Introduction and Welcome

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 638

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support. The kindly light amid encircling gloom Lead thou me on the night is dark and I am far from home Lead thou me on

Thomas Murphy [00:00:58] Keep.

John Dehlin [00:01:15] Hello everyone and welcome to Mormon Stories Podcast. My name is John Dehlin. The date Today is Wednesday, June 8, 2016. I look a little bit different. If you're watching through YouTube, I look a little bit different because I've got my hat on and my headset. We're recording this live in my basement in North Logan and we're super excited today to have with us someone who I've wanted to interview for at least 14 years. I guess that's not totally true because I didn't have a podcast 14 years ago and didn't know I'd be interviewing people. But I can say that Thomas Murphy, Dr. Thomas Murphy, was someone who was a really important part of my early journey, sort of to begin questioning and processing LDS truth claims. So let me just give you a bit of an introduction to get you really excited about this interview. I'm guessing it's going to be two, two hours, three hours. We've got a lot to cover. Dr. Murphy has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Washington and he is a professor. He's the chair of the Department of Anthropology at Edmonds Community Colle in Lynwood, Washington, where we're going to talk about all this in depth. But where I learned about Thomas Murphy was along with Simon Southerton in the early 2000s. I believe that Mike Thomas was probably, along with Simon, the first to publish about DNA and the Book of Mormon and to begin questioning the possibility that that what we consider to be Native Americans are in fact descendants of, you know, Hebrews or Israelites that traveled to America in 1600 BC. So he published what I think was the first peer reviewed journal article about DNA in the Book of Mormon. And it landed him on the hot seat such that he was actually called to a disciplinary court, I believe in 2002. But what was strange about that was that because the press was notified and I believe they even showed up at the parking lot of the church headquarters of the Stake Center. The disciplinary council was called off. And to this day, I don't believe he has faced church discipline, even though he no longer believes and has held to his claim that the Book of Mormon isn't historical and all that stuff. But what I've learned is that there's a lot more to his story, and even back then, there was a lot more that he was trying to do than, than validate or invalidate LDS Church truth claims. His specialty is in, let's just say, I'll say, Native American anthropology. And he's gonna have a chance to correct everything that I say or missay in this introduction. But he has a real focus on what he calls decolonization. And basically we're going to get into what that means. But it's all about how, you know, Western Europeans came to the United States and colonized the Native Americans in ways that were horrific and abusive and how that legacy of colonization lives to this day and how if we're ever going to find healing and peace and a constructive way to move forward, not just in America, but in the LDS Church and even in Mormon studies, we need to go through the process of decolonization ourselves. He has a lot to say about, about all of these topics about racism within the church. He's done a lot of great work on racism and ways that we can move forward in a more healthy manner. And so I'm just very delighted to have Dr. Thomas Murphy here with us today on Mormon Stories. I'm super excited. So I'm going to actually turn the camera around now and I'm going to point it back at Thomas Murphy. Dr. Thomas Murphy. How are you doing, brother?

Thomas Murphy [00:05:27] I'm doing very well, thank you.

John Dehlin [00:05:29] All right, well, it's a pleasure to have you with us today on Mormon Stories. Thanks for joining us.

Thomas Murphy [00:05:36] It's an honor. You know, it's kind of neat to be back in Logan. I was here 30 years ago as a student at Utah State.

John Dehlin [00:05:44] Oh, wow, so you're an Aggie.

Thomas Murphy [00:05:47] I went for two quarters and then I dropped out of college. But, you know, and then I went back later.

John Dehlin [00:05:51] And where'd you do your undergrad?

Thomas Murphy [00:05:53] I. After Utah State, I eventually returned to school at the University of Iowa.

John Dehlin [00:05:58] Okay, so I was your undergrad. Washington was grad school.

Thomas Murphy [00:06:01] Correct.

John Dehlin [00:06:01] Okay. All right, well, we have a. I. I'm gonna try and I'm gonna try and make what very well could be a six hour John de Lynn Mormon Stories interview into like, let's just say a Two to two and a half hour interview. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna be a little bit more concise. Is that all right?

Thomas Murphy [00:06:17] That's all right with me.

Thomas Murphy's Mormon Upbringing in Idaho

John Dehlin [00:06:18] Okay, so tell us just a bit about your Mormon upbringing prior to kind of grad school.

Thomas Murphy [00:06:25] Okay. Well, I was actually born in Los Angeles, California, and my family was from Idaho, from Southern Idaho. And my father had moved, taken a job in Southern California to work for this new company called IBM. And his goal was to make enough money to return to Idaho and buy a farm. And he achieved that within a couple of years of my birth. And we returned to Idaho, which is where my memories start. So I grew up in Southern Idaho. The early years spent on a farm, and that was near Burleigh and Paul area. And I don't have a lot of early memories of church. And I think sometimes we were maybe a little bit semi active at the time. I remember more water skiing on Sundays and stuff like that. But after my parents got divorced and I was seven years old, we moved first into to Paul and Rupert and eventually ended up in Burley. And that's where my memories of the church really start. And my mother dived in quite, quite strongly. And eventually my stepfather was particularly. He was a convert and particularly devout from John Birch Society, sort of framework, Cleon Skouson, that sort of approach to Mormonism. And he's the one who baptized me when I was 8 in Burley. And my, you know, early on I was. While we lived in Burleigh, I was actually probably a little bit more of a rebellious kid. And I remember running around Burleigh and doing things like stealing our dog out of the dog pound and, you know, things that later in life when I got really devout, I would never have done. But I think the kids I was running around with and I just hadn't, you know, I hadn't processed and thought a lot about church issues at the time. But we moved to Pocatello when I was around 10, and that's where I became really uber Mormon. And, you know, by the time I was entering priesthood, I was deacons, quorum president, teacher's quorum president, even priest first assistant, I think that's what they called it. But about the time I was in the priests, you know, kind of my. It was really my sophomore and junior year of high school. I joined the high school debate team. And in debate you had to argue both sides of an issue for and against things. And this black and white world that I'd grown up in, all of a sudden Got really gray. And that's when I started questioning things when I was about 16, 17, and we moved to. To St. Anthony, Idaho, very close to my 17th birthday. And so right before I started my senior year of high school. And at that time, I was. Well, I didn't want. As a rebellious teenager, I didn't want to be that involved with the church. Actually, I should say there was a really turning point for me that I should mention that happened in Pocatello. My seminary teacher assaulted a student in class.

John Dehlin [00:10:24] Like, beat him up, kicked him. Whoa.

Thomas Murphy [00:10:27] And that really felt to me like that was inappropriate behavior from a seminary teacher.

John Dehlin [00:10:35] Yeah.

Thomas Murphy [00:10:37] And, you know, I. I came home and talked to my mom about it, and she was actually good friends with the seminary teacher who was in our ward and defended him. And I said, well, I'm not going to go to seminary anymore until he's gone. And so I stopped going to seminary and I stopped going to church, too. And when we moved to St Anthony, under pressure from my mother, I agreed that I would start going back to church, but I wouldn't do seminary. And so in St. Anthony, I did attend church, at least for about the first half of my senior year. But pretty soon I just. I was working on Sundays by that time and working at McDonald's in Rexburg. And so that became my excuse for not going to church. But in Rexburg, I met this Ricks College student that was what's now byu, Idaho, and her name was Carrie Sumner. And we got started dating and actually ended up in a situation with the church that pushed us even further away and that it was a. We both were working at McDonald's in Rexburg, and anybody that's lived in that area knows that every now and then you get these big snowstorms. And we had this very large snowstorm, and there were several feet of snow drifts on the roads for me to get home. I lived in the Egypt area by St. Anthony, and it was a few miles away from Rexburg to get home, and all the roads were closed. And we got off work around midnight, and my brother and I and Carrie and we. I often took Carrie home to her apartment. And so the roads were clear enough in town we could get her home. But my brother Greg and I had nowhere to go. And she's like, well, you could stay at our apartment, which was, of course, Brooks College approved housing. And so we spent the night in that apartment. You know that at that point in our relationship, we didn't, you know, we weren't sexually involved or anything like that, and yet I did speak, spend the night in her apartment. And that would lead to accusations by her roommates that led to an honours honor code investigation. And that's, of course, in the news today. So these honor code things, and there's a good example of where honor code enforcement becomes a real problem. And so Kerry was called in by her bishop and interviewed about these accusations that her roommates had placed. And the only true accusation was that I had spent the night in the apartment and so had my brother Greg. The rest of the accusations got pretty wild about all this drinking and drugs and sex and, you know, just stuff that just wasn't true that her roommates had imagined that we were doing. And because the bishop had heard these stories from the roommate, he told Carrie that the spirit had told him that they were true and that he had this spiritual confirmation that she was lying, but she was telling the truth for her and for me, because it impacted me as well. That really added to the doubts that we already, at least I already was having about the church. And for her, I think it was a. It was a big impetus for more doubt about the church because, you know, she was an active attending Mormon at the time, and I was a little bit rebellious. But for her, that was a key turning point because she knew the bishop didn't have an inspiration. Whatever he thought was inspiration wasn't God speaking, or at least God didn't know what was going on. And so she would end up initially being suspended. And her dad, who worked for the church, the CES church education system, was very upset about the mistreatment that she had had at Rick's and actually came to Rick's and confronted other people involved and got her suspension suspended. I mean, her suspension withheld, I think, is the technical term they used. But she'd already missed three weeks of class by that point and ended up being a scar on her academic career and would make it difficult for her to later get back in college. But, you know, we were just dating at the time. But I think that going through that experience really brought us together as a couple because we felt the injustice of it. And, you know, if somebody were were

John Dehlin [00:15:56] to try and dismiss that as, oh, my gosh, well, you were just offended and that's why you left, how would you respond? Was it more than just being offended for you?

Thomas Murphy [00:16:07] It was more that, yeah, in the sense that certainly we were offended, but that wasn't the primary issue. The primary issue was that question of credibility. If the bishop, the person that we thought the way we had been raised was that he had some sort of direct line to God, this line of inspiration that it was clear that that was not what it was claimed to be. So it was a truth claim that we wrestled with. But even then we didn't completely walk away from the church at that time. That wouldn't come for several years later. But what we did do at that time was I didn't want to serve a mission. And so our rebellious act is we got married.

John Dehlin [00:16:58] So you didn't serve a mission?

Thomas Murphy [00:16:59] Yeah, so I got married. I was right out of high school and I had had a scholarship to come to Utah State. And so we got married right before I moved to Logan and began my freshman year of college. And that was a way to. You don't think of marriage normally as a rebellious act, but for us it was. And you know, it was a way to say, well, you can't tell me that I need to go on a mission now. And you know, at Utah State I didn't enroll in the institute or anything like that, but we did occasionally attend in our ward, but we didn't feel particularly welcome. But we'd go on occasion and you know, again we had doubts, but we were still very Mormon and saw ourselves as Mormon. And we spent almost a year here before Kerry. In that first year of our marriage, Carrie got pregnant and we decided that we would move to Iowa, where she was from, because before she got pregnant, I had signed up for the Army Reserve and I'd been scheduled for basic training and AIT or the advanced individual training during the summer between what would have been my freshman and sophomore year. But that would have left Kerry home alone to take care of, you know, a brand new baby. And so we decided we would move back to Iowa where she could stay at her parents home and have some support. Actually, initially we tried to get out. I tried to get out of the basic training and I just couldn't. I'd already signed the contract and the army was not negotiable. And so we ended up in Davenport, Iowa, where she was from. And she moved back staying with her parents and I was there temporarily and then I went to training and then after my training we lived with our parents for a little while.

Undergraduate Studies and Early Influences

John Dehlin [00:19:07] So what did you study in your undergrad at Iowa?

Thomas Murphy [00:19:09] Well, I didn't go back to school immediately. We started businesses and we got involved in marketing. Kerry was a great artist and we did some marketing and graphic design, some merchandising work and worked in the restaurant business and did some consulting. But our business career didn't go a long ways. And we ended up getting involved with a con artist, basically, is the best way to describe it, and unknowingly assisted him in conning a lot of people.

John Dehlin [00:19:50] What was the con?

Thomas Murphy [00:19:52] It was businesses buying and selling of real estate and businesses buying a lot of things on credit and then selling them without paying off the credit.

John Dehlin [00:20:05] And then going bankrupt.

Thomas Murphy [00:20:06] Yeah, and going bankrupt.

John Dehlin [00:20:07] Pocketing the difference.

Thomas Murphy [00:20:10] Yeah. And, you know, and he used me for a lot of the handling of the cash, which, you know, I was a naive young person who, you know, still believed the world was a great and friendly place. But having.

John Dehlin [00:20:30] How did it feel to be used as part of a con?

Thomas Murphy [00:20:34] Rather disconcerting. Yeah. I mean, that really. And I think that would later contribute to my doubts about the church is because I saw myself very easily taken in. And with, you know, a little bit of patting on the back and encouragement, I fell right into what should have been, in retrospect, an obvious facade. And I can look back and see. I even remember other people that were working for us figuring it out before I did and telling me, and I wouldn't believe them. And I ended up in their positions. I became vice president of these companies, and that was kind of cool. I was like, what, 18, 19 years old, and I was vice president of several companies. And so it felt really cool. Until he ends up. He disappears, and I'm left to file bankruptcy for the companies. And that's when it really dawned on me, actually, when there were investigators that were hired by, I think it was Bank One, they started investigating me because I'd handled all the cash. And we were, at that time, we were active in the church, and I actually had gone to an attorney that was in our stake and, you know, said, look, I'm being investigated. And, you know, I don't know what's going on. You know, I talked it all through him, and he's the one who explained to me that nearly everything that he did was legal. The only thing he could say that was illegal was using a fake name. And we're fairly certain he was using a fake name. But other than that, it was all legal. And so all this stuff that I had done that I was starting to worry about was all just business. And that kind of would raise questions for me, too, in terms of really could. Is it okay just to rob people and call that business?

John Dehlin [00:22:41] Could something be legal, but still unethical?

Thomas Murphy [00:22:44] Right.

John Dehlin [00:22:44] Yeah.

Thomas Murphy [00:22:45] Right. And so that was a relief, though, that I didn't have anything to worry about as far as Potential prosecution and stuff. But that would have a big impact on the way I thought about the world. And so after that, business failed and we were trying to figure out, all right, what do we do now? That's when I decided I was going to go back to college. And so I applied for admission to the University of Iowa and the University of Illinois and decided on Iowa and the Hawkeyes.

John Dehlin [00:23:20] Yeah, Hawkeyes.

Thomas Murphy [00:23:21] Yeah. And so at the University of Iowa, I was initially. Was I initially, I think, a botany and political science major. At Utah State, I'd been in economics and political science. I wanted to be a lawyer at that point. I started to get this science interest. I think at that time, that's why I kind of combined those two. That didn't last particularly long. I would eventually, after jumping around with a few different majors, I was pre med for a while. I was pre med and pre law actually. And those aren't exactly majors. You still have to choose a major in addition. And I had chosen, well, I should say, while I was pre med and pre law, my National Guard unit got activated for the Persian Gulf War. So this was in 1990. Yeah, 1990. And so in the middle of my semester, I get activated and I've got to withdraw from my classes. And so I go, well, not necessarily withdraw, but at least go talk to my professors, because we were more than two thirds of the way through the quarter. So I went and talked to all my professors, and they were very generous in just giving me the Most of them just gave me the grade at the point that I was at. And a few had me do a couple of additional assignments that I could quickly get done. And my anthropology professor, his name was Mack Marshall, is the only professor who asked me what I thought about being deployed for the war. And I remember telling him that I don't really want to give my life for the price of a oil. And that's what I felt like I was being asked to do. And he gave me some sage advice. He said, you know, anthropologists often find themselves in situations where they don't necessarily agree with what's happening around them, but you can be a participant observer using a little bit of cultural relativism, and you can. You have an incredible opportunity to study human behavior in war. And so following his advice, I approached it as a research project. And so the study, A Soldier's Perspective on the Persian Gulf War, became my honors thesis in anthropology at the University of Iowa. So by the time that I was returning to school, I had completely changed my mindset about where I wanted to go with my career. I was pre med and pre law at that time because I was going to get rich as a lawyer, and if not as a lawyer, I was going to get rich as a doctor. And I knew I was capable of both. But I started asking myself, well, the greed that I was seeing in the war, do I want that to be my signature in life? And when I had to put my life on the line, what am I willing to die for? And not for what I was being asked? Although I did go. But that's not what I. If I could choose what I would die for, that was not the choice I would make. And so I came back committed to trying to understand people and trying to build relationships between people and to undo the biases of class and race and gender and the major issues of the day and to use anthropology as a means to do that. And so I became an anthropology major. And along the way, I started taking a few religion classes. And I remember feeling. When we moved to Iowa City from Davenport, Carrie and I had decided to stop going to church. I should say that we had. When we were in Davenport at the time we were running those businesses. We. We'd gone through the temple and we'd gotten very active, but the temple had been a rather shocking experience for me and so. And for Carrie. And so that would play a role in us wanting to stop going to church when we moved to Iowa City, away from where her parents were and her parents ward. But I guess I should talk about what happened in the temple. Our daughter Jessica was still nursing at the time. And so we had. We had been. We did the endowment ceremony, and then we were going to do our sealing. And so Jessica had been in the nursery while we were in the endowment ceremony. And as we go.

Temple Marriage and Faith Transitions

John Dehlin [00:28:44] Just for yourselves or for.

Thomas Murphy [00:28:45] For ourselves?

John Dehlin [00:28:46] The dead for ourselves. So you weren't initially married in the temple?

Thomas Murphy [00:28:49] No.

John Dehlin [00:28:49] Okay, got it. Yeah.

Thomas Murphy [00:28:51] And so this was a decision later to get married in the temple. And so we. When we came into the sealing room, they brought Jessica from the nursery, and she was still nursing. And so the first thing she wanted to do when she saw her mother was. Was eat. And they had no provision for that. And so she started crying, which is a normal reaction for a baby. And they asked Carrie to calm her down. And Carrie took her out in the hall and tried to calm her down. In retrospect, she wishes she had nursed her at that time, but she didn't. She was trying to just calm her down a little bit and bring her Back in. So she'd get her. Gets her calmed down, brings her back into the room. And immediately when she comes into the room and sees again all these people in white, and it's really bizarre and familiar, and she starts crying again. The officiator told me that I needed to hold her down on the altar. And. My stepfather had been very abusive when I was a kid. And when Carrie and I had had a child, we both experienced abuse at home. And we had decided we were never going to physically punish our child, that we were never going to use physical punishment. And that was a commitment we'd made to each other. And so here we are in the temple. And I wasn't being asked to strike my child, but I was being asked to hold her down against her will. And I did it. And after the ceremony, the officiator said to me, you know, we don't normally expect people to do things like that in the church, but this is so important. And. I felt like I had violated her in that act of holding her down and that I'd violated myself in my commitment to me. I'd violated my commitment to my wife that we wouldn't do that. And. That really broke the straw of my belief. I should add that there were the other things that there had been things that I'd read when I was in high school from the God Maker's book about some of the temple ceremonies. And I thought they were all made up.

John Dehlin [00:31:52] The God Maker accusations were.

Thomas Murphy [00:31:54] Yeah, were all made up. Yeah. And I also going through the endowment, discovered that those blood oath covenants and stuff were not exactly fake. This was before they were taken out of the temple ceremony. So that add to that on the intellectual level, that deeply emotional experience of doing something that I believed was wrong and being asked to do that by the church and not only being asked, but doing it. And I couldn't. I just could not. If I was going to be in a situation where I would be abusing other people because I was being asked to and I would do that. I couldn't live with that. And I had to. It felt like to me that the best way to deal with that situation was to walk away from the church, because then I wouldn't be asked to do the things that I thought were wrong. And so when we moved to Iris,

John Dehlin [00:33:04] this is just the storyteller, me wanting to connect dots a little bit. Was there any connection in your mind between having helped a fraudster defraud people and being complicit in the fraud? Do you think there was either Subconscious or consciously, any connection between that and then being a participant in sort of what you felt was a little bit abusive of your child? Did you even draw that connection?

Graduate Work and Fieldwork in Mesoamerica

Thomas Murphy [00:33:31] Yes, I did. And particularly during the war, because during the war, I had a lot of time to think about that stuff.

John Dehlin [00:33:37] Did the temple stuff happen before the war?

Thomas Murphy [00:33:39] Before the war.

John Dehlin [00:33:40] Okay, got it. Got it.

Thomas Murphy [00:33:41] Yeah. And during the war, I had a lot of time to think about that, and I had a lot of time to read. And actually, the book I was reading was the one I saw on your bookshelf, Khayyam Potok.

John Dehlin [00:33:53] Which one?

Thomas Murphy [00:33:54] Khayyam Potok's the Chosen, the Promise. My name is Asher Lev. My name is Asher Lev.

John Dehlin [00:33:59] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:34:00] And I read that during the war, and that had a really profound impact on me. And so I had a lot of conversations with friends, and for a while, we were positioned near a unit from Utah, and so I had a lot of conversations with Mormons. And so I was processing a lot of this stuff during the war. And, you know, that's where I really. You know, when you're asked to place everything on the line, that's when you really start to look inwardly and say, what is it that I really believe? And a lot of that I processed in letters back and forth with Kerry, and. I didn't believe in this whole image of a Mormon God, this anthropomorphic person. And I should say that another book that I'd read that was quite profound was Elie Wiesel's Night.

John Dehlin [00:35:17] Wait, what did you. What did you take from My Name is Asher Lev. And then tell us what you took from Knight.

Thomas Murphy [00:35:23] From My Name is Asher Lev was. The challenge that the protagonist. And now it's been so many. Well, Asher Lev was his name, I guess, but I don't remember all the other characters.

John Dehlin [00:35:41] He's an artist.

Thomas Murphy [00:35:42] Yeah, I remember that. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:35:44] Jewish Orthodox.

Thomas Murphy [00:35:47] I resonated with the Orthodox Jewish experience as being similar to my Mormon upbringing and the kind of gradual, in his case, of starting to question the cultural norms that were associated with that, and then having the courage to defy those norms that I admired that, and I resonated with that. And so that struck me very deeply. And then with Elie Wiesel's Night, and these had both been books that had been assigned in a class I was in in the religion department before the war. I hadn't finished all of them before I got deployed, but I did continue to read them. And with Knight, that it's Elie Wiesel's account of being in the concentration camps, in the Holocaust. Yeah. In World War II. And being abandoned by God. And I felt the same thing. I felt abandoned by God. I felt that God wasn't there when I needed him.

John Dehlin [00:37:00] When did you need him? In the story you've told us so far?

Thomas Murphy [00:37:04] I needed him in the temple, that's for sure. And what I saw was an abusive father. I didn't see Jesus Christ. That's not what I experienced in the temple. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:37:23] Is that what you mean?

Thomas Murphy [00:37:23] Yeah. I experienced an abusive father. That's what I experienced.

John Dehlin [00:37:28] Meaning the officiator who told you to be abusive.

Thomas Murphy [00:37:31] Yeah. And to me, that's not what Jesus represents. That's not what I read in the New Testament. That's not what I read in Third Nephi.

John Dehlin [00:37:42] But at the time, would it have occurred to you that people make mistakes and nobody's perfect, or was there something.

Thomas Murphy [00:37:52] Yes, it did. But the thing is, at the places where the Spirit is supposed to be most present in a bishop's interview, in the temple, that's where the breakdown was happening. Those were the places that were supposed to be the exception. They were the places that were supposed

John Dehlin [00:38:09] to be most likely that God would be there, right?

Thomas Murphy [00:38:12] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:38:13] And governing.

Thomas Murphy [00:38:13] Right. Yeah. And he wasn't. Or at least what was there wasn't what

John Dehlin [00:38:22] you thought.

Thomas Murphy [00:38:23] Yeah, I thought God ought to be. And even, you know what? I. Yeah. It wasn't what I expected the church to be and what I believed it ought to be. And so I was let down. But during the war, I made the decision that I was no longer going to be pre law, pre med. And I decided I was going to major in athletic anthropology and I was going to work towards peace. And when I got back, I took a few more religion classes. And pretty soon I realized if I just took a couple more classes, I would have a religion major, too. And so when I graduated from the University of Iowa, I had a degree in anthropology and religion. And as part of that, I was a little bit of an overachiever. And I did. I did the paper on the war was my honors thesis in anthropology. I did an honors thesis in religion on this group, a breakaway group from the Native American church, that combined peyoteism, the use of peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus, with the word of wisdom and Mormon beliefs. And I should say that in my anthropology classes, particularly a class on American Indians, and then doing some archaeological work on some native sites, sparked an interest in the stories that my grandmother had always told us as a kid of an Indian ancestor An Indian princess is the term she would use, or a Lamanite ancestor, often the term that was used. And so as I took these classes, I was like, well, I want to know more about this ancestor. And so when I was back home, I would ask my grandma all sorts of questions about it. And she told me, well, she thought she was Iroquois and, you know, a few details that she thought and that this story had been passed on by her, I guess it would have been her grandfather. And he talked about being about his grandmother who was native. And this was back before they moved to Idaho. They lived in Kansas in the late 19th century. And this Indian grandmother would not be allowed in the house. And he would end up playing with her outside in the yard. And it really troubled me to think that this native ancestor of mine would be treated that way by her own children and in laws. And so that became a question that was stewing. And so I started exploring more my own the native side of my ancestry as well as the Mormon side of my ancestry. And that began in college. And one way that I did that was I started looking at where Native American ancestors, Mormon ideas came together. And I by chance ran across an article about these peyotists who'd gotten arrested in Texas, and they ran a church in Arizona that combined Mormonism with peyoteism.

Mormonism Among Mayan and Mexican Members

John Dehlin [00:42:10] Around what year?

Thomas Murphy [00:42:12] The year that they were arrested or the year, I don't remember exactly the year they were arrested generally. I was doing this research in about 92.

John Dehlin [00:42:21] No, when was this nativist church doing its thing?

Thomas Murphy [00:42:24] Oh, they are still around.

John Dehlin [00:42:27] When was this getting arrested and when was it forming?

Thomas Murphy [00:42:30] In the 80s.

John Dehlin [00:42:31] Okay, okay, 1980s.

Thomas Murphy [00:42:33] Yeah, okay. And. And well, they had. There's a quite a bit longer history of the connection between peyotism and Mormonism. I would discover, you know, Joseph Smith's grandson, who would eventually become the president of the rlds, had did a dissertation in sociology on peyoteism and had used it quite a bit as part of understanding his prophetic callings. So there's this whole fascinating combination between Mormonism and peyoteism. And so that became my honors thesis in anthropology, I mean, excuse me, in religion. And two honors thesis weren't enough for me, so I did a third one. It wasn't an honors thesis per se, but I applied for a research grant, an undergraduate research grant to go to Guatemala. And the grant was for health related research. And because I'd gotten involved with this intriguing interpretations of the word of wisdom in Arizona, I proposed to look at how is The Word of Wisdom. How does the Word of Wisdom change Mayan practices when Mayan people convert to Mormonism? That was my research question. And so that research was funded and I went to Antigua, Guatemala, and this would have been the summer of 1993 or 92 maybe. Yeah, 92, yeah. And. I brought my daughter along and my wife and my mother in law for part of the time and did language study. I think I went there first and they came later, but did language study and then got. Even though by this time I was a non believer, I did attend church for research purposes. And so I was attending this ward that lacked Melchizedek priesthood holders. And very quickly they were like grabbing onto me and like, you know, we need you to do this, we need you to help pass the sacrament and all this. And I didn't own a white shirt purposefully. And so I remember the bishop lending me a white shirt so I could bless the sacrament. So I was involved pretty heavily in the ward there and conducted this research. And I very purposely in that research did something that is not often done in Mormon studies. And I made sure that I included inactive people because remember, I was inactive at home and I really felt that. But if you really want to understand Mormonism, you need to go beyond the people that go to church. And you know, this peyote group in Arizona were not traditional Mormons. So I was always interested in that non traditional Mormon experience. So in my interviews, I interviewed nearly as many inactive members as I did active members. And so I had a pretty great data set in that regard. I ended up flipping the research question at the recommendation of my advisor. Nora England was her name's great Mayanist. And she pointed out as we were going through the data in my first practice presentation of it, that the more interesting question was not how did Mormonism change Mayans, but how did Mayans change Mormonism? And what the data showed is that the interpretations of the Word of Wisdom that they did that extended beyond the usual things like coffee and tea followed the traditional Mayan concepts of hot and cold medicine. And so the extra things like chili peppers and chocolate, and those were things that they added to the Word of Wisdom, if you will, in their interpretations. Those followed a logic, a Mayan logic rather than a North American Anglo logic. And so that ended up being the flipped research question. And I would eventually in graduate school, publish that research in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. And I actually published all of those. Well, no, I guess I didn't. Well, yes I did. I published all of Those theses, the one on the war would be published. I won an award from the Elie Wiesel foundation for the essay I wrote about the war and that would be published by Elie Wiesel in an anthology of award winners. And I published the peyote. The work on peyote was published by the Peyote Way Church of God themselves and in their. What they called the sacred Record. And the work in Guatemala actually produced a couple of different articles. The one for the Journal of Scientific Study of Religion that was on the medicine, but I also published another one that was on identity issues. And that wasn't an original research question, but it became really a fascinating question for me. And everywhere I'd go in Guatemala that I introduced myself to Mormons as an anthropologist. The question was, have you read the Popol Vuh? And before that time I'd never heard of the Popol Vuh and the language school I was attending, they had a viewing of the, of an animated version of Popol Vuh by Patricia Amlin. And so I went and watched that and I'm like, what does this have to do with Mormonism? It is pretty bizarre. And so I was, I added to my research or to my interview questions, questions about the Popol Vuh, because that was the question everybody was asking me about. And what I found, found that was quite astounding, is that these Mayan and Ladino Ladino are people that they're Mayan in heritage, but they've adopted culturally the dominant mainstream Spanish culture and identify perhaps more with that than their Mayan heritage. But in Mayan and Ladino, members of the church, their applying the Popol Vuh alongside the Book of Mormon and seeing it as in some cases equivalent to the Book of Mormon. And that was like, wow, this is kind of interesting. And the other thing that came up in the, in priesthood meetings was one particularly outspoken person who'd lived in the United States for a while, call him probably a Ladino because of his culture. That's the culture. He was more practicing. But he would emphasize that Lamanites and he self identified as a Lamanite were born into the Covenant of Abraham or Anglos. And he saw me simply, simply as an Anglo were adopted into the covenant and that Lamanites were destined to be the leaders of the church in the last days and that Anglos would be eventually, that they would give up the leadership of the church and that that was prophesied in the Book of Mormon. And they could show me the passages

John Dehlin [00:50:32] and wow, they were paying Attention when they were reading.

Thomas Murphy [00:50:35] Yeah. And so that was like, whoa, this is pretty interesting stuff. And I'd been reading while I was in Guatemala, Lamond Tulis book, Mormons in Mexico and had tullis or tulis. I'm not sure how you pronounce it.

John Dehlin [00:50:50] Okay. He was my professor. I thought it was tullis, tullus. I'm just making sure it's the same guy.

Thomas Murphy [00:50:55] Yeah, yeah. The same guy at byu. Yeah, yeah. And it was a great book. And he talked about this schism in Mexico in the 1930s called the Third Convention. And I was like, wow, here are parallels to this in the 1990s in Guatemala. And so I wrote an article about that for Dialogue.

The Third Convention and Indigenous Mormon History

John Dehlin [00:51:17] What was the Third Convention?

Thomas Murphy [00:51:18] The Third Convention was a group of Mexican Mormons who about a third of the Mexican Mormons broke away from the LDS Church in the 1930s in response

John Dehlin [00:51:35] to

Thomas Murphy [00:51:37] the church's kind of avoidance, if you will, of the, at least the spirit of the law, which the anti clerical legislation that had been passed in Mexico after the revolution. I had said that clergy needed to come from within Mexico. They couldn't be brought from the outside. And the church had gotten around that rule by bringing Anglos from the colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora down as mission president in the Mexico City area. And the, the Mexican members felt like that was, if not a violation of the letter of the law, certainly of the spirit of the law. And so they had petitioned in their first and second convention to the First Presidency to reconsider the appointment of the mission president. And when that wouldn't be reconsidered, they withdrew from the church and started their own wards and wow, Mormon. Yeah, parallel ran their own parallel church. And they ran their own parallel church for a decade and that would become a research topic of mine later.

John Dehlin [00:52:57] Did they end up reintegrating or just dying out?

Thomas Murphy [00:53:03] Well, I'll tell you how I got to answer that question. I end up applying for graduate school, go to the University of Washington. And while in graduate school at the University of Washington, my purpose was to. Or my proposal, my research proposal for graduate school was to investigate Mormon and native relations. I really wanted to know why my grand. Why my native ancestors had joined the church, but I didn't know how to, how to do that research. I couldn't figure out a methodology to do that research. So like a typical anthropologist, although now I sometimes think it was a rather naive approach, but it's not entirely wrong. It turned out to be informative. But the idea was, well, if I studied contemporary Native American Mormons I could better understand why somebody would convert to a church that taught that dark skin was a curse from God. And so I thought, well, if I look at contemporary Native American Mormons, I'd have better understand my own ancestors. And that I think, as a research, because there's some problems with it from an intellectual level. But that was a very common way for anthropologists to approach these questions. And so I started focusing on contemporary Native American Mormons. And so while I was at the University of Washington, I was offered a research assistant position in Southern Mexico in the state of Oaxaca. And it was for a Zapotec ethnobiology research project. And while I was there, I was curious about what had happened with the Third Convention, because what Tolus. Is that right? Tolus had said in his book was that after about 10 years, the in a negotiate kind of a new mission president that was a little more tolerant and with mediation by the president of the church, brought most of the schismatic group, the Third Convention, back into the fold. But there were a couple of groups that, or some that had stayed out. And according to Tullis, what they had kind of fizzled out. But a big character in this was a man by the name of Margarito Bautista. And so what I did when I had a break on my research project in Oaxaca is I jumped on a train and I went to Osumba, Mexico, and I got a hotel for stay for a few days and I started looking for relatives of Margarita Bautista. And so I first asked the hotel owner and if he'd heard of Margarita Bautista, if he knew of it. And he's like, no, no, there are Bautistas, a lot of Bautistas. And I said, well, he was Mormon. He said, oh yeah, we got some of those. We got some Mormons over here. And he said, they're over in this colonia nearby. He actually gave me the wrong name of the colony, but it got me close. And so I just walked down the street, it was a couple mile walk and ended up in this colonia. And I found the first store and started asking them if they'd heard of Margherita Bautista. And again, there's like, no, there are some Bautistas kind of that sort of thing. And I said, well, how about Mormons? And they said, oh yeah, the Mormons, they live over there. And so I followed their directions and I walked into this really. It was like. I guess the thing that struck me the most is how clean the community was. There were kids sweeping the streets. It was immaculate. And it was also economically there was definitely an economic. There were more cars, There were nicer houses. There was an economic difference between this community and the community surrounding it. And those kind of things struck me right away. It's like, oh, wow, this is different. And so I saw the kids sweeping the street, so I asked them if they knew of any relatives of Margarita Batista. And. And they said, wait a minute. And they went and got a woman, and she came over, and I asked her the same question, and she says, hang on. The bishop's not in town, but let me go see if his counselor can talk to you. And so she took me to the home of the. The first counselor in the bishopric, and I introduced myself to him. And initially, I think there was a little bit of suspicion, but I had a copy of Margarito Bautista's book with me, and I knew a little bit about their history, and I knew enough that they saw me as a credible researcher. And I. You know, from what I understand, I'm the only outside researcher that ever got let into this community.

John Dehlin [00:58:32] This is reminding me of Colorado City and the s. Church for some reason.

Thomas Murphy [00:58:35] Yeah, well, they're not associated with.

John Dehlin [00:58:37] No, no, no.

Thomas Murphy [00:58:38] I'm just saying they are associated with the Allred group.

John Dehlin [00:58:42] So they were polygamists.

Thomas Murphy [00:58:43] Yeah, they were polygamists. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:58:45] And the united order.

Thomas Murphy [00:58:46] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:58:46] And I read that in your article.

Thomas Murphy [00:58:48] I didn't know.

John Dehlin [00:58:48] Okay. Yeah.

Thomas Murphy [00:58:49] They were polygamous in the united order of a plural marriage, as they called it, you know.

John Dehlin [00:58:52] But were they ethnically Mexican?

Thomas Murphy [00:58:55] Entirely.

John Dehlin [00:58:55] Okay. Wow. Yeah.

Thomas Murphy [00:58:57] And so this.

John Dehlin [00:58:59] Have you talked to Lindsey park about this yet?

Thomas Murphy [00:59:02] No, I haven't talked to her about this story.

John Dehlin [00:59:03] Okay. You got to get on your polygamy and tell her the story.

Thomas Murphy [00:59:06] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:59:07] And we.

Thomas Murphy [00:59:09] I established my credibility by knowing a little bit about their history and having Margarita's book there. And so they agreed to some interviews. And I interviewed the first counselor, and I think the other one was the bishop. Did you record it?

Imagining Lamanites and Native American Identity

John Dehlin [00:59:27] Audio?

Thomas Murphy [00:59:27] Yeah, they recorded.

John Dehlin [00:59:28] You still got it?

Thomas Murphy [00:59:30] Yes, yes, I do. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:59:31] Okay, cool.

Thomas Murphy [00:59:32] Yeah. They're, like, on those old cassette tapes. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:59:34] That's awesome.

Thomas Murphy [00:59:35] And they were some of my first ethnographic interviews. And I had this thing on my tape recorder where I would. It would have a time stuff. It saved tape because I was worried I wouldn't have enough tape. So it cut off the first and last words of every question. It was really great learning experience as an ethnographer. But anyway, I did get the interviews, and I kept notes as well, so it wouldn't make a good transcript or audio to share. But the. It was fascinating to hear their story. And I would later come back in the summer. So that was in 1996.

John Dehlin [01:00:17] And how was Tolus wrong?

Thomas Murphy [01:00:19] Well, he was wrong in that he thought the group had fizzled out. And here they said they had about 700 members in this community, and they had more in other parts of Mexico, and they had quite a few in Arizona and some in Utah. And they had some members that were, like, in graduate school.

John Dehlin [01:00:42] I wonder how they got affiliated with the Allred group.

Thomas Murphy [01:00:49] It was partly through the lebarons, which is a whole other story as well. And Margarita Bautista had been. He'd been in the colonies and he'd lived in Utah, and so he'd had those social connections. And so, anyway, here's this thriving Mexican version of Mormonism that very few people knew about outside of their own group. And so I did get a few interviews. I would later return a couple of times and do some. Some more interviews. And unfortunately, in that case, my. My video camera that I did a lot of video recording with got stolen on my return trip from the airport. So I lost a lot of the footage. But I did. I was able to incorporate that research. And that would become part of my doctoral dissertation, which was on my doctoral dissertation is called Imagining Lamanites, Native Americans and the Book of Mormon. And it really, the goal of it was to say kind of two questions. One question is, how have Mormons imagined Lamanites? Where does this ethnonym Lamanite come from? How is it related to cultural ideas at the time of Joseph Smith? And then how does it get expressed in Mormonism, first by white Mormons, but then most importantly by native Mormons, and not just native Mormons. But what did Native Americans have to say about this? And again, my personal goal is I wanted to understand why my ancestors would have joined a church that seemed to me to be rather explicitly racist. I wanted to understand in their terms, in the terms of contemporary native Mormons, what appealed to them about the church or what didn't. And that's where really. Well, part of it became a significant portion became about Margarita Batista and about another. So he was Nahua, and about another Nahua scholar who would eventually become a Stake president and Temple president, and I think a mission president as well, and some of their differing views about how to tell the story of being Mexican and being Mormon. And I wrote an article that's in the Journal of Mormon History. It's called Other Mormon Histories, and that's by far my favorite article. That's in press right now. I have some ones coming out that I think I'm more excited about. But that article really looked at the question of how in new Mormon history can we do justice to the stories of Nahua Mormons? And there's some fundamental problems with the way we tell history. And even our best historiography today slights and misrepresents and does damage to their stories. And so how do I, as a academic scholar, tell their stories in a way that's both accurate and represents their story? And so the article is about the dilemma. There's no resolution that I have her. It's just the dilemma. How do we do this? And so I title other Mormon histories. These are ones that don't fit in our regular narratives and that whether it's the narratives of the church or the narratives of academia. And that is a chapter in my dissertation and would be a journal article and kind of a big centerpiece of it.

John Dehlin [01:05:15] So we're at about an hour for this first segment. I want to talk about. I want to get to the discussion about DNA and your disciplinary council as a springboard into the more important stuff that I know you really feel passionately about. But to close out this segment, is there anything else you would need to tell us just in terms of the narrative to get us to the point where. Next segment we start talking about that just briefly.

Thomas Murphy [01:05:46] Yeah, I think the timing is about right to, to make that move. Yeah. So.

Beginning the DNA and Book of Mormon Research

John Dehlin [01:05:53] So by the time you're graduating with your PhD, you had been focusing on understanding, trying to understand why a Native American in the 19th century would join the church. And you were doing that by, by studying Native American Mormons in the, the 20th century. And that took it in Mexico and Guatemala in understanding not only the ways that the church, not only the things that the church had done there and the way that the church was experienced there, but the way that the natives had influenced the church back. And then that led also to trying to understand better how the church thought of Native Americans, how Native American Mormons, how Native American Mormons thought about themselves and matters of identity as it related

Thomas Murphy [01:06:46] sort of bidirectionally, is that that's a very good summary. And yeah, and that was the primary interest of what I was doing up until actually through the first draft of my dissertation. And the first draft of my dissertation had a big section on the Popol Vuh and the, the use of the Popol Vuh by Mormons and also an ethnographic or ethno historical component in the United States. Of the uses of Black Elk Speaks by Native Mormons, and particularly the idea of using the Popol Vuh and Black Hawk Speaks as other Bibles, other scriptures. Actually, my committee asked me to pull out the work on the Popol Vu and Black Hawk speak and elaborate instead on the work I was doing with Nahua Mormons and the ethno historical look at the church in general of its treatment of Native Americans, because I covered it from before the founding of the church through the present, and they wanted that to be more the focus. That's a good point to pause.

John Dehlin [01:07:57] So in the next segment, what we're going to go to, just to give our listeners a summary, we're going to go to your work in Mormon Native American DNA, the article you published, how that led to your disciplinary council, what happened there? And then your disappointment in the emphasis on truth claims at the expense of a broader discussion of about colonialization. And that can be a platform into talking about the decolonization of Mormonism, of Mormon studies, and of maybe the Mormon Internet as well. How's that sound?

Thomas Murphy [01:08:39] That sounds good.

John Dehlin [01:08:40] All right, listeners, please join us on Mormon Stories if you have comments or questions. And stay tuned for part two of my interview with Dr. Thomas Murphy. Thanks, Dr. Murphy.

Thomas Murphy [01:08:52] You're welcome.

John Dehlin [01:08:52] See you in a second. Thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org music for this episode was provided by the Lower Lights. Cease to make me whole

Thomas Murphy [01:09:22] when with

John Dehlin [01:09:24] a wounded heart, anger or malice

Thomas Murphy [01:09:33] I

John Dehlin [01:09:34] draw myself apart, Searching my soul.

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 639

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support. The kindly light amid encircling gloom Lead thou me on the night is dark and I am far from home. Hello Mormon Stories listeners, and welcome Back to part two of my interview with Dr. Thomas Murphy. In part one, we have discussed his early years in the church, his some challenges he faced around abuse of authority and lack of inspiration with leadership that led to he and his wife kind of separating from the church. We learned about his interest in anthropology and his military service that led to his budding career in studying Native American anthropology amongst Mormons in Mexico and Guatemala. And we've learned about some of the research papers that he wrote early on on some of these topics. And now we're going to jump to the part that intersects with my personal life, which is his work around publishing a paper on DNA in the Book of Mormon. So we've got a lot to cover. We've got about two hours to go. This will be segment two of three. And we want to just be really careful about getting the narrative in, getting whatever details are important to get the story across, but not taking, you know, leaving time for the rich content that comes after this part of the story. So we'll balance that together. But so talk about, you know, you, you publish your district, you finish your dissertation, you graduate or whatever. Take us to, through your interest in DNA, the Book of Mormon, the publishing of the article, and what happened after.

DNA Evidence and the Book of Mormon Origins

Thomas Murphy [00:02:21] Okay, well, we got a little bit of that out of order there, so I'll kind of that. So yeah, yeah. My first version of the first draft of the dissertation I had, it was a pretty sketchy draft, but I'd given it to my committee and they had redirected me away from looking at the Popol Vu and Black Hawk Speaks as additional forms of American Scripture. And really, you know, that original version would have been called something like blank pages in scriptural tombs and looking at the making of Scripture. And instead they directed me more towards deeper engagement with the Nahua material that I had gathered in my research and the ethno historical material that I had gathered about Mormons and Native Americans in the United States. And so after that first version there, like make these changes. I was on the job market already and I was expecting to finish. And of course dissertation committees have this history of kind of making you stop and restart. That happened while I was on the job market and I got a full time job and I was offered a job at Edmonds Community College, which was nearby. It was really great for my family. My daughter was able to stay in the same high school and, and you know, Carrie could continue her job and we didn't have to have that disruption to family. So it was very convenient. And I actually went on leave while I started my teaching. And it was actually through teaching that I would start to get involved a little more with biological anthropology and eventually with DNA. And so one of my teaching assignments right away in a community college was to teach across the four fields of anthropology. So anthropology has biological, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology and archaeology. And so I was very quickly assigned to teach biological anthropology courses and in fact worked in really developing those both technologically in the online format and technologically in lab content, including eventually working with DNA. And so that would slow down my dissertation. So I had gone back to the drawing board, in essence on my dissertation, and I'd started working at Edmonds. I'd gone on leave. I'd been a year or two of leave and I got a call or an email actually from Bitmetcalf. And I had met Brent through Sunstone symposia and I'd been very involved in the Sunstone dialogue crowd at that point in my career. And so Brent had asked me for references on someone and he said maybe you that would be willing to write an article about the new DNA evidence and its implications for the Book of Mormon. And so in my teaching, biological anthropology, I was familiar on at least a cursory level with that literature and from my own classes that I'd had in graduate school. I would not say I was an expert on the issue at the time, but I did know a little bit about Mormonism, I knew a little bit about the Book of Mormon and, and so. And I thought it'd be a fun project to take on. And so I offered to do it myself. And there was a small amount of money, a research contract associated with that. And so I accepted that contract myself, put my dissertation on hold.

John Dehlin [00:06:26] Who funded it?

Thomas Murphy [00:06:28] The funder is anonymous. Okay, but lds prominent LDS member.

John Dehlin [00:06:34] Okay, was the purpose in is the motive of that prominent LDS funder to actually show that there was A connection between Native Americans and Israelites.

Thomas Murphy [00:06:46] I think the funder wanted the truth.

John Dehlin [00:06:49] Really?

Thomas Murphy [00:06:49] Whatever that was.

John Dehlin [00:06:50] Really?

Thomas Murphy [00:06:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:06:51] Okay. But it wasn't someone who was trying to take the church down necessarily?

Thomas Murphy [00:06:57] No, no, I don't think so.

John Dehlin [00:06:58] Or was it someone.

Thomas Murphy [00:06:59] Well, definitely not, because this person could do that in other ways and. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:07:05] Okay. Yeah. But also, was it someone trying to prove the church is true?

Thomas Murphy [00:07:11] Yeah, I wouldn't say they were trying to prove the church true. I never had a pressure to try to interpret the evidence that way.

John Dehlin [00:07:16] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:07:17] It was to follow the evidence, where it went.

John Dehlin [00:07:19] And you can't talk about who it is?

Thomas Murphy [00:07:20] I can't.

John Dehlin [00:07:21] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:07:22] All right.

John Dehlin [00:07:23] It's been a long time.

Thomas Murphy [00:07:24] It's been a long time. But I'm not going to be the one that reveals the name. That person can do. So that's fair if he chooses to do that. Cool. So I accepted that challenge and I went and read. It was really a literature review is what the article was. I read extensive, pretty much every scientific article that had been written to date on Native American origins and DNA. And the field was still pretty new at the time. So trying to do that now would take a lot longer. And along with that, there were several books as well. And I put it together in an article called Lamanite Genesis Genealogy and Genetics and submitted it to Mormon Scripture Studies, which is an online peer reviewed journal that Brent Metcalf was the editor for.

Collaborating with Other Researchers on DNA

John Dehlin [00:08:23] Now, we've had Simon Southerton on Mormon stories before. Was Simon doing this work parallel to you? Were you guys collaborating at all? Were you unaware of each other's efforts? Did his book come before or after yours?

Thomas Murphy [00:08:36] I did an Internet search as part of my research and I came across a personal story that he had shared about as a Mormon bishop in Australia, coming across the DNA evidence and how it destroyed his testimony.

John Dehlin [00:08:50] Okay, but he had not published Losing a Lost Tribe yet.

Thomas Murphy [00:08:54] No, no, no, no. Not. That was. That was still quite a few years out.

John Dehlin [00:08:57] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:08:59] But I was aware of his work and.

John Dehlin [00:09:02] But you weren't corresponding with him.

Thomas Murphy [00:09:04] We did start corresponding, but, you know,

John Dehlin [00:09:07] you don't remember quite when.

Thomas Murphy [00:09:08] Yeah, I don't quite remember when. It might have been before the article came out.

John Dehlin [00:09:12] But he wasn't a co author on the article.

Thomas Murphy [00:09:13] No, no, we did co author later.

John Dehlin [00:09:16] Okay, but he wasn't a primary contributor to that article.

Thomas Murphy [00:09:19] No, he wasn't. But we did co author an article in Anthropology News.

John Dehlin [00:09:23] Later.

Thomas Murphy [00:09:23] Later, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:09:24] So. But this. So this became the first peer reviewed, kind of published piece on DNA. The Book of Mormon?

Thomas Murphy [00:09:31] Yes, to my knowledge.

John Dehlin [00:09:32] Yeah. And that's. That's when I heard about you. So. Okay, keep going. So you.

Thomas Murphy [00:09:36] Yeah, so it was.

John Dehlin [00:09:38] Yeah, Brent had been. Brent had been excommunicated maybe 10 years by this point. Is that right?

Thomas Murphy [00:09:44] That sounds about right, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:09:45] Because I think he was in 1994, excommunicated. So you're working with an excommunicant, he's still causing trouble, and he asks you to write this article. Andy Fund. You know, you get a funder. Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:09:58] Yeah. And so this was early in 2002.

John Dehlin [00:10:05] Yeah.

Thomas Murphy [00:10:06] And maybe we. I might have started in 2001, but by. I had a draft done by the middle of 2000. It was more than the middle of 2002 because it went through a peer review process. And it was to be released online, which online journals are so much faster than other journals. But it was to be released during the Sunstone Symposium of 2002.

John Dehlin [00:10:34] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:10:35] And so I. At the same time, Brent had proposed a session at Sunstone called something like a Galileo event. DNA in the Book of Mormon, something along that line. And he asked, thinking that this would

John Dehlin [00:10:53] be the smoking gun that takes down Mormonism.

Thomas Murphy [00:10:56] Yeah, well, I don't know about smoking guns so much as the idea of a Galileo event that he articulated in that panel was, you know, Copernicus was really the one that came up theoretically with the idea that the Earth didn't revolve around the sun, and it was the evidence that Galileo collected that became the issue. Okay. And so to be a Galileo event is like that. The evidence is now so overwhelming that the Church is going to have to shift its position

John Dehlin [00:11:35] that the Book of Mormon is not historical, basically, or at

Thomas Murphy [00:11:39] least that the Book of Mormon is not a history of all of Native America.

John Dehlin [00:11:44] Okay. All right, so can you summarize for our listeners who may not really know much about science at all, what the main findings of your article were?

Thomas Murphy [00:11:58] Yeah. So the central question is, is there DNA evidence to support the idea that Native Americans came from Israel? And the short answer is no. And the answer is none, in fact, which is quite a strong answer. And of course, you could say, well, maybe future evidence will be found. And that's always a possibility, but there's no evidence to support it. And you want to consider with that that the Book of Mormon already has some significant historical anachronisms and the wrong plants and animals and all of this. And so you put that together with the DNA evidence and you really do

John Dehlin [00:12:44] a one minute summary of in what ways the Book of Mormon has the wrong things, both what it includes and what it leaves out. We've done this with the Michael Coe interview. Maybe you've heard it, but I'd love to hear your version in two minutes of the Michael Ko interview where you say, here are all the things that are in the Book of Mormon that shouldn't be there. And then here are all the things that should be there that aren't Go.

Thomas Murphy [00:13:08] Okay, so the Book of Mormon claims that there were horses and sheep and goats and grains and barley and oats and steel. You know, I'm working off the top of my head here, you know, steel swords and chariots and so on and plows and, you know, so these technologies that really were representative of European civilization. And I. This is not something I explored that much in that particular article, but I do have an article or at least a conference presentation I recently gave about this question. And in my more recent research, I've actually found out that it was very common for the Haudenosaunee or the Iroquois people to bury European trade goods with the dead. These European trade goods included virtually all of those things and things one I left out was glass. Right. And that was a very common thing. So these new technologies that had been coming into new animals and plants that had been coming into Iroquois for now, almost two centuries before Joseph Smith I came around, those were preferentially buried with the dead. Now, think about Joseph Smith. What is his main occupation prior to producing the Book of Mormon as a treasure hunter, you know, a digger, and digging up oftentimes burials and ruins and artifacts and involved with a whole group of people who did that, you know, beyond his own. His own actual work. And we know at least that some of his. Some of his digs were in known artifact or known archaeological sites. And so very likely Joseph Smith encountered these items. Very likely he saw them. And this is where the apologetic is kind of way off track to say, oh, they were misnomers that Joseph Smith just named, you know, that the Nephites basically named their plants and animals that they encountered by names that were familiar to them. No, I think a better explanation is that Joseph Smith encountered these items in his money digging and that the knowledge of those items being there, they were markers of European civilization. And so I think he took what had been buried in the last couple of centuries and projected that back into the ancient past.

John Dehlin [00:16:12] And so one thing that I don't think we can really relate to, it sounds like people running around settling New England would come across burial mounds of Native Americans.

Thomas Murphy [00:16:26] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:16:26] Okay. See that's something we don't do now. We don't run across burial mounds of Native Americans. So you're saying that you'd be plowing a field or whatever, clearing away, buying some property and what would happen.

Thomas Murphy [00:16:39] Yeah, yeah. Plowing is a great example. So digging, you know, just the regular activities of establishing new farms. And you know, you got to consider that when Joseph Smith is in upstate New York, that he's only a generation removed from the Revolutionary War where this land had been occupied by the Iroquois. So in his parents generation, and certainly in her his, this was common experience. And not only that, it was common practice to go hunting for treasure in this land that had been taken forcibly from the Haudenosaunee or the Iroquois people.

John Dehlin [00:17:20] Because was there occasionally treasure, Occasionally there

Thomas Murphy [00:17:23] were valuable things found. Yeah, yeah. And you know, so. And you know, there were all these stories, of course, of kids treasures and stuff like that that probably motivated pirates

John Dehlin [00:17:33] that had buried treasure. So pirates that had been tooling around in the Atlantic.

Thomas Murphy [00:17:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:17:38] Is that right? And would have come aboard and buried treasure.

Thomas Murphy [00:17:41] Yeah, there were lots of stories about that sort of thing, too. So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't just Native treasure that probably motivated Joseph Smith, but he may also have been motivated by searching for pirate's treasure and that sort of thing.

John Dehlin [00:17:53] And it's all coming out of being poor and really wanting money to not be so poor.

Thomas Murphy [00:17:57] Right, right. Yeah. And so my hypothesis is that Joseph Smith actually encountered these items and that he used that empirical knowledge in the writing of the Book of Mormon and assumed that that those were markers of European civilization, which legitimately they were.

John Dehlin [00:18:15] He would have seen Iroquois on horses, Right? Or at least.

Thomas Murphy [00:18:20] Yeah, very, very. Yeah, very possibly.

John Dehlin [00:18:23] Or at least. Or at least he would have heard of them on horses.

Thomas Murphy [00:18:26] Yeah. And. Yeah, well, that would very likely would have been. The people that he encountered could very well have been on horses. Yeah. But I think that those items in. In graves as well. I think he's seeing that as European or, you know, as at least Old World in origin. Okay. And he's finding it buried in the ground. And instead of thinking that, oh, there's been two centuries of trade that preceded this and that Iroquois were preferentially burying that stuff with the dead, he assumed that this was more ancient.

John Dehlin [00:19:02] Would there be swords buried with some of these?

Thomas Murphy [00:19:05] Very likely, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:07] Swords.

Thomas Murphy [00:19:07] Well, the swords could very well have been also left over on a battlefield. And, you know, these areas of upstate New York had been battlefields for the French and Indian War, the American Revolution. The War of 1812.

John Dehlin [00:19:24] Would swords have been used in those wars?

Thomas Murphy [00:19:26] At times? Yes. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:28] Not just gunpowder.

Thomas Murphy [00:19:29] Yeah, well, you know, the musket at the time was. You better have a backup option when it misfires and when people come, it takes too long to reload. You know, you gotta have.

John Dehlin [00:19:39] I've never even thought about this, but he was smart enough to not include gunpowder in guns.

Thomas Murphy [00:19:44] Yeah. That's interesting.

John Dehlin [00:19:45] Yeah, I'd never thought of that before.

Thomas Murphy [00:19:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:48] And he didn't put guns back in, you know, the 2000, you know, whatever.

Thomas Murphy [00:19:55] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:55] However many years before.

Mound Builders, Archaeology, and Missing Evidence

Thomas Murphy [00:19:56] Yeah. I mean the general, I guess from the academic side, I think the general thing is Joseph Smith was ignorant of that stuff. And then the apologetic side is saying, well, they're misnomers that Nephites had. And I'm proposing. No. That Joseph Smith wasn't that ignorant, that he had empirical observations that informed his understanding. But he also had racial prejudices, that he assumed that these items meant white skinned people and European civilization. And so he projects that into the ancient past and combines it with the lost Israelites idea and this very prominent idea at the time that there had been white mound builders that had destroyed the ancestors that had been destroyed by the ancestors of the American Indians.

John Dehlin [00:20:43] White mound builders, yeah. Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:20:45] And so a lot of the earthworks and stuff that were being encountered, the prevalent myth of that day, the story that these European colonists were telling, I think to ease their own anxiety and guilt over the theft of this land, was that they were only doing what the Indians had recently done to an ancient white civilization. And so if you think about how do people deal with atrocity.

John Dehlin [00:21:16] Ancient white civilization.

Thomas Murphy [00:21:18] Right. The Nephites.

John Dehlin [00:21:20] Yeah.

Thomas Murphy [00:21:21] So if you think about how so

John Dehlin [00:21:23] they hurt the white guy so we could hurt the red guy. Are you saying that was the logic?

Thomas Murphy [00:21:27] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:21:27] Really?

Thomas Murphy [00:21:28] I think that that's a fundamental logic underlying the cultural currents that are incorporated into the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:21:35] So there were, there were myths at the time of white. Of darker Native Americans having annihilated a whiter race.

Thomas Murphy [00:21:46] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:21:47] Really?

Thomas Murphy [00:21:47] Yeah, that was a common belief among what we would. They certainly weren't professional archaeologists, but they were more and antiquarians, you know, kind of the collectors.

John Dehlin [00:22:01] So the basis of the dark skin, light skin narrative and the dark skin killing off the light skin that comes from prevailing myths or legends of the day.

Thomas Murphy [00:22:13] Yeah, Likely, yes. Well, no doubt.

John Dehlin [00:22:15] Oh, I didn't know that part.

Thomas Murphy [00:22:17] And, and I would add to that that I think that it usually.

John Dehlin [00:22:20] Sometimes I think people look at view of the Hebrews as The source of that. But is that.

Thomas Murphy [00:22:25] Yeah, well, the view of the Hebrews combined the lost Israelite, the 10 lost tribes idea with the white mound builder idea.

John Dehlin [00:22:32] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:22:33] So the view of the Hebrews has those both together.

John Dehlin [00:22:36] Got it.

Thomas Murphy [00:22:36] And that's why people often point to the view of the Hebrews as a possible inspiration for Joseph Smith. But the point that I would add is I think that. I think Joseph Smith genuinely believed that all are alike unto God, as the Book of Mormon claims, but that he saw all this inequality around him and saw this injustice, and the injustice was really what today we would call holocaust or genocide. That what happened to my ancestors, the Iroquois people, was a genocide.

John Dehlin [00:23:16] You have Iroquois blood in you?

Thomas Murphy [00:23:18] Yeah. So that native ancestor that I told you about earlier, my grandmother would say that she was Iroquois. Since that time, I've done. My mother actually has done an extensive amount of genealogical work, and I've used her genealogical work to trace that family back to Susannah Ferguson, who was born about 1786 in the Mohawk Valley in a Mohawk village known as Tionondaroge and known by the English as the Lower Mohawk Castle. And there was also a military fort there called Fort Hunter. I've actually visited the place and seen the graves of her children or one of her children and her husband and

John Dehlin [00:24:05] one of her descendants behind one church somehow. What's that?

Thomas Murphy [00:24:09] Yeah, I'm one of her descendants. So her granddaughter joined the church. What was her name was Laura Elmina Cole.

John Dehlin [00:24:19] But that's not the interview you did with Lindsey Hanson park on Color of Heaven.

Thomas Murphy [00:24:25] No, in the Color of Heaven, we talked about my wife's ancestry. Her name's Penina Shropshire Cotton, and she was one of the first native converts to Mormonism. And that's great video for somebody that wants to learn about some of the early native Mormons, and particularly.

John Dehlin [00:24:42] Is it video or just audio?

Thomas Murphy [00:24:43] Audio.

John Dehlin [00:24:44] Okay. And I do want to just. I always want to plug other podcasts and specifically women podcasts. So please check out Thomas Murphy's interview with Lindsay Henson Park. And, well, there were two.

Thomas Murphy [00:24:55] And Gina Colvin and Misha mcgriggs. So there's two of them. One called Lamanite DNA and the other called. I think it's Peninushire Cotton, one of the first Native American Mormons.

John Dehlin [00:25:09] Got it. Okay, so let's loop back, because I don't want to lose the story. So now we've gotten some good context for Joseph Smith creating the Book of Mormon. Let's go back to the DNA. You had listed a bunch of stuff that shouldn't be in the Book of Mormon, that is. And you've said that that ties to possibly artifacts, Western artifacts that were buried with Native Americans that Joseph would have possibly associated with ancient Native Americans, even though they were more contemporary artifacts. True.

Thomas Murphy [00:25:37] Right, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:38] Real quickly, what should be in the Book of Mormon that isn't. If it's. If it's truly Native American history. Just talk about some of those things.

Thomas Murphy [00:25:48] Ideas like. Reciprocity, ideas like thanks, thanking. In terms of the plants and animals, they should be the native plants and animals of upstate New York or wherever the setting of the Book of Mormon would have been in the major. There weren't a lot of domesticated animals in the Americas. Turkeys, llamas and dogs. Llamas down in South America, Alpacas as well there. But in native North America, dogs and turkeys are the domesticated animals. In terms of the plants, corn, beans and squash, of course, there are some references, I think, to corn, if I remember right, in the Book of Mormon, but not to beans and squash and certainly not to sunflowers. And strawberries were such an important thing in Iroquois tradition. So a lot of the plants and animals that are in the native traditions, in the native stories, they just. They're not there.

John Dehlin [00:26:55] And of course, chocolate and.

Thomas Murphy [00:26:57] Yeah, chocolate, potatoes, peanuts, those are all Native American domesticates. Not all of those had made it. I don't know that chocolate had made it that far, but tobacco, I think

John Dehlin [00:27:08] potatoes, if you're talking about a Central America setting, then you would have seen jaguars and monkeys.

Thomas Murphy [00:27:16] Yeah. And lots of birds. Birds were important there as well.

John Dehlin [00:27:22] So we were seeing kind of the farm animals that Joseph was working with, basically prominent animals in the Book of Mormon.

Thomas Murphy [00:27:29] And again, if you think about the cultural and ethnic stereotypes of the day, there's the plants and animals that he puts in the Book of Mormon are the same plants and animals that are associated with European civilizations and Old World civilizations. So, you know, certainly the ancient Middle east and near east as well. Those are the plants, animals and technology that appear in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:27:58] Got it. So back to DNA. Now you're saying your main findings in the article were what?

Mitochondrial DNA Lineages and Apologetic Responses

Thomas Murphy [00:28:06] So I surveyed the literature, and just to give a little bit of a background on how DNA research works is that you can, particularly at that time, most of the DNA research that had been done to date had been on either maternal or paternal lines. And you investigate the maternal line, your mother's mother's mother's mother's mother, through what's called mitochondrial DNA. And mitochondrial DNA exists in the organelle of the cell outside of the nucleus. In essence, every cell of our body has multiple, at least two different sets of DNA. Okay. In our mitochondria, there are a lot of mitochondria in individual cells, maybe thousands in muscle cells. And so mitochondrial DNA is more abundant, easier to get to. It's shorter. It's only about 16,000 base pairs. It's a lot shorter and easier to work with. You know, it's a lot of what crime scene investigations work with, and certainly at that time was the predominant way of investigating ancestry. But it is limited in. It tells you just your mother's mother's mother's mother, mother's line, so on. And in the mitochondrial DNA, four major lineages were found initially in the Americas, and then a fifth one would be found later. And these are known as AB or A, B, C, D and X. And these lineages, A, B, C and D are not found outside of north and East Asia, basically, kind of that north and East Asian populations, X is found a little more broadly. And in fact, when X was so

John Dehlin [00:29:51] ABC and D would sort of point to Asians, Mongolians crossing the Bering Strait and settling North, Central and South America. Right. Which would be what anthropology and archaeology would also, in history, would also suggest. True.

Thomas Murphy [00:30:07] Yeah. Well, I want to be careful about saying crossing the Bering Strait because.

John Dehlin [00:30:11] Or on a boat. Yeah. Coming from Asia.

Thomas Murphy [00:30:15] Yeah, yeah. There are two major hypotheses, what's called a land bridge hypothesis and a coastal migration hypothesis. And the evidence is increasingly, in my opinion, leaning much more towards the coastal migration hypothesis and much earlier than archaeologists and anthropologists used to think. And the DNA evidence was some of the first evidence for that, but the first evidence that was widely accepted because there's actually been evidence all along that people are coming back and looking at these archaeological sites that were much older and were being dismissed. But the DNA evidence suggests that natives could have been here much, much, much, much earlier than previously thought, which previously was, you know, maybe 10, 12,000 years ago. And it pushes that possibility to 30,000 to 50,000 years ago, well before the last ice age. And so it actually kind of validates a lot of native claims that, you know, we've been here since time immemorial. And the DNA evidence is suggestive of, at a minimum, a separation from other populations very early on, if not an earlier migration. So certainly well outside of the timeframe of the Book of Mormon, because the

John Dehlin [00:31:37] Book of Mormon ties itself to the Bible. And the timeframe in the Bible is an Adam and Eve, that was around 6,000 years ago, and there were the first humans, and there was no humans before Adam and Eve. And because the Book of Mormon is tied to the Bible, then the Book of Mormon is populating America 600B, somewhere between 600 BC and after. Right?

Thomas Murphy [00:32:01] Yeah. And I think if you take the Book of Mormon as history, it assumes a creationist narrative. You know, it assumes the biblical narrative and even assumes that there weren't people here until or after the Flood, until the Jaredites came. It's pretty explicit about that, actually, in the Book of Mormon. And, you know, so those are well outside of the time frame.

John Dehlin [00:32:30] And so that by tens of thousands of years.

Thomas Murphy [00:32:33] Yeah. At a minimum to the 10,000. Yeah. And so that gets the time frame wrong and gets the origin wrong. Now, the X was a little more ambiguous.

John Dehlin [00:32:44] Origin meaning not Middle east, not from

Thomas Murphy [00:32:46] the Middle east, but from Asia. Right. Not from the Middle East.

John Dehlin [00:32:49] So the time frame's wrong and the origin's wrong.

Thomas Murphy [00:32:51] Right, okay. Yeah. And the actual.

John Dehlin [00:32:53] Now, apologists would say we don't know what Middle Eastern DNA looked like back in 600 BC.

Thomas Murphy [00:33:00] That's a little bit of tricky.

John Dehlin [00:33:05] Why we don't have samples. There was no 23andMe back then for them to spit into little vials. Right?

Thomas Murphy [00:33:12] Yeah. Well, you know, so what you. What much of the research at that point in time was focused on was living descendants. And so the people that are living today, there's certainly a possibility that different populations might have lived in the Middle east in the past than live there today. And there's certainly been wars and migrations and stuff that would suggest that there were some differences. There would be differences. Of course, now an increasing amount of ancient DNA is being analyzed and used. So that's becoming less of a claim that can be easily made. And in the long term, it's an argument that has significant potential of disproval. But the migrations that would be needed for the ABC and D to get over to this area and have those are pretty significant leaps of logic and not very likely and so extremely unlikely.

John Dehlin [00:34:20] Impossibly.

Thomas Murphy [00:34:21] Well, what's interesting is if you follow this along multiple lines of evidence, which is the best way to get a more accurate assessment. The more lines of evidence you look at, the less likely it is to be true. And all the lines of evidence are pretty consistent.

John Dehlin [00:34:38] Which lines are you referring to?

Thomas Murphy [00:34:40] The maternal, the paternal, the nuclear DNA, the DNA of plants and animals, the plants and animals themselves and how long they've been here, their presence, the archaeological evidence, the linguistic Evidence, the cultural evidence, and none of those are providing any significant support for the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:35:03] Does the linguistic evidence tie back to Asia at all?

Thomas Murphy [00:35:07] The linguistic evidence? It's difficult that far back in time to make a tie. There are some suggestions.

John Dehlin [00:35:16] Because it's prehistoric.

Thomas Murphy [00:35:17] Yeah, it's pretty early. The best evidence is up in Alaska. And that area of linguistic, and not just linguistic, but there's probably some migrations that were continuing to occur. And that area. Yeah. But a lot of the other. Actually, the linguistic evidence you think about, it's also kind of suggestive of even more ancient origin because it's difficult to tie those languages together. They certainly don't tie to Hebrew languages or Egyptian languages or anything like that. And so let me tackle that. X. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:35:57] Because maybe X is our answer, right? Apologists.

Thomas Murphy [00:36:01] Yeah. There was a super excitement. There was an excitement among Latter Day Saints when the X lineage data first came out and among people that proposed a European migration to the Americas. And there's kind of a minor smaller group of anthropologists that have advocated a European migration via the Atlantic to the Americas. And so both Mormons in that group got pretty excited over the X lineage because the excellent lineage is not only found in places like east and North Asia, and initially, I should say it hadn't been found there. Okay. But it was found in other parts of Asia and certainly in the Middle East. It was also found in Europe and it was also found in Africa. And so the excitement was that, oh, well, maybe X, because it is a lineage that is found in modern Israelite population, modern Middle Eastern populations, and in Native Americans, that that might be a link. The problem with that in the literature review that I did that was already evident at the time I published this in 2002, was that there was a more. The split between the variations in the X lineage that are found in Europe and the Middle east and Africa split way too early, 30 to 40,000 years ago, if I remember right before, way too early, before long before the events of the Book of Mormon took place. And since that time, you know, the Ex LNH has been found in Siberia in some of the same populations that have the highest densities of A, B, C and D. So very indicative of that. X likely came across in the earliest first migrations with A, B, C and D didn't become as prevalent for some reason across the Americas. And it is interestingly concentrated across North America. And of course, there are people like Rod Meldrum who's using that as. And I kind of predicted this would happen in my Lamanite Genesis Genealogy and Genetics article. Is that there? And in my dissertation, I wrote about this in that dissertation as well.

John Dehlin [00:38:30] Jaredite. Would they connect.

Thomas Murphy [00:38:32] They're proposing a North American geography for the Book of Mormon. And I think it's been a real big challenge to those who are proposing a Mesoamerican. Setting for the Book of Mormon is because, you know, if X is our key, X isn't found in Central America. And so but it is found in North American settings and found even, you know, in the areas near where Joseph Smith said he found the plates. But again, it's not good evidence because it was way too early. And there's on a very technical detail, there are differences between the Native American versions of the X lineage and those found in the Old World, Europe, Asia and the Middle east, or Europe, excuse me, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Okay, yeah, go ahead.

John Dehlin [00:39:30] No, no, no.

Thomas Murphy [00:39:31] So the other line of evidence, the other significant line of evidence at that time was in the or two other lines of. Was in the paternal line. And the paternal line, there wasn't a lot of data at that point. There was a limited amount of data, but that data was also supportive of a similar north or East Asian origin of the ancestors of Native Americans. So it was consistent with the mitochondrial DNA. There's been a lot more Y chromosome or paternal lineage data accumulated since then, and it continues to support that early north and East Asian migration. And at the time I wrote that article, there's also. There are a lot of different ways of looking at genetics, you know, protein synthesis and some. A little bit of work on different markers that are on the nuclear genome. And again, the evidence consistently, even at that early date, it was showing the Asian origin and it's only increased. And now, you know, there's so much more stuff that's out in the scientific literature on the nuclear DNA. And, you know, the scientific evidence since the publication of my article in 2002-now is just strongly confirming the conclusions that I reached at that time. And that conclusion was that there is no scientific evidence to support the idea that Native Americans came from Israel and not only Native Americans in general, but there's no scientific evidence to support a small migration of Middle Eastern populations to the Americas at any time in early American history.

John Dehlin [00:41:15] Because that's what the apologists have moved to is to say, well, there was an existing population of people populating Central, south and North America, and the Nephites just became, you know, dwelled somewhere within them and became their. Their DNA was swamped and absorbed by the by the host population. And so we can't find it. It's too small. It's like a needle in a haystack.

Thomas Murphy [00:41:41] Yeah, and that's the apologist line. But there's no evidence to support it. There's no evidence to support that either.

John Dehlin [00:41:48] That's because it's too small. And it got drowned out. It got.

Thomas Murphy [00:41:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:41:51] Genetic drift or something. Right.

Thomas Murphy [00:41:52] Yeah. So the apologetic becomes how did it disappear? Okay. And so you can look at it in two different ways. Is there any affirmative evidence for a limited geography? And the answer to that question is no, why not? And so then that becomes the why not question. You could have different possibilities. Well, if there never was a migration.

John Dehlin [00:42:18] Oh, you're saying because we haven't found even the small amount yet.

Thomas Murphy [00:42:21] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:42:21] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:42:21] So there's no. There's no evidence to support the limited migration at all.

John Dehlin [00:42:25] And it's worth noting that the prevailing narrative by general authorities and apostles and prophets for over a century was it was all Native Americans. North Central, South America.

Thomas Murphy [00:42:35] Right, right.

John Dehlin [00:42:36] Predominantly. And that once DNA evidence didn't confirm that, then what? The narrative shifted. To what?

Thomas Murphy [00:42:44] Well, actually, that shift started before the DNA evidence. So that shift. And I traced this in my dissertation. Oh, earlier than that.

John Dehlin [00:42:52] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:42:52] Yeah. Lewis Hill, who was a. Well, re L Dias at that time, scholar in the early 19th century. 20th century. Yeah, excuse me, early 20th century. Yeah. Was proposing a Middle Eastern. I mean, excuse me, a Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon. So that that idea actually started in relds circles. Think about that. Right. Relds were way ahead of the LDS in this.

John Dehlin [00:43:20] You like that as an anthropologist idea? Well, the relds, how they influenced us.

Thomas Murphy [00:43:25] So the relds were way ahead of the Mormons. They were the ones who came up with this. Now where is the Relds today? Well, most of them have moved well beyond limited geography. Where are they today? Well, the 19th century document. And you know, even in your interviews, the president of the church is comfortable at least with that as a possibility. And you know, and in fact, during all this controversy, the John Whitmer Historical association invited me to speak in a meeting right before their general conference. And it was a packed room and included their general authorities or their equivalent of general authorities. And I talked about the DNA evidence and eventually published that talk in the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal in an article called Sin Skin and Mistakes of Men in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:44:25] How long was this that you presented in front of their leadership?

Thomas Murphy [00:44:28] It would have. Geez. It would have been probably 2004.

John Dehlin [00:44:32] Oh, wow.

Thomas Murphy [00:44:33] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:34] So they wanted to hear it back then.

Thomas Murphy [00:44:35] Yeah. And I think that was published in 2005, and that is actually my favorite article that I've written about DNA in the Book of Mormon. So Sin Skin and Mistakes of Men in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:44:47] Published where?

Thomas Murphy [00:44:48] Published in the journal John Whitmer Historical Association.

John Dehlin [00:44:51] And I should say, isn't that amazing that their first presidency, Chroma, the 12 and GA's, would invite a scholar to tell them a troubling narrative because they're willing to face the truth?

Thomas Murphy [00:45:03] Yeah, well, I should clarify that. It was the John Whitmer Historical association that invited me, but their leadership was in the audience.

John Dehlin [00:45:10] Okay, yeah, yeah. So they came.

Thomas Murphy [00:45:13] Yeah, they came and they listened. Yeah. And then they published it, at least. The John Whitmer Historical association, which is

John Dehlin [00:45:18] an arm of the church. Right.

Thomas Murphy [00:45:20] Or I think it's an independent nonprofit organization, but I should say that it participates in.

John Dehlin [00:45:28] Right. Their leaders engage.

Thomas Murphy [00:45:30] Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

John Dehlin [00:45:32] Instead of marginalizing it and ignoring it and defaming it.

Thomas Murphy [00:45:36] Right, Yeah. I mean, this event was held in conjunction with the General Conference. Could you imagine Sunstone right before General Conference?

John Dehlin [00:45:44] Right.

Thomas Murphy [00:45:44] You know, that sort of thing.

John Dehlin [00:45:45] Yeah, yeah.

Thomas Murphy [00:45:46] And I should say, for those who are interested in my publications, that I make nearly all of them for available free on my academia profile. So if you look for academia. Edu and search for Thomas Murphy, or we can put the link to the podcast here, people can look up those articles.

Church Attention, Disciplinary Council, and Aftermath

John Dehlin [00:46:07] Okay, so to bring this back to the narrative, all the various DNA strains that you studied, all confirmed, along with linguistic and anthropologic and archaeological, historical, geographical, all sort of pointed towards some sort of migration from Asia that was tens of thousands of years prior to any feasible chronology that the Bible plus the Book of Mormon are trying to present. True.

Thomas Murphy [00:46:36] That's correct.

John Dehlin [00:46:37] Yeah. And so what was the response? How did you hear from the Church? What happened?

Thomas Murphy [00:46:44] Well, I mean, before the Church. Want to see how that ended up getting in the book American Apocrypha. So it was initially published in the Mormon Scripture Studies, and the publication coincided with the 2002 Sunstone Symposium and this panel that Brent Metcalf had put together with myself, Trent Stephens, and Jeff Meldrum called the Galileo. Galileo event.

John Dehlin [00:47:14] Is he related to Rodney?

Thomas Murphy [00:47:16] They're cousins. Okay. Yeah. But they do have very differing perspectives on the issue. Actually, strongly differing perspectives on the issue.

John Dehlin [00:47:22] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:47:23] One is a professional scientist and one is not.

John Dehlin [00:47:26] And one is. And one is Rodney.

Thomas Murphy [00:47:28] Yeah. And, yeah, Rodney is so far out There, in fact, Rodney, just let me say, while his name is up, is one of the more frightening aspects of racism in the church today. Very explicitly racist and creationist in his orientation and presentation of the data, and not a good scientist at all. But put that aside. And in that session was where we revealed this evidence along with the online publication. After that, a representative from Signature Books came up to me and asked if I would be interested in having my article, which had just come out in Mormon Scripture Studies, also appear in American Apocrypha.

John Dehlin [00:48:21] Was this Tom Kimball or.

Thomas Murphy [00:48:23] I think it was Gary Brigeira.

John Dehlin [00:48:25] Ron Prittis?

Thomas Murphy [00:48:26] I think it might have been Ron.

John Dehlin [00:48:29] Okay. I'm just curious.

Thomas Murphy [00:48:30] Yeah. I was blanking on who it actually was. I've interacted with all of them since then. That's fine. At least one of them asked me.

John Dehlin [00:48:36] One of those three.

Thomas Murphy [00:48:37] Yeah, okay. And I said yes. But when I had accepted that research contract, I'd given up the copyright to the article. So I said, you need to talk to Mormon Scripture Studies or Brent, because they had the copyright. And so with Brent's approval, of course, he was one of the editors with Dan Vogel of American Apocrypha. And so with his approval, that article slightly revised, because by the time it got through the publication process, more data was available that I included and corrected minor spelling and those sort of things, and worked on tone a little bit. And so that revised version of the article appears in American Apocrypha. That was the article that got the attention of the Church.

John Dehlin [00:49:25] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:49:26] So I should say that at the time, I was at the Sunstone Symposium there that I had while I was doing the research in that article, I had contacted David Glenn Smith at UC Davis. Again, he's a molecular anthropologist there or biologist, and he had some possible X lineages that might have been found in Central America. And so I was investigating whether or not they were able to confirm whether X had been found in Central America. And he told me about a documentary film that was in the process of being made by what I would later learn was Living Hope Ministries and said that he'd just been interviewed for this documentary film because I told him I was working on Mormon topics. And he said, yeah, there's this documentary film they're doing. And so I contacted the names, and I'm blanking right now. It's okay. Yeah. And so I contacted them and let them know I was going to be in Salt Lake City. And that I was working on the same topic, and I'd like to talk. And they wanted to do More than talk, they wanted to interview me. And so I agreed to an interview. And I did that interview while I was in Salt Lake City in 2002. So subsequently, the American Apocrypha comes out later in 2002. So I get a call in November, day before. Now, the call was in November. I don't remember the date of the call, but asked from my stake president if I would come and meet him. And the meeting was scheduled for the day before Thanksgiving. And my thought was that he had heard about, well, okay, I thought he'd heard about this Christian ministry, because I didn't know they were a Christian ministry doing the film until they set me down with the cameras and everything. And they handed me a disclosure form that identified themselves as Living Hope Ministries. And that was my first notification that they were associated with Christian ministry. And it was actually a difficult decision at the moment. I was like, should I interview with them or not? Because there's this really strong characterization of them as anti Mormons. And. And even though I don't like that term myself, I don't think it accurately describes them. I didn't want to be associated with that. But I also felt like in my own faith journey that people like Sandra Tanner had provided resources that weren't readily available at that time. This was before the Internet, and it had really helped me. And so I'm in this quandary. Do I say, yes, I'll do the interview once they've disclosed to me who they are. And I remember now it was Joel Kramer was the filmmaker. And I made the decision that, yes, I would do that. And that more so than the publication of the article, I think was what I thought would get me in trouble. So when I get the call from the stake president, I'm thinking, uh, oh, they found out about this film. And the film hadn't come out yet, but there was Internet rumor going around about it. And in fact, they had published in one of the Christian newsletters about Mormons of how miraculous this encounter with me had been. And so the word was out that this film was in the making of that I was involved. So that's what I thought the interview was about. And so I show up and I brought Carrie with me and in fact, insisted that she be a part of it. And they were actually quite. He was acceptable to that. And so my stake president's name is Matt Latimer. And so he said, I. The reason I've called you in here after a little bit of chit chat was, you know, the reason I've called you in here is because somebody gave me a copy of an article that you've written for this book called American Apocrypha. And he had a copy of the article and he said that.

John Dehlin [00:54:03] Who would have given him the article?

Thomas Murphy [00:54:07] I still don't know that.

John Dehlin [00:54:08] The members committee probably.

Thomas Murphy [00:54:09] Yeah, that seems the most likely. There were a lot of rumors for a while that it had come through BYU or farms. And I actually asked him directly that in a later meeting or actually an email. And he said that it was not anybody from byu. And so he said it came by a more mundane

John Dehlin [00:54:38] snail mail basically. Right?

Thomas Murphy [00:54:40] Yeah. But anyway, he said he had trouble with conclusions I had reached. And in particular he read. Probably the most quoted part of that article is a paragraph towards the end where I say that

John Dehlin [00:54:59] from the scientific perspective, the Book of Mormon's origin is best situated. Why don't you read it? You want me to read it? Early 19th century America and Lamanite Genesis can only be traced historically to circa 1828. The term Lamanite is a modern social and political designation that lacks a verifiable biological or historical underpinning linking it to ancient American Indians. The Book of Mormon emerged from. From an antebellum or pre Civil War perspective out of a frontier American people struggle with their God and not from an authentic American Indian perspective. As Mormons, we have a moral and ethical obligation to discontinue this view of Native American origins and publicly disavow the offensive teaching that a dark skin is a physical trait of God's male addiction.

Thomas Murphy [00:55:57] Yeah. Or punishment.

John Dehlin [00:55:59] All right.

Thomas Murphy [00:56:00] Yeah. That was the party quoted. And he said that that statement was not one that the church wanted associated with a member of the church. And then he asked me if I was willing to reconsider that conclusion. And I said I would reconsider it if the scientific, scientific evidence changed, but otherwise, no. And it was actually a pretty quick interview because then pretty quickly he went, no, I do remember we discussed some other topics, some other concerns that I had with the church. And I don't remember if I brought that up or he asked me about it, but I talked to him explicitly about the racism in the church, the sexism and the homophobia in the church.

John Dehlin [00:56:49] Homophobia. This is 2002.

Thomas Murphy [00:56:52] Yes. Yeah, but you know, I remember, I'm an educator. I'm teaching about race and gender were major issues in my classes. You know, I was very aware of the scientific evidence at that time that homosexuality was not simply a choice. And the church was already involved in anti gay marriage legislation at that time. So I expressed those concerns with him as well. And then he said that my views were not compatible with that of the church and that they don't want me being a representative of the church in the public, holding these points of view, and that he would like to schedule a disciplinary council to have me considered for apostasy. And I said, well, if that's what you want to do, that's fine with me. You can do that. And so we then talked about, what about a date. And he was very lenient there. He says, you know, we can do it right away. You can have a while to think about this. It's up to you. And I said, well, if you're going to do it, you might as well do it soon, sooner rather than later. And so he scheduled it a couple of weeks away. And so, again, this was the day before Thanksgiving. I come home and I write an email to some friends and family that included, I believe it was Ron Priddis at Signature Books. And Ron asked for permission to forward my email to. To someone he knew at the Associated Press.

John Dehlin [00:58:40] I'm guessing Jennifer Dobner, but I'm not. I don't.

Thomas Murphy [00:58:43] Patty Hennett's, I think.

John Dehlin [00:58:45] Okay. Not Peggy Fletcher's tag.

Thomas Murphy [00:58:47] No. Because she was at the Tribune.

John Dehlin [00:58:48] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:58:48] Yeah, but it was.

John Dehlin [00:58:50] That's fine. It doesn't matter.

Thomas Murphy [00:58:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:58:51] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [00:58:51] Yeah. And so anyway, he. He asked my permission, and I said, yes, you could forward that email. And so again, that was. I. I don't remember if I replied to him on Thanksgiving Day or that night, but the day after Thanksgiving, I get a phone call from a reporter at the Associated Press, and they said, we've heard about this disciplinary action that the church is taking against you, and would you be willing to tell your story? And I said, yes. And, you know, again, Brent Metcalfe was a good friend of mine, and I knew that, you know, he'd been through this and I'd been talking with him about this, and I'd actually been talking with quite a few others, like Lavina Fish. Fielding Anderson was really, really helpful to me in terms of how to process this and how to respond. And my idea was that something like what happened to Brent would be what happened to me and his story. You know, there were news stories about it, but they didn't. They weren't broadly carried, you know, some significant stories. But then it went away. That's all I thought was going to happen. So I said, yeah, I'll tell the story. And I told the story, and then I got A call in the afternoon, pretty early in the afternoon, if I remember right from Brent. And he said, you need to get online. The stories broke. So I get online and do a search and it shows up. I forget now in my memory I remembered it as Yahoo, but now I've looked back at earlier recollections of it and I said, ABC News at that time. So it must have been ABC News website. And it was the third most forwarded story of the day. And it had just come out and I was like, uh, oh, that was the first hint that it was going to be a big story. And it wasn't as popular as the story about the guy who burned his penis on a laptop. That was apparently a bigger story. But it came out on the same day. And so the next few weeks were just crazy. And I think you can probably relate

John Dehlin [01:01:15] to the press totally. Yeah.

Thomas Murphy [01:01:17] I mean, my phone at work, especially because that was publicly available, you know, my phone number at work was just ringing off the hook. A few people had my cell phone number and, you know, so that was ringing off the hook. And I mean, I would be in talking to one reporter on my office phone and my cell phone would be ringing or I'd have another one in the office. And in fact, one of the stories was about that talked about a reporter in my office having all these other people calling and, you know, television and radio shows. And it was like. Mind numbing, crazy, exhilarating in some ways, But it was very. So all this stuff was happening, but I wasn't having time to think about it and process it. Right. But finally getting home at night and getting away from the phones and talking to Kerry, I was like, you know, I could just make all this go away. All I need to do is resign. And you know, we're not active members of the church. What does it matter? And, you know, I'm not so sure. I mean, it's not like, you know, when people give you attention, you get this kind of, oh, it's nice that people are paying attention. But when it's too much attention, you're like, that's enough. I need my space. And I was at that place, I was like, I don't need this kind of attention. And I'm like, I think I'm going to just resign and just get this over with. And Carrie looks at me and she says, don't make it that easy for them.

John Dehlin [01:03:16] Whoa.

Thomas Murphy [01:03:18] And I'm like, okay, you're right, I shouldn't. If I'm going to go down, I'll go Down in a fight. And about that time, I was also getting a lot of requests. They started from my students and kind of the. Kind of the Sunstone Dialogue crowd, and then the ex Mormon crowd were all contacting me about what could they do on my behalf. And. And in fact, they wanted to organize these protests. And at first I asked my students, I said, well, you go check with the city to make sure that you can legally organize where you can legally hold a protest, and if it's legal what you're proposing, then I'll support you. And I said the same to the other groups. And ironically, speaking of legality, this would be just after the ACLU had sued the city. I think it was the city of Salt Lake over there. It might have been the church. I don't remember who the suit was against, but the church had acquired that property street, what had been a public street, and they had acquired it and incorporated it into this Greater Temple Square sort of downtown. And so the ACLU was suing for the right to hold public protests on that street. I forget now what the name of that street is, but this coincided with that. Okay. And so it had just been legalized to be able to protest on, you know, now where you can't, because that decision would later be overturned. And so. Right by Temple Square.

John Dehlin [01:05:17] Okay, yeah, yeah.

Thomas Murphy [01:05:19] I don't know what they call it now, but the news got out that all these events were being planned. And so there were several stories breaking about that. But the story that really would change the tide was Bill Lobdell's story in the LA Times. He was, I think, the lead reporter. There were some other reporters on it. He's the one who interviewed me. And when he called me, one of the questions that he asked me was, what does it feel like to be called the Mormon Galileo? And my recollection of what I said was something along the lines that I don't think that's an appropriate description of what is happening. And he didn't quote me saying that. Instead, he quoted somebody from BYU saying that I wasn't the real Galileo, and he quoted Maxine Hanks saying that I was the Galileo for Mormons or something like that. It wasn't, though, the interview of me that turned the tide. It was his interview of my stake president. So he actually got the stake president on the phone somehow and asked him, what does it feel like to be the Inquisitor? And I know this because later the stake president disclosed this to me. And as the reason, or a significant reason for him changing his mind, and he basically. Well, what he said at that time was that he was worried about my well being. I think he framed it as like my mental well being or emotional well being or something like that. That was kind of inflammatory and that it was clear that I didn't want to leave the church and that disciplinary actions were intended to be helpful, not harmful, and that it appeared to be harmful to both me and the church and that that's why he was stopping the disciplinary council. So he called me the night before it was scheduled and did that. The protests went on on my behalf, many of them. There was one here in Logan, there was one in Salt Lake, and there was one in my. The people that were gonna protest in front of the church. I just invited them over to my house and we had a big party.

John Dehlin [01:07:57] Who was leading these protests, do you know?

Thomas Murphy [01:08:01] My students were some of the big organizers. And then.

John Dehlin [01:08:06] Were they Mormon?

Thomas Murphy [01:08:08] No.

John Dehlin [01:08:09] That's weird.

Thomas Murphy [01:08:11] They were the local organizers.

John Dehlin [01:08:12] What about Sally?

Thomas Murphy [01:08:14] Yeah, in the ex Mormons and I'm. Oh, geez. What was his name? It was the same name as the aclu.

John Dehlin [01:08:22] Rocky Anderson.

Thomas Murphy [01:08:23] Lawyer.

John Dehlin [01:08:24] But not Rocky Anderson. Not Paul Toscano.

Thomas Murphy [01:08:27] No, but I bet it was. It wasn't him. It was somebody else. Geez. He'll be. When he sees this. He'll be disappointed. That's what I remember.

John Dehlin [01:08:34] Maybe it'll come.

Thomas Murphy [01:08:35] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:08:35] So the stake president calls it off and blames it on caring about your emotional well being.

Thomas Murphy [01:08:42] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:08:44] And you don't buy it. What do you think he was calling it off for?

Thomas Murphy [01:08:47] Well, he also acknowledged that it was harmful to me in the church, which was true. And so that was the more believable part. I would later ask him more directly because I would later. He'd later call me in for a follow up. And at that time he said he had indefinitely postponed it. And it was a few months later and it was during sweeps week and Fox News wanted to carry a special about it. And that's when the TV cameras showed up at the church that you mentioned earlier. It was during the second meeting. And so was the second meeting supposed

John Dehlin [01:09:28] to be a disciplinary council?

Thomas Murphy [01:09:30] It wasn't. No, it wasn't supposed to be a disciplinary council. It was supposed to be a follow up to the postponement of the earlier disciplinary council.

John Dehlin [01:09:40] So a meeting between you and your stake president?

Thomas Murphy [01:09:42] Yeah, and I'm sure that Fox News had contacted him too, so that he knew that they were on it and that they were going to do a story. And I think he wanted to preempt the Story and I told them I was going to the meeting, and I don't think they quite expected that. So Fox News showed up with me, you know, photographing me going in, and they waited for me to come out. And so that was a little. You could tell they were quite, you know, visibly bothered by that. But, you know, I went in and there were no protests at. It was just a few close friends in Fox News. And so I go in for that meeting and in that meeting he tells me that he wants to call it off altogether. And I asked him, I think it was at that meeting, or it might have been another time, but I think it was at that meeting. I asked him if he had felt any pressure from the church to pursue disciplinary action against me. And he said, no, quite the opposite is true. And so I pushed. I said, well, what do you mean by that? And he then said, I was always told it was my decision and I was encouraged that whatever decision I made would be the. Would have the support. And it seemed to be backing off from that. The church had pushed him to halt it. He said. My first impression was, oh, the church was pushing him to halt it. And then he kind of backpedaled from that. And then he did tell me that interview from the LA Times was critical in his thought process, in his processing of it.

John Dehlin [01:11:44] What do you. Do you have a sense for what you think happened or do you just don't know?

Thomas Murphy [01:11:50] Yeah, I mean, I really don't know at a level beyond speculation.

John Dehlin [01:11:55] And if you're just having to try and guess, how do you put it together in your mind?

Thomas Murphy [01:12:02] I suspect that the Church informed him that the evidence was pretty solid.

John Dehlin [01:12:08] Evidence of what?

Thomas Murphy [01:12:08] The DNA evidence.

John Dehlin [01:12:10] And why would that lead to a calling off?

Thomas Murphy [01:12:13] Because they don't want to draw attention to that and that this was not, you know, this was not a good political PR move for the Church because

John Dehlin [01:12:21] if they actually carry through with it, then there are all these stories about.

Thomas Murphy [01:12:25] Yeah. And it makes the Church appear anti science. And of course it brings to light and to public discussion the fact that the Book of Mormon is not a historical document.

John Dehlin [01:12:36] And in fact, to this day we have all these gospel topic essays. What gospel topic essay do we not have?

Thomas Murphy [01:12:44] No, there is one on DNA in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:12:46] Oh, that's right, we do. Wait, what do we not have? So they have addressed that.

Thomas Murphy [01:12:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:12:50] Oh no, we don't have Book of Mormon historicity.

Thomas Murphy [01:12:53] Yeah, we don't. That's true. Right, right.

John Dehlin [01:12:55] So we have DNA, but not Book of Mormon historicity.

Thomas Murphy [01:12:58] Right. And the DNA ignores everything but DNA. Right. It ignores all the archaeological, the cultural. Yeah. But, you know, interestingly, in that DNA article, they. Or the DNA essay, the Church says that the Book of Mormon is more spiritual than historical. So I think, what does that mean? You know, that is perhaps an opening towards a non historical interpretation of the Book of Mormon. And I think that's where the Church is going to end up.

John Dehlin [01:13:29] Well, that'll be interesting. Okay, so for you, it was too radioactive for the Church and they said, let it go. Now, I'm sure that you've maybe been paying attention over the past few years as the Church has come after Kate Kelly, me, Jeremy Runnels Carson and Marisa Calderwood, Rock Waterman and others. Lots of excommunications. Right. Have you kind of ever wondered what about you?

Thomas Murphy [01:13:59] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:13:59] Why us and not.

Thomas Murphy [01:14:00] Yeah, I mean, and there were a few others near my time, so, you know, Grant Palmer and Simon Southerton in particular, and they didn't get as favorable results as I did.

John Dehlin [01:14:12] So Simon Southerton was excommunicated.

Thomas Murphy [01:14:14] Right.

John Dehlin [01:14:15] Grant Palmer at the time, I think

Thomas Murphy [01:14:18] he was disfellowshipped, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And

John Dehlin [01:14:23] why not you?

Thomas Murphy [01:14:25] You know? Yeah. So, I mean, there would be eventually a book published about, you know, maybe there's a change of tide with the way the Church handled me and they're backing off. And in fact, Armand Moss would argue that in a. In a. In an article in the Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, that the early 2000s was the time of the Church tolerating more scholarship and stopping its disciplinary actions. Almost immediately after. He must have turned that in, your stories started popping up. And of course, what was kind of deeply disappointing to me because Armand Moss had been a mentor of mine, is he said there were no significant disciplinary actions taken in the early 20th century.

John Dehlin [01:15:09] And you didn't like that. Why?

Thomas Murphy [01:15:12] For somebody who was my mentor in

John Dehlin [01:15:14] the early 21st century.

Thomas Murphy [01:15:15] Yeah, in the early 21st century, for somebody who was my mentor to dismiss me, it felt personal. And,

John Dehlin [01:15:24] you know, does that mean there wasn't an out? Did he mean there was no outcome? Do you know what I'm saying? Perhaps.

Thomas Murphy [01:15:31] But there were outcomes in the case of Simon and Grant, and I think they're significant, too.

John Dehlin [01:15:40] That happened before.

Thomas Murphy [01:15:42] Yeah. And like I say, probably immediately after he turned in his manuscript, your stuff started happening. And yeah, I worry about it now, but really, I think it's a question the Church has to ask itself. It's not a question about me. And I don't see it as one About Me I do think I should say I took 10 years off from Mormon studies because I was tired of it. And I've only recently come back to starting to do Mormon studies. Well, I shouldn't say it wasn't just because I was tired of it. It was because I was having great successes in other arenas. I built an environmental anthropology field school that has really been my heart and soul for a decade. I work very closely with Kos Salish tribes on projects to help address sustainability issues in our community using traditional knowledge that's been richly rewarding for me. I've gotten certified as a wildlife tracker and I get to track wildlife and help document the return of wolves to Washington and helped reintroduce fishers to our national parks. And I've just had a wonderful time taking students on tribal canoe journey and just had such a wonderful time doing this work. And I made the decision to come back to Mormon studies during the Mitt Romney campaign four years ago because I felt like the subtle racism in his public remarks, the disparaging of the poor, the disparaging of cultural differences, the support of Israeli occupation of Palestine, these things reminded me of what's wrong with a lot of Mormon ideas. And it reminded me of the work that I left undone, particularly the detective decolonization work. And I felt like I had an unfinished responsibility. And so I read in your paper

John Dehlin [01:17:55] that one of the disappointing outcomes of the disciplinary council that was called off was that the focus of the story was on the church truth claims and there wasn't a focus on the issues of colonization and racism. And so I know that you have to go in a few minutes. And so what I want to do is promise our listeners and you that we're going to do another several segments, if you're willing and interested. One is going to be on decolonization and racism within Mormonism, Mormon scripture, Mormon studies, etc. And then we also have some other things around Native American perspectives, perspectives of the Book of Mormon and what what how Native Americans think about being called Lamanites, about the narrative that's kind of has been foisted upon them. So I'm going to put that to our listeners as a promise that that's something that's coming. But what I'd like to do is, is decide, just for the sake of time, that we're going to talk just really briefly about what you experienced. So when you talked about Armin Maes in that slight, do you have a way to guess what that was about? You being left out was he just trying to spin a narrative.

Thomas Murphy [01:19:17] I think at the time he was disappointed in me. The mentorship really stopped pretty abruptly, although his wife continued to be very supportive.

John Dehlin [01:19:25] And

Thomas Murphy [01:19:27] I think he was disappointed, and particularly in my association with Dan Vogel and Britt Metcalfe. And I think, you know, he saw me as headed in the wrong direction from where he'd like me to be.

John Dehlin [01:19:40] Meaning he wanted you what, within the Church?

Thomas Murphy [01:19:43] That was. Yeah, that was, you know, he definitely was a good mentor in terms of developing the scholarship. And he worked with me on how to write for an academic audience and. And we collab. Well, not exactly collaboration. I mean, we read each other's work and stuff as he was working on his book and I would end up reviewing it and we talked a lot about the ideas. It wasn't like a co authorship or anything like that, but we definitely were working in similar veins. And you know, he cites my work profusely in his book on All Abraham's children. And. But all through that process, he was always encouraging me to go back to church. And it was pretty clear at that point that that wasn't going to happen.

John Dehlin [01:20:34] So once you kind of chose from maybe his perspective, the wrong path, he kind of cut you off.

Thomas Murphy [01:20:41] Yeah. And I mean, he should speak for himself on why that is, but that was hard. But I will say that he was a great mentor and I know he mentored a lot of people.

John Dehlin [01:20:50] But then also when he wrote a history reflecting on early 21st century disciplinary action, he left you and Brett and Grant Palmer out.

Thomas Murphy [01:21:01] And Simon. And Grant Palmer, Simon Sotherson. And maybe it was. Maybe it was just trying to make the case stronger that the Church was changing things. I think a wishful thinking would probably be more than a slight. I think it was probably his wishful thinking and I was the contradictory evidence that kind of fell by the wayside.

John Dehlin [01:21:20] So I'll just briefly interject something, then I want to ask you a few final questions. It's interesting that when I started Mormon stories 2005, I had saw that the Church called it off on you. And for me that was a sign that maybe, maybe things were changing. And interestingly enough, I learned about this guy named Buckley Jepsen, who was this gay man in Washington D.C. who had married his partner in Canada around 2005, 2006. And then I was doing Mormon stories when Buckley told me, hey, the Church is coming after me. They want to excommunicate me for marrying my partner in Canada. And I thought of your situation and so I contacted Jennifer. Dobner this is my memory. I could be wrong. And said, hey, let's get some news on this, because maybe they'll call it off. And believe it or not, even though Buckley was being directed towards the disciplinary council, Jennifer Dobner writes the story. It hits the international press. And lo and behold, as I understand it, either as bishop or stake president was like, called on a mission and the disciplinary council was called off. And so I had the sense, starting Mormon stories, that maybe Mormon stories was going to represent a change in the tides and that the church was going to stop disciplining us. And in reality, we went from 2005 until 2000 until 2014 without a lot of excommunications or disfellowships. And I was surprised how long I got to go without catching heat. Right.

Thomas Murphy [01:23:07] Yeah. And there were other changes afoot. Opening more of the archives, the Joseph Smith Papers Project, you know, making sources and materials much more available. The engagement of scholarship, you know, kind of the. The farm's kind of alienation from byu, a new scholarly approach of engagement. And those changes are still afoot. In fact, the reason I'm here is I was invited to a seminar at byu. So that's kind of a full circle, is I'm here in the area to participate.

John Dehlin [01:23:40] BYU has invited you to participate in a seminar on what?

Thomas Murphy [01:23:43] Native Americans and Mormonism.

John Dehlin [01:23:45] Wow.

Thomas Murphy [01:23:46] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:23:46] Did they pay?

Thomas Murphy [01:23:48] Yeah, for my expenses, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:23:49] Wow, that's.

Thomas Murphy [01:23:51] Yeah. So it is kind of full circle.

John Dehlin [01:23:53] That's cool.

Thomas Murphy [01:23:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:23:54] So what do you think?

Thomas Murphy [01:23:55] Yeah, I think the scholarly things are. Scholarly changes are still happening. So

John Dehlin [01:24:03] as it relates to truth claim, Mormon studies, church openness and candor versus discipline, how do you reflect on where we are are?

Thomas Murphy [01:24:13] I'm not quite sure. I really don't quite understand. It seems to me the essays. Right. Justice Smith Papers Project and, you know, and the changing of the introduction to the book Mormon, we have to mention with the DNA. Right. That, you know, when did that come? About 2006.

John Dehlin [01:24:28] So that's four years after your stuff, right?

Thomas Murphy [01:24:30] Yeah, it was 2006 or 2007.

John Dehlin [01:24:33] And that's about how long freaking bureaucratic, corporate, you know, processes take. Processes are going to take. So you think your stuff may have led to that change in the Book of Mormon? Tell us quickly what that change is.

Thomas Murphy [01:24:45] The Book of Mormon introduction used to say that the Lamanites were the principal ancestors of the American Indians, and now it says they were among. Among the principal ancestors or among the ancestors, something like that.

John Dehlin [01:24:58] And that's sort of an apologetic attempt to shrink to Shrink whoever the Lamanites were. So the Church can be vulnerable to DNA evidence. Anthropological and. Anthropological evidence. Right.

Thomas Murphy [01:25:09] Yeah. Not as much DNA evidence to lose if it's a small population being subsumed by a larger population, which is a

John Dehlin [01:25:17] change in the predominant narrative by the Church for over a century.

Thomas Murphy [01:25:22] Oh, absolutely. And it's a fundamental change.

John Dehlin [01:25:24] And it's also a less clear interpretation of what the Book of Mormon text actually says. True.

Thomas Murphy [01:25:34] Right. And you know, really, I think it's

John Dehlin [01:25:36] because the Book of Mormon text has millions of soldiers fighting battles all over the place. Right?

Thomas Murphy [01:25:42] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:25:43] And that wouldn't be a small little tribe in some small little part of Mesoamerica. Right.

Thomas Murphy [01:25:50] Well, that's the big problem with the Church's essay, is that the Church's essay tries to create a small scenario or potential scenarios under which DNA or genetic signatures would be lost. The problem is that those scenarios that they create are not the scenarios described in the Book of Mormon. So the scenarios described in the Book of Mormon is there is no clear reference to outside populations. Maybe a few things that maybe could be interpreted that way, but no definite clear reference. There's no. In fact, there are passages that seem to contradict that, particularly in ether, suggesting that nobody was here when the Jaredites came. So there's some pretty strong. The prophecies of other nations not coming to bother the Nephites and Lamanites. I mean, there's a lot of stuff in the Book of Mormon that contradicts that narrative.

John Dehlin [01:26:46] Plus, if they're surrounded by all these other non Nephites, non Lamanites, they would be bumping into them all the time,

Thomas Murphy [01:26:52] just like in the Bible, and they

John Dehlin [01:26:54] would be included in the.

Thomas Murphy [01:26:55] In the history. Right, right. So the Bible is full of all the ethnic groups of the time.

John Dehlin [01:26:59] So the, you know, Sumerians or the.

Thomas Murphy [01:27:01] And the Persians, Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians.

John Dehlin [01:27:05] Where are those equivalents in the Book of Mormon if it's just a small tribe amongst a huge population?

Thomas Murphy [01:27:11] None.

John Dehlin [01:27:12] None. Zero. Right.

Thomas Murphy [01:27:13] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:27:18] Okay. So that's the problem with the essay. Keep going. So makes it. It makes. Too small.

Ahistorical Readings and the Future of the Book of Mormon

Thomas Murphy [01:27:23] Yeah. So the scenarios that they're describing, there are some possible scenarios where genetic lineages could be lost, but those aren't. Those scenarios aren't. The. Aren't in the Book of Mormon narrative. The Book of Mormon narrative are the types of scenarios that you would expect to leave a genetic signature. And in fact, it promises that there would be descendants to the last days. You know, and there's some pretty explicit stuff in the Book of Mormon that contradicts that narrative. So they're in a difficult place. And the real resolution, I think, is an ahistorical approach to the Book of Mormon. There are other.

John Dehlin [01:28:01] Can I pause just really quick, one last thing? Brent made this point earlier. The entire purpose of the Book of Mormon is to bring Native Americans back to Christ, right?

Thomas Murphy [01:28:15] Yeah. That's what it.

John Dehlin [01:28:16] The Lamanites. Bring the Lamanites back to Christ. That's the whole purpose of the book. It says that, I think, in the forward yet. Now, who are the Lamanites? Who are we talking about? If it's not the people in Guatemala or in Mexico or in South America, Peru, Brazil, who the freak are we talking about? Who's the book for? Is that fair or not?

Thomas Murphy [01:28:37] That's a great question. You know, to the credit of the people at byu, that's the question they're asking is.

John Dehlin [01:28:43] But instead of who are the Lamanites,

Thomas Murphy [01:28:45] they're asking Native people that question.

John Dehlin [01:28:47] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [01:28:48] And that's what I was advocating for in my dissertation. That's why I feel we're coming full circle. And I think the Church has a real opportunity to engage indigenous scholars and Native Mormons in forming a new pathway. How do you rethink that relationship? And that's what my current scholarship is about. How do we rethink that relationship?

John Dehlin [01:29:13] So the Church is trying to see how Native Americans feel about all this.

Thomas Murphy [01:29:18] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:29:19] But aren't they going to say it's silliness some?

Thomas Murphy [01:29:23] Well, sure, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:29:25] Yeah. All right. Well, I want that to be just a preview of what we're going to talk about, because we have to get to decolonization and we have to talk about Native American perspectives of the Book of Mormon narrative.

Thomas Murphy [01:29:40] Right.

John Dehlin [01:29:40] And then where we go from there. You were talking about things coming full circle and there being progress. But you. You were saying. Saying that the logical place we have to go to in terms of a historical Book of Mormon is. What is that?

Thomas Murphy [01:29:57] We need room within the church for people to publicly express a belief in the Book of Mormon independent of history.

John Dehlin [01:30:07] But see, that's the thing. That's one of the main things that got me excommunicated. My stake president said, you said the Book of Mormon is a fraud, which is a really strong word. I don't even know that I may or may not have used those terms, but I certainly at the fundamental critique I was making is there's this book is not historical. It's not a record of ancient people. It's a product of 19th century creativity. Right. And that is a major thing that got me excommunicated. Yeah.

Thomas Murphy [01:30:39] And I think. It's a time for introspection. It's a time to really ask. And I think, most importantly, not to formulate the question as the church leadership, but to formulate the question in dialogue with native peoples. I think there's a radical message that Joseph Smith had in the Book of Mormon, and that radical message is that God speaks to all people in their own languages and on their own terms. That message is transcendent, whether you believe in a historical Book of Mormon or not. That if divinity or the Creator or whatever you want to call that. Has to work on human terms, on cultural terms, has to work with us where we are, rather than some divine, direct, clear communication. And that the Bible's not the whole story. Those are radical messages of the Book of Mormon that are transcendent beyond whether or not it's historical. And what I've been doing is going back to that work that was my original dissertation, looking at native Mormons who believe in scriptures besides the Book of Mormon, or sacred traditions beside the Book of Mormon. Things like Black Elk Speaks in the Popol Vuh and more recently, Endhoud Nshaunee or Iroquois traditions, the work of Handsome Lake and, of course, traditions that my ancestors adhered to. And what if we took the Book of Mormon to say that those are equally valid to the Bible and that became the message of the Book of Mormon? And I think that's a message that progressive Mormons can work with. I think it's a message that the church, maybe, eventually, someday, maybe after I'm. Long after I'm gone, will get to.

John Dehlin [01:32:52] So I love the spirit and the enlightenment with which you shared that vision. My two questions to you to kind of close this part of our interview, is, number one, can the Church survive a broad change in how the Book of Mormon is viewed? Because basically what it means is Joseph Smith made it up, which means that it was a fraud, which means that we've all been fooled. And so if it's not, if there wasn't a Moroni carving into gold or Mormon carving into gold, real plates that really got delivered, and a real angel that if that's not a real story, then it was all made up, then we've all been had. How can the Church survive that without a massive fracturing? That's question one.

Thomas Murphy [01:33:58] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:33:59] And then question two is, who the crap cares about Mormon stories, Mormon studies, at that point, if we've all been had, why even try to have a more elegant Sophisticated, metaphorical or enlightened, nuanced, liberal, whatever perspective on Mormonism and the Book of Mormon, if it just freaking was a, was a, you know, was a con.

Thomas Murphy [01:34:27] Well, there are texts in the sacred traditions or scriptures, if you want to use that word, of other world religions that are also fictional, some probably produced fraudulently even in the Bible, and yet they are still accepted as scripture. So I don't see it as quite the either or. And looking at it a little bit more from more of an indigenous perspective, you don't expect people to be perfect. There's this expectation that somehow Joseph Smith has to be perfect, that he doesn't have the same flaws that you and I have or the same temptations and struggles that we have. But if you actually go back and read his narratives, he acknowledges those, he acknowledges struggling with temptations, he acknowledges with wanting to use the gold plates for personal gain. Even in the Book of Mormon itself, there are these moments of, of self consciousness where he says it's got. Mistakes of men are part of the title page acknowledges that the mistakes of men are there. And I think the more powerful. Self consciousness in the Book of Mormon is in Third Nephi, when Jesus chastises the Nephites for not recording everything that Samuel the Lamanite said. And he says other scriptures I have that you've not yet written or something along that line. And elsewhere the book says, yeah, there are other things that Samuel said that Jesus said that weren't written. And there's a self consciousness to Joseph Smith's own writings, whether it was intentional or not, of his own failings. And. I think looking at those and looking at him as a whole person, looking at him as like one of us and struggling and not having all the answers, but trying to, but being influenced by power and greed and even his self consciousness there, his power corrupts, you know, things like that. He acknowledges those things because he experienced them. And I think the scenario that we've set up of this either or sets the church itself up for failure. But it doesn't have to be that way. And from the beginning there's a self conscious recognition that it wasn't that, that it wasn't what it was proclaimed to be. And I think what Joseph Smith must have experienced is that people wanted him to be more than he was. And so he played the role. And in that he was human. He was like us.

John Dehlin [01:37:23] It's kind of like the wizard of Oz.

Thomas Murphy [01:37:25] And you don't think you and I have gotten caught up in that media and wanting to play the role. Right.

John Dehlin [01:37:32] Of course. I'm wanting to. Maybe back then you were wanting to be what the people wanted you to be. And I feel like I'm trying to be what the people want me to be. Right.

Thomas Murphy [01:37:42] Yeah. We experience the same things. And to me, he's human. Is he perfect? No, not even close. Neither am I.

John Dehlin [01:37:54] But can, I mean, you look at, you talked about the RLDS Church, which is now Community of Christ. They're struggling to survive. It's like there are changes that become an existential threat to the organization. You have to acknowledge that this change could pose an existential threat to the church. And in many ways, some would say the church is teetering on a crisis right now.

Thomas Murphy [01:38:17] Yeah. And I think, you know, there's different models out there for. If you take a Protestant model, and that would apply more to the community of Christ. And there's a lot of social science about this. If you take more of a Protestant model, the church really could, you know, what would happen, and it is happening is you get these breakoff groups, the more fundamentalist breakoff groups, and that's inevitable. And that's the Denver snuffer. Yeah, the Denver snuffers. Those things social science would predict is going to happen, they're going to happen regardless of whether at what pace the church makes these moves. They're going to happen. The faster the church makes the moves, probably the faster they'll happen. But you can also take a Catholic model, and the Catholic model is much more of an inclusive model, and you incorporate within the faith tradition the divergent branches. So within Catholicism, you've got the Jesuits, you've got the Franciscans, you've got the various orders for the nuns as well. And they, you know, you've got, what are the nuns that are going around on a bus with. They call that in the Midwest. And, you know, you've got these varying perspectives within a large umbrella. And if the church goes that direction, I think that they will slow the bleeding. And particularly look at what is happening in the Catholic Church with the new Pope. It's revitalizing, helping them recover from this horrible sexual abuse scandal. And people are talking about the church in new ways and they're excited about it. And it's going back to the message of Jesus about equality, about social justice and breathing new life into the church.

John Dehlin [01:40:05] And if you look at, I'm calling them neo apologists, and that's just a placeholder term for now. But if you look at Terrell Givens, Fiona Givens, Richard Bushman, if you look at Patrick Mason, Gina Colvin, Dan Witherspoon. It is certainly true that indirectly and even Spencer Fluman now going to the Maxwell Institute.

Thomas Murphy [01:40:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:40:31] All of these people are building up subgroups within Mormonism that don't take the scriptures too literally, that de. Emphasize, you know, the, the, the strengths or perfections of the church leaders that encourage members to not take everything literally, to not obey everything, to view the leaders as flawed. And there's more progressive sensibilities around LGBT rights about women. It may not be quite ordained women, it might be quite pro same sex marriage, but we're seeing the seeds growing of these sorts of Catholic like strains of which you speak.

Thomas Murphy [01:41:11] Yeah. And I think, I think the church would be better off. In my opinion, they'd be better off trying to create a big umbrella. But what they're doing to you and Kate is counterproductive to that.

John Dehlin [01:41:22] Is it possible that we were just going too fast and they needed to make examples of us of not getting ahead of their own pace?

Thomas Murphy [01:41:32] That's possible. It's also possible that you were casualties of an internal power struggle, that some people want the church to do that and some don't. Some want the Protestant model, some want the Catholic model, some want to go back more. They may agree more with the Denver snuffers.

John Dehlin [01:41:49] And that's what we're hearing, that Elder Nelson did an end run around that Thomas S. Monson has dementia and that with Boyd K. Packer's demise, that Thomas the Russell Nelson made an end run around Thomas S. Monson and did this policy in November 2015 for LGBT Mormons for same sex attracted same sex married Mormons.

Thomas Murphy [01:42:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:42:16] That maybe he represents, through Whitney Clayton, an attempt to, to sort of clamp back down, to defend, follow Armand Moss to retrench. But at the same time, some like to think that Uchtdorf or Holland or Christofferson represent the more progressive wing and that they do want a bigger tent. And Elder Holland specifically told me he wanted a bigger tent. But then again, he gives his Book of Mormon talk in general conference and he gives these crazy, these crazy talks sometimes where he's all angry and pounding, pounding his fist on the table. And so it's. And it's hard to know if that's just wishful thinking, that we just want the church to be a bigger tent and to become progressive. But they keep disappointing us time after time. And I think my final question for this segment is you were excommunicated or no, you were threatened with excommunication. I've been excommunicated why would we want to even hope for a better church? Or even what you're doing is engaging the church and trying to even maybe help them. After such unkind treatment, after showing their cards, after knowing that maybe it's kind of made up, why would we even want to engage or build on this foundation?

Decolonization, Native Elders, and Final Reflections

Thomas Murphy [01:43:39] I take my inspiration from the native elders that I've gotten to know over the last 22 years working in Coast Salish country. And I've had a lot of time to talk with several elders about these issues. Some of them are former Mormons. And. One of the messages that I keep hearing from the elders is that I need to honor all my ancestors. So one thing that's come out of that is I need to go back to that question that inspired my work with native Mormons to begin with. That is, who is my ancestor? Why did she do what she did? And who are my ancestors? Okay. Honoring them and recognizing them and being more forthright about their indigenous heritage. Because in previous publications it was hidden in footnotes, if it was there at all. And today I'm being much more open about it. I'm being much more vulnerable about it because there's always questions of authenticity in nature native circles, and these are distant ancestors. How can I speak for them? And I'm being encouraged by those elders to go back and reclaim their voices and to listen to them and they really believe that they're speaking to me. And it's not though, just the indigenous ancestors, it's my Mormon ancestors, it's my, my grandmother, it's my mother, it's my. They also deserve honoring and deserve respect. And I love them. I don't think they're perfect either, you know, and I. Want to give them charity in trying to understand where they were and how they developed. I know that at various points in my own life I've been all across the spectrum, from a super devout, true believing Mormon to one time I described myself as an atheist in a foxhole. And you know, I've been all along that route. I've been in all those places. And who am I to judge somebody else for wherever they're at right now or wherever they were at in their life. And like you, I think that there's a power in the stories and that's what I'm trying to do now is bring those stories out, the stories that are, that are often overlooked, especially those of indigenous Mormons.

John Dehlin [01:46:17] And you're willing to even help the church develop a deeper understanding of that.

Thomas Murphy [01:46:24] Yeah, that's what I Hope for. Yeah, I would hope for that.

John Dehlin [01:46:32] All right, so thank you. This isn't going to be the end because we're going to have a few more episodes. So tell, tell our listeners really quick if we have two or three more one hour segments, what they might be about so people can get me excited to look forward to it.

Thomas Murphy [01:46:49] I'd like to introduce people to one of my former students and a mentee of mine, Angelo Baca, who's a Hopi and Navajo filmmaker. He produced a film that I helped a little bit with called In Layman's Terms that looking at laymanite identity. It took a lot of the. The same ideas that I was exploring in my dissertation, but did it as a documentary film. It's widely known in Native circles, but not so well known in Mormon circles. It's available for a free download online at Culture Unplugged. Again, it's called In Layman's Terms. I'd like to help introduce people to his work.

John Dehlin [01:47:26] And this is a film about what Native Americans think about the central narrative in the Book of Mormon.

Thomas Murphy [01:47:31] Correct.

John Dehlin [01:47:32] Being called Lamanites, being called, that their skin is dark because of a curse and all that.

Thomas Murphy [01:47:38] Yeah. And Native American perspectives on DNA and archaeology as well.

John Dehlin [01:47:42] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [01:47:43] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:47:43] Nice. From scholars.

Thomas Murphy [01:47:46] Some of them. Yes.

John Dehlin [01:47:47] Okay.

Thomas Murphy [01:47:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:47:47] Some of them. Just experts in their lives.

Thomas Murphy [01:47:50] Yeah, yeah. So it's definitely an incredible film and I'd like to introduce people to that. And he's got another one called Into America that explores along with his grandmother, going back to their ancestral lands that were lost and through going through Salt Lake in the process and talking about the Mormon connection. And so there's some great work that I. I think that Mormons need to pay more attention to.

John Dehlin [01:48:14] So maybe we'll have him come to Salt Lake with you, do a screening of the film, and then do an interview about the film.

Thomas Murphy [01:48:20] Oh, I'd love that. Okay. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:48:22] So that's the goal there. All right. There's another. At least one more discussion we need to have.

Thomas Murphy [01:48:27] I would. I'd like to have a discussion about.

John Dehlin [01:48:29] About

Thomas Murphy [01:48:32] the narrative that underlies the acquisition of Mormon scripture. There's some really fundamental problems if we think about the role of the acquisition of scripture and the desecration or even robbery of graves of indigenous peoples. Where did that papyrus come from? If those gold plates were found, who would they have really belonged to? Did Joseph Smith have a right to take them? And today we have things like the Mormon militants taking over Malheur Wildlife Refuge or prosecutions of Mormons for artifact Theft in Blanding, Utah. And I think that those narratives we tell about the Book of Mormon and about the Book of Abraham and how they were acquired inspire and encourage and foster a culture in which it's okay to desecrate the graves of indigenous peoples. And we need to talk about that.

John Dehlin [01:49:36] Okay. And there's at least one more conversation we need to have just from this article I read about decolonization.

Thomas Murphy [01:49:45] Oh, about what is decolonization. Yeah, yeah. And of course, that's wrapped into both of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:49:50] But I mean, there's concepts there. I think most of my listeners have no idea what that word means or how it applies to the church, to us, to themselves, to Mormon studies, to the Mormon Internet.

Thomas Murphy [01:50:02] Right. Yeah. And I would love to have those conversations. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:50:06] And partner with that. Is your. Is your work on. On racism kind of baked into Mormonism? And it's a. It's a deeper look at racism. It's not just. And it's not kind of black cane, the angle of just black, you know, people of color cane. It's more about. From. From the Native American point of view. Yeah.

Thomas Murphy [01:50:28] I mean, Mormons have this tendency to look at race as a black and white issue, and it's a lot more complex than that. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:50:33] There's lots of different.

Thomas Murphy [01:50:35] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:50:36] Racial identities.

Thomas Murphy [01:50:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:50:39] All right. Thomas Murphy. Well. Well, I'm unsatisfied with the amount of time that we had today, but I'm also very grateful that you'd come. And I think we've had a fascinating discussion, so I'm going to hold you to a few more episodes. Is that all right?

Thomas Murphy [01:50:51] I look forward to that.

John Dehlin [01:50:52] Okay. And listeners, please come to mormonstories.org you can comment on this issue. I hope that Thomas will. Dr. Murphy will respond to any comments made there. We can have a little bit of a discussion about that. You know, those of you who support us financially at the Open Storage foundation, this. The money you give makes it possible for us to create not just Mormon Stories podcasts, but Mormon Matters podcasts, the Thoughtful Faith podcast with Gina Colvin, Mormon Mental Health podcast with Natasha Alvar Parker, Mormon Transitions podcast with Kristi Money, Gay Mormon Stories podcast. So please support the Open Stories Foundation. We can't do this without your support. And even as well, something that I try to do whenever I can remember that female podcasters are getting paid infinitely less than male podcasters within Mormonism. That includes Gina Colvin, Christie Money, Natasha Alfred Parker, but it also includes Lindsay Hansen park with her Year of Polygamy and Color of Heaven. Podcast. So please not only support the Open Stories foundation, which will support female podcasters, but also support Lindsay and Sunstone because it's an important legacy for us. And thank you for joining us. Thanks for all your support. And, Thomas Murphy, we're gonna have you back on soon. Is that all right?

Thomas Murphy [01:52:17] That's all right. Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:52:17] All right. Take care, brother. Thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org music for this episode was provided by the Lower Lights and other sources. Cease to make me whole? When with a wounded heart? Amen. Anger or malice? I draw myself apart? Searching my soul.

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