Smith First Vision account. They knew that the papyra came out in the 1960s and, and showed the Book of Abraham to be a fraud. And they chose every step of the way to silence beats Roberts, to marginalize him, to erase him from the memory hole, to excommunicate Fawn Brody, to marginalize the Tanners, to, you know, use Hugh Nibali, to attack the Egyptologists who accurately translated the Book of Abraham every step along the way for over 120 years. They lied, they hid, they punished and defamed the truth tellers and they propped up and they rewrote the history, created a false narrative, whitewashed the history and then punished any truth teller. And then generation upon generation has forgotten the truth and has had to relearn it. Thanks to Fawn Brody, thanks to the Tanners, thanks to Sunstone, thanks to Leonard Arrington, thanks to Dialogue, thanks to the September 6th, thanks to the modern Internet pioneers like Jeremy Runnels, like rfm, like all the others. Like this has to stop this multi generational distortion and deception and fraud. It has to stop.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:41:17] Yeah, it does harm. It breaks apart families. It causes people, people to, you know, feel like they have no hope if they're lgbt. Like it's just they're letting all the fallout be on the people and not on the organization. And the organization can take it. That's the thing that is so frustrating is if they at the top would just be more transparent, they could make a difference. And. And they choose not to.

John Dehlin [03:41:51] But it's even more than that. Like, with $120 billion or more in cash and stock and in real estate investments, plus all the assets of the church with a 7% annual return, they don't even need the church members tithing anymore. They can still support the current budget just on the interest of their investments. So the depression, the anxiety, the suicides, the failed marriages, the broken marriages, the LGBT suicides, all of the carnage, it's blood on their hands. It's inexcusable, and yet it continues and it's just driving me crazy.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:42:35] And all it would take is just opening up a little bit more and just being like, okay, these people, people, you know, you don't have to divorce your husband if he loses his testimony because he has good reasons for this. And we're sorry. We were afraid. We were afraid to let this go out, but we're sorry. Like, stuff like that would go so far and yes, they would lose members, but you know, if, if the truth can be harmed by, you know, the whatever, if it, if it can be damaged by the truth, then maybe it needs to be brought down. So as long as you're telling the truth, you have nothing to fear. But they have a lot to fear, obviously. And that's, I guess that was the point of my thesis is after 1922, they seem to have a lot to fear. And before that, if you take the quotes, you know, with, I mean, Heber J. Grant and B.H. roberts were both saying things like, you know, it's okay to believe in higher criticism and it's okay to not have literal belief. But after these meetings, things really, they start guarding against doubt in some really terrible ways. And it's become more and more toxic, toxic as time goes on. So until they come clean, it's not going to get better.

John Dehlin [03:44:05] Yeah. They need to stop it. And it's so ironic. J. Reuben Clark was the author of that quote.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:44:10] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:44:12] You know, if we have the truth, it cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not truth, it ought to be harmed. Yeah. So if we're harming the church, if Sam Pinson, if Jeremy Runnels, if rfm, if Bill Real, if Sam Young of Kate Kelly, Lindsay Anson Park Shannon, you know, Cola Montez, like, if we're harming the church by telling the truth, we've been invited to do so by J. Reuben Clark.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:44:42] Right.

John Dehlin [03:44:42] He's invited us to harm the church with the truth.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:44:46] Right. He didn't say that publicly. But you know, one other thing about him that just is fascinating, fascinating to me is that he, like, he was so he, he was a government. He was. Government was his, like, ultimate goal. He was. He lived in Washington D.C. for most of his life. He wasn't super active in church. He did follow the word of wisdom, but like, he didn't baptize any of his kids. His wife would come home for the summer and his kids would get baptized while they were in know you Utah for the summer and then they'd go back to D.C. so like, he wasn't like the picture of righteousness for his whole life. It wasn't until after his political career kind of got stalled that he like went back to Utah. And Utah was like, the church was super excited because he was a very high profile guy. He'd been like the ambassador to Mexico. And so he was a big deal. And so, so they just brought him in and he brought him in to the first presidency. He hadn't been an apostle, he hadn't been a general authority, he hadn't even been a stake president. And suddenly he gets put into the highest court, you know, the highest position that he could possibly be in. And he starts treating it like government, you know, where you, where this is a war and you need to win on your side. And he doesn't treat it like a church where everyone should be brought together and nurtured and cared for. He's looking at it as a war, you know, us against them. And he found enemies in the, in the hierarchy and he went after them. But I don't know, he's. He's such a fascinating character. Mike Quinn wrote a biography about him that's excellent. Definitely go read it. But he's such a, it's such a crazy character to have him suddenly come in and just start destroying things and insisting on things being a certain way. And I think he did a lot of damage in his tenure

John Dehlin [03:47:10] and Gerardo's reminding me just in a text that, that the damage continues. There's this. One of the techniques of, of a cult is called thought stopping. It's whatever occult does to get you to stop learning information and thinking for yourself. So an Uchtdorf says, doubt your doubts when you know. Renlund says, stay in the boat when Oaks says, you know, don't study further. Right. Stay away from the Internet when they tell us to go on social media fasts, when they tell us to stay away from bloggers and podcasters who aren't faithful when they stay Stay away from anti Mormon literature. All that is thought stopping. It's continuing this century plus long practice of keeping the information from its members, keeping them from having the thoughts so that they can become fully informed. And even recently, you know, in that Q and A where the kid from California asked the, the apostle and his wife, who was it? It was the one that had worked for Huntsman Chemical. What's his name?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:48:22] Starts with an R, right?

John Dehlin [03:48:24] Renlund, is it?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:48:26] No, Rasmussen. Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:48:27] Rasmussen's asked about what's Rasband. He says, should I, you know, the kid says, should I resign from the church because I'm having doubts. And instead of Rasmussen saying, yeah, you have doubts because we kept the truth from you and now you're finding it out and now you're disturbed and we're sorry and yeah, learn the truth. He's, he's comparing a faith crisis to depression and suicide and then somehow saying if you stay in the church, you won't want to kill yourself and you'll marry.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:48:59] Plenty of active Mormons do that. You know, it's, yeah, he's kind of like, look, if every, you know, this will solve all your problems and then your life will be beautiful. He doesn't address that question at all. That was a very disappointing, sad, kind of manipulative, emotionally manipulative answer that he gave in that fireside when, you know, again, he took, had an opportunity to come clean and to say, look, I'm sorry you're going through this and I know this is really difficult and friends and family don't understand. Let's help them be kinder to you if you're having a faith crisis. But no, he puts up this emotionally manipulative video of someone who's suicidal and as soon as they find the church, their depression goes away and they find purpose and they're happy and now they have this beautiful wife and all their problems are solved. Which doesn't really help someone who's already in the church, already doing those things. You know, they're taking someone from outside the church, finding the church and making that story. But the person in the question is like, I've been a member, I don't believe these truth claims. What should I do? And he's like, well, you might want to kill yourself if, if you leave. Like, that's just a terrible answer.

John Dehlin [03:50:29] And that's what's so weird is that, is that depression. Prescription met prescription drug abuse, depression, suicidality are rampant in Utah.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:50:41] Right? They exist inside the church just because this guy left it when he joined the church doesn't mean that people in the church don't experience those exact same feelings that he was having outside the church.

John Dehlin [03:50:53] Right. Yeah. They need to just stop and it, and they need to fix this. And 120 years, 150 years, it's just too long. It's. I, I'm, I can't believe it's taken me this long to realize that this, that this deception is a century and a half long.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:51:15] Yeah, I, I would say started on day one. Joseph Smith was deceiving people. So, you know, I, I don't, I mean, I guess that's the conclusion that I kind of came to after wanting to make it all work was like, what am I trying to save if it's been alive from the beginning? And it's, you know, I think we had a period in 1924. Pack is writing this book that could have led us in a different direction and had that happened, we could have done it. But instead we have this cover up situation and the COVID up is always what does the damage. So I don't know. I don't know if they can come back from this. I think that the lying and deceiving is their only option until, until there's nothing left. I don't know. I, I'm not really confident that our talking about it is going to get them to change. Although I wish they would. I wish it would become a healthier, happier place forever. You know, big tent Mormonism, that's what everyone pretends to want except for the guys at the very top. They obviously don't want big tent Mormonism where they accept feminists, intellectuals and gays and.

John Dehlin [03:52:37] Yeah, and a lot of people say, well, they're, they're coming clean. They. The Joseph Smith Papers Project and Joseph Smith Roughstone Rolling and now the Gospel Topics essays. I've been reading Rough Stone Rolling. I've been reviewing the Gospel Topics essays. We're going to be covering them soon on Mormon stories. They're awful, egregious examples of gaslighting. They are not coming clean with the

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:53:03] Rough Stone Rolling was like, I know it was like an attempt, but it was, you know, as far as historians go, he was making a lot of assumptions that would not be considered good history. I think he's an excellent historian and he, you know, he starts with a disclaimer saying, I'm, I'm saying this from through the lens of faith. So that's why he feels like it's okay, but it's still not telling an unbiased, accurate history. It's it's making assumptions that can't be fully made in responsible historical work.

John Dehlin [03:53:47] I think Roughstone Rolling is irresponsible. It's gaslighting. It is apologetics. It's not history. It's a. It's a great historian doing really awful apologetics, in my opinion.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:54:01] Yeah. And subtle. Like, I think. I think it's actually a masterwork in a lot of ways because it's presenting difficult information in ways that won't scare a lot of people. But it's. You know, he. He makes it look like it's not biased because he's honest enough that it's hard, but it still is being told in a very biased way. And I don't know. I. I was disappointed when I read it.

John Dehlin [03:54:31] Me, too.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:54:32] Not. Not in the information, but in the presentation.

John Dehlin [03:54:35] Yeah. And that's everything. It's. It's spin. It's context.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:54:39] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:54:40] Mark. Mark Blanchard writes saints is also horrible history. So some people are wanting to say the Saints is another example of the Church coming clean and being honest about its history.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:54:49] But again, like I was saying, they have lawyers writing the history. They don't have historians. Well, they have historians maybe writing it, but then the lawyers go over it and, you know, again, it's not ethically problematic for a lawyer to only tell one side of the story, but it is ethically problematic for a historian to do so.

John Dehlin [03:55:10] Yeah. Well, the. The thesis is the Secret Mormon meetings of 1920. The scholar is Shannon Caldwell Montez.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:55:19] 1922.

John Dehlin [03:55:21] What's that? Oh, what did I say? The Secret Mormon meetings of 1922. What did I say?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:55:25] 20.

John Dehlin [03:55:26] Okay. University of Nevada, Reno. I want to talk forever with you. I got to run home plus, we're getting to the point of beating a dead horse. But, Shannon, your work is so profoundly inspiring and motivating and enraging and important, and I just. I hope you'll keep doing work in this area, and I even hope that we can collaborate some because I think you're a huge treasure to us all, and I can't thank you enough for all your work and for coming out Mormon stories and sharing it.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:56:03] Yeah, happy to do it. It's been fun. I did a lot of work on this, and it's been fun to be able to put my baby out in the world and let everyone see it, rather than it just die a dusty shelf life. So it's been fun.

John Dehlin [03:56:19] Not all master's students get this much exposure for their master's thesis, right?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:56:23] No, no, not at all. So it's been. It's been fun. Most master's thesis is do die dusty deaths. So. So it's been fun even if you know in a year it's forgotten. It's been fun to at least have some people understand and read this and enjoy it. So I enjoyed it and it's been fun to have other people enjoy it as well.

John Dehlin [03:56:46] Well, Shannon, you're awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks thanks to Steve and Mindy for in touch with you and thanks to all our listeners. Donate to Mormon stories support us mormonstories.org I want to do a project with Shannon so Shannon will be talking about. What's that?

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:57:06] We'll talk.

John Dehlin [03:57:07] All right, we'll talk and then we'll get back with you listeners about what we come up with. But Shannon, you're awesome. Thank you so much. All right, thanks and listeners, Evan, thanks for joining us live. Thanks to Gerardo that made all our technical wizardry possible. Thanks everyone supporting us and we'll be doing much more soon. Coming up on more of a story. So stay care, take care, stay tuned. Speak up when you can because we need, we need people to be vocal. Otherwise the silence and the gaslighting continues. Thanks everybody.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:57:38] Important Bye.

John Dehlin [03:57:39] Thanks Shannon. Take care.

Shannon Caldwell Montez [03:57:41] Yep.

Speaker C [03:58:01] Come, come ye saints no toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive to the San Joa hearts will swell. Oh, all is well, all is well. Why should we moan? I think a lot is hard Tis not so all is right why should we think to earn a great reward if we now shun the fight Gird up your lo fresh courage take Our God will never us for sake soon we'll have it's tale to tell. Oh, all is well all is well oh, all is well all is well. Sam. And should we die before our journey is through Happy day. All is well we that are free from toil and sorrow too with the just we shall dwell but if our lives are spared again to see the same the rest obtain. I will make this chorus well. Oh, all is well, all is well all is well all is well all

John Dehlin [04:01:58] is well

Speaker C [04:02:02] oh, is well. All is well all is the way.

John Dehlin [04:02:25] Sa.

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