Nemo the Mormon is a third-generation believer who grew up devout, orthodox, and deeply committed to the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
But over time, he began to discover uncomfortable truths: financial secrecy, historical cover-ups, and leaders who seemed more like businessmen than prophets. Convinced that honesty and accountability were core Christian values, Nemo became an outspoken internal critic - until last year, when he was excommunicated after appearing in the media to challenge the church’s leadership.
We explore Nemo’s journey from devoted missionary to vocal dissenter, what finally broke his trust in the institution, and how he now thinks about truth, authority, and belief.
Want to see more from Nemo?
🎥 Watch Nemo the Mormon on YouTube — his channel on Mormonism, belief, and truth
Follow him on Twitter/X for commentary and discussion
About the hosts
Thom and Aidan left boring, stable careers in law and tech to found FarmKind , a donation platform that helps people be a part of the solution to factory farming, regardless of their diet. While the podcast isn’t about animal welfare, it’s inspired by their daily experience grappling with a fundamental question: Why do people so rarely change their minds, even when confronted with compelling evidence? This curiosity drives their exploration of intellectual humility and the complex factors that enable (or prevent) meaningful belief change.
Thoughts? Feedback? Guest recommendations?Email us at hello@changedmymindpod.com
00:00:03
I was like, well, hang on a minute, why are we giving all
00:00:06
our money to an organization that's just hoarding it?
00:00:08
I mean, Jesus said some pretty strong things about the, you
00:00:12
know, the rich young man who needs to go and sell everything
00:00:14
he had and give it to the poor. And I always thought that my
00:00:17
tidy money was going to do charitable work and charitable
00:00:19
good. I'm Tom.
00:00:22
I'm Aiden. And you're listening to Change
00:00:24
My Mind, where interesting people share their biggest
00:00:26
changes of heart and take us along their journey from first
00:00:29
outs to completely new perspectives.
00:00:41
How much do you know about the Mormon church?
00:00:43
If you're anything like me, probably not very much, but this
00:00:46
is a church that believes it's founder, Joseph Smith,
00:00:49
discovered golden plates buried in an upstate New York and at
00:00:53
least by some accounts, translated the Book of Mormon
00:00:55
into English using a Sia stone in a hat.
00:00:58
From these unlikely beginnings it has grown into a global
00:01:01
institution with 17 members with extraordinary
00:01:04
wealth and influence. The church recently made
00:01:06
headlines when it was fined $5 by the SEC for
00:01:10
creating shell companies to hide it's $100 billion investment
00:01:14
fund. This is an organization that
00:01:16
sends 65 young missionaries around the world each year to
00:01:19
spread its message, while working hard to control what
00:01:21
information those same missionaries and its members can
00:01:24
access about its own history and practices.
00:01:27
Today's guest was recently excommunicated from the Mormon
00:01:29
Church for speaking up and voicing from the inside
00:01:32
criticism of the church's leadership and its culture of
00:01:34
deception and secrecy. Nemo the Mormon, as he's known
00:01:37
online, is a British third generation Mormon.
00:01:40
Today, we're going to tell his story, from devoted believer to
00:01:44
internal critic to his expulsion from the church last year for,
00:01:47
among other things, being interviewed on the popular media
00:01:49
platform LAD Bible. But this isn't just a story
00:01:52
about the Mormon church. Nemo's experiences raised
00:01:56
fascinating questions about what makes some people willing to
00:01:58
stand up and question deeply held beliefs, while others
00:02:00
prefer not to look too closely at uncomfortable truths.
00:02:04
Nemo, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me, but
00:02:07
you don't really need me here now that that intro was was
00:02:09
fine. We've done it, we can all go
00:02:11
home. Fantastic.
00:02:12
All right, I hope so. Before we get into your story,
00:02:16
let let's try and help the listeners understand a bit about
00:02:18
what the Mormon church is and when you are growing up as a
00:02:22
Mormon. What?
00:02:23
How would you have explained your faith to non Mormon
00:02:26
friends? You explain it as it is the
00:02:28
restoration of Christ's true church as he established on the
00:02:31
earth during his mortal ministry.
00:02:33
It was restored through Joseph Smith.
00:02:36
He was told all the other churches were wrong, which tends
00:02:38
to alienate people when you're talking to them about their
00:02:40
faith. But he was told all the other
00:02:42
churches are wrong. You shouldn't join any of them,
00:02:44
but instead you should start a church that is the restoration
00:02:47
of Christ's mortal church. OK, yeah.
00:02:50
And so this Joseph Smith character, he's the really key
00:02:54
thing that sort of separates Mormonism from most other kind
00:02:58
of splinters of Christianity, right?
00:03:01
So what is the key kind of extra ingredient that that Joseph
00:03:05
Smith brings? Well, it's, it's not exclusive
00:03:08
to Mormonism, I guess, because a lot of other religious movements
00:03:11
will also claim that they speak to or for God.
00:03:14
But that was one of the key things was this idea that no,
00:03:17
God still speaks to prophets today.
00:03:19
So this is the prophet that he's called, this guy Joseph Smith.
00:03:23
He also brought forth more Scripture, which is, as you
00:03:25
talked about, the gold plates, which is an account of the
00:03:27
inhabitants of ancient North America.
00:03:30
And he brought that forth. And again, that wasn't unique.
00:03:34
That was an idea that was going around sort of similarly at his
00:03:36
time as well, the idea of who the Native Americans could have
00:03:40
been. So that his this claim of a
00:03:43
vision, this claim to translate Scripture, that's kind of what
00:03:48
makes him unique, really. Cool.
00:03:49
And so he is. He is saying that American
00:03:53
people are essentially descendants of the nation of of
00:03:58
Israel. Yeah, ancient Jews that build
00:04:01
boats and sail to America. Sail to America.
00:04:03
Yeah, completely reasonable, of course.
00:04:06
And, and this is kind of the what so as as a Mormon, do you
00:04:11
need to sort of become, do you need to become a part of the
00:04:13
Mormon church in order to kind of be in the chosen people?
00:04:16
Is this sort of a a reconstitution of Israel?
00:04:18
Yeah, yeah. It's like you become part of the
00:04:19
House of Israel. Mormons receive something called
00:04:21
a patriarchal blessing during their teens, which is Mormons
00:04:23
get blessings throughout, you know, Mormon priesthood holders,
00:04:26
men who kind of hold positions within church will lay their
00:04:28
hands on people's heads and give them blessings for sickness or
00:04:31
for comfort and all those sorts of things.
00:04:34
But you get a specific blessing during your teenage years where
00:04:37
the patriarch, a man set aside to do that job, will pronounce
00:04:40
your lineage in the House of Israel that you're adopted into.
00:04:42
So a lot of people are adopted into the House of Ephraim, for
00:04:45
example. Some people are Dan Manasa,
00:04:47
etcetera, and you have that lineage declared upon you and
00:04:53
you're given sort of an outline of what your life could look
00:04:55
like as long as you're faithful to their church, right?
00:04:57
You might. You will get married, you'll
00:04:58
serve a mission, you'll have children, you may have a
00:05:00
leadership call and all that sort of stuff.
00:05:02
OK. And what does it mean to be a
00:05:04
practicing moment? So what was your kind of daily
00:05:07
and weekly life like as a faithful member?
00:05:09
Busy. Mormonism is very busy.
00:05:11
It keeps you on your toes. So Sunday services until
00:05:15
recently were three hours long. So you got the first hour is
00:05:18
sacrament meeting, the second hour would have been Sunday
00:05:20
school, and then the third hour would have been separate men's
00:05:22
and women's classes. Then on a Monday night was
00:05:25
family home evening, which is where you get together and study
00:05:28
the scriptures as a family and play games and things like that.
00:05:30
Tuesday night was often youth activities known as the mutual
00:05:34
short of the Mutual Improvement Association, but it was young
00:05:37
people go to play football or whatever.
00:05:39
Then Wednesday night was often the women's night, the Relief
00:05:43
Society, which is the women's organization, the Mormon church,
00:05:46
they would get together and do what they call home, making so
00:05:49
womanly activities in that sort of very patriarchal system that
00:05:52
Mormonism is. Then Thursday night would have
00:05:54
been ward council meetings or bishopric meetings
00:05:56
alternatively. So the leader of the local
00:05:58
congregation would meet together with his counsellors on a
00:06:01
Thursday night, or he would meet together with all the sort of
00:06:03
leaders within the community, the person that runs the Sunday
00:06:06
school, the person that runs the Young Women's program and that
00:06:08
sort of stuff there. Friday night was date night.
00:06:11
Saturday's the day that you get ready for Sunday, and then
00:06:13
Sunday starts all over again. That's the life of a Mormon
00:06:16
during the week. Well, and I've got to know about
00:06:20
the the temple garments. OK, Yeah, yeah, fine.
00:06:23
The Internet tells me that that the the label magic underwear
00:06:28
can be like offensive to Mormons.
00:06:30
Is that? It it kind of you take yourself
00:06:31
very seriously. I always find it interesting
00:06:34
whenever someone says this can be offensive to members of the
00:06:36
church and they act like the members of the church are a
00:06:38
homogeneous group. But like everyone, some people
00:06:40
take their religious religion more serious than others.
00:06:42
Some people have a sense of humour, others don't.
00:06:44
I know active believing Mormons that went and watched book and
00:06:48
more musical and found it funny and enjoyed watching it and
00:06:51
others that wouldn't be caught dead there because they find it
00:06:53
incredibly offensive. So there is a spectrum there.
00:06:55
Magic underwear January. I wouldn't walk into a Mormon
00:06:57
meeting house and call it that, but you know, it's not going to
00:07:00
offend me or and it wouldn't have ever offended me, really.
00:07:04
So you become a member of the Mormon church when you're 8, I
00:07:07
think, or whenever you're baptized as an adult, convert,
00:07:10
depending. Then as an adult, you go through
00:07:14
another ceremony called the endowment ceremony as well as
00:07:17
some Washington anointing. So you go to the Mormon temple.
00:07:19
So Sunday worship happens in a Chapel.
00:07:21
Temples are separate buildings. They're much more expensive,
00:07:23
they're much more grand. And you go there for certain
00:07:26
ceremonies. You go there to do essentially
00:07:29
all the ordinances, which are like the steps of the Mormon
00:07:32
pathway to get to heaven. So it starts with baptism,
00:07:34
receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, then it's endowment or
00:07:38
Washington anointings and endowment, and then eventually
00:07:41
it's getting sealed to someone getting married in the temple.
00:07:43
That's like the Mormon outline of steps.
00:07:45
You do the baptism outside of the temple, but in the temple
00:07:48
you can do it on behalf of your dead ancestors.
00:07:51
The same with all the other steps as well.
00:07:52
You can do that for yourself once and then repeated times for
00:07:55
your deceased ancestors. So as part of the washings and
00:07:58
the only things you're given sacred garments to wear that are
00:08:00
to remind you of the covenants that you make in the temple.
00:08:03
So you wear them under your regular clothes.
00:08:04
They have markings on to remind you of certain markings within
00:08:07
the temple ceremony. And there, there there is a
00:08:10
reminder of your covenants and commitments that you've made in
00:08:13
the temple. You wear these all.
00:08:15
All the time, all the time. And this is not in addition to
00:08:19
non Norman underwear. This is.
00:08:21
Depends. Generally for men it's just your
00:08:24
underwear. For women, depending if they if
00:08:27
they want extra sport or anything like that, you can wear
00:08:28
it alongside normal underwear. There was a big debate for years
00:08:31
about bra over the top or underneath garment tops.
00:08:34
Many women were told that they had to put their garments on
00:08:37
then their bra, which is incredibly uncomfortable I'm
00:08:39
told. And then younger people being
00:08:41
told, oh I was never told that no, you can, you can put your
00:08:44
bra on and then your garment top.
00:08:46
And now there are some young people who basically only wear
00:08:49
their garments to church and to the temple when they were told
00:08:53
they should wear them through because the wording of the
00:08:55
temple ceremony is you're to wear them throughout your life.
00:08:58
And so the question is, many people were told, explicitly
00:09:01
told by the people in the temple who give you the instructions on
00:09:05
how to wear the garments, that that means you wear them night
00:09:07
and day. And even in the follow up
00:09:10
interview questions when you're renewing your recommend your
00:09:13
piece of paper that says you can go to the temple when you're
00:09:15
renewing that every time you're asked, do you wear them night
00:09:18
and day as instructed in the temple?
00:09:20
But that's never the instruction you were given in the temple.
00:09:22
You're just told to wear them throughout your life.
00:09:23
So some people go, well, as long as I'm wearing them frequently,
00:09:25
you know, on Sundays or whenever I go to the temple, then that's
00:09:28
fine. I don't have to wear them all
00:09:29
the time. And the church has tried to
00:09:31
clamp down on that a little bit in recent years.
00:09:33
They've spoken about the disturbing, LAX way that some
00:09:35
people are treating their their garments.
00:09:37
It's like, come on, people just don't want to be wearing
00:09:39
essentially AT shirt and sort of shorts all year round,
00:09:42
especially when it's hot. It's funny, the idea of like the
00:09:45
centralisation of underwear, right?
00:09:47
I'm sorry. Well, the.
00:09:48
The church manufacturers them and sells them to the members,
00:09:51
so it's a captive market. Are there?
00:09:53
Are there different like variant style ones?
00:09:56
You can get different materials so.
00:09:58
I saw recently there was a New York Times article.
00:10:01
Apparently Mormon women going crazy for this new cut of that.
00:10:05
I wonder with like that has like removed the sleeves.
00:10:07
Or something. So OK, right, really quick.
00:10:11
Essentially the youth of my age. So when I was a teenager, we had
00:10:14
a pamphlet called For the Strength of Youth, which is
00:10:17
given by the church centrally for young people to know what
00:10:20
the standards to live by are. So it covers things like dating,
00:10:22
pornography usage, which is a no no, music and dancing, topics
00:10:26
like that. And when it came to modesty, it
00:10:29
was very clear that showing your shoulders was immodest.
00:10:33
Girls that would wear shoulderless things would go to,
00:10:37
would go to a church activity and they'd be given a baggy
00:10:40
T-shirt to wear so that their shoulders weren't showing.
00:10:42
Right? Because we've, we've talked
00:10:44
about before that certain church leaders have said that, you
00:10:47
know, when you're immodest, you become pornography to men that
00:10:50
see you. And that's a problem.
00:10:51
You exacerbate issues amongst men.
00:10:53
So be modest. So you've got this connection
00:10:55
between showing your shoulders and modesty that was absolutely
00:10:58
codified by the church. And a lot of people justified
00:11:00
that position of the church by saying, well, when you wear
00:11:02
garments, you won't be able to show your shoulders because
00:11:04
garments cover the shoulders. Then the church released this
00:11:09
style of garments that is like a tank top.
00:11:11
It doesn't go over the shoulders anymore.
00:11:13
It's just got a strap. And it was originally released
00:11:16
for hot and humid climates. But it has gone mental because
00:11:20
all these Mormon influences have started getting them.
00:11:22
Like people they know whose sons are coming back off missions to
00:11:25
Africa are bringing back suitcases, extra suitcases.
00:11:28
There's a black market for them. There's people selling them on
00:11:31
at a profit. They're like, garments cost
00:11:34
maybe like $10 a pair for top and bottom right.
00:11:38
People are selling them for 40 to cover the cost of getting
00:11:42
them into the country because you can't order them in the
00:11:44
states. So you had there's people
00:11:45
getting them posted to former BYU roommates who live in, you
00:11:49
know, Kenya or somewhere where you can get them and then
00:11:52
sending them out of country. And it's been a backlash for
00:11:54
these women because they grew up thinking they couldn't show
00:11:58
their shoulders. And now all of a sudden, the
00:11:59
churches have gone. Well, yeah, you can mad this
00:12:01
emotional whiplash for some of these people or theological
00:12:03
whiplash for some of these people that you wouldn't
00:12:05
believe. Yeah.
00:12:06
So I think that sort of brings us on as we starting to starting
00:12:09
to kind of we don't want to do like another 4045 minutes about
00:12:12
we'll have the we'll have the bonus members only episode of
00:12:16
like of the magic underwear. So we've kind of been alluding
00:12:21
to a bit how I think one of the things that's really important
00:12:23
to understand about the Mormon Church is how central the
00:12:26
institution is to the faith. So could you briefly give us a,
00:12:31
a sense of like, how is this institution structured?
00:12:34
How does? How do decisions?
00:12:35
Get made. So everything, it's a very top
00:12:37
down structure. Everything's run out of Salt
00:12:38
Lake. So if you have a question,
00:12:41
you're told to go to your Bishop.
00:12:43
Above him is the state president who covers like an area, like a
00:12:45
diocese. Above him is the area presidency
00:12:48
or the area authorities who cover like the Europe North
00:12:50
area. Then you go to the guy in Salt
00:12:52
Lake who overseas you, then you go to the 12, then you go to the
00:12:55
First Presidency and then the prophet.
00:12:57
That's the power structure of Mormonism and everything
00:12:59
originates from Salt Lake. If Salt Lake says this is what
00:13:02
garments look like now, then this is what garments look like
00:13:04
now. If Salt Lake says we're
00:13:05
introducing a new pamphlet for the youth, which they did, which
00:13:08
no longer explicitly bans tattoos, right?
00:13:11
They will put that out there. They will they will do that.
00:13:14
Any changes? It's all centrally run and the
00:13:17
church has, you know, different arms and it's really quite
00:13:21
complex corporate structure. But Simply put, everything comes
00:13:25
out of out of Salt Lake. There's even an app.
00:13:28
As I understand, there's many apps which which one do you
00:13:31
want? Do you want?
00:13:33
So yeah. On your on some of your previous
00:13:36
YouTube share videos I've heard you you had a login and then you
00:13:40
got this removed when you were excommunicated.
00:13:42
Spoilers you you had this removed, so yeah.
00:13:46
So, so you have, yeah, you have your church login and that
00:13:49
allows you to access things like the ward directory.
00:13:51
So all the people in your congregation, you can get their
00:13:53
emails, their phone numbers, so you can contact so and so about
00:13:55
whatever you need to. That caused AGDPR nightmare, but
00:13:59
we'll gloss over that. You have access to the store
00:14:04
where you can buy garments, you can order them online, you can
00:14:06
buy church materials, things like that.
00:14:08
It's, yeah. It's like your it's your login
00:14:10
for church activity. It allows you to log into the
00:14:12
Scripture app where you can keep your notes or your hymn book
00:14:15
app, whatever. And when I was excommunicated, I
00:14:17
lost access to that. And it was an odd moment that I
00:14:20
didn't think would affect me, but did I thought I just, I
00:14:23
can't log into this anymore. I can't, I can't log in And and
00:14:27
you know, look at these things. Yeah, it's like, I don't know,
00:14:30
like if my, if my like Evernote subscription suddenly got like
00:14:34
deleted but also like religious at the same time.
00:14:38
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So your religious Evernote's
00:14:40
just gone? Essentially, yeah.
00:14:42
Devastating. Yeah, absolutely.
00:14:45
OK, I think we can probably get the sense that the church was
00:14:49
like incredibly central to who you were even from an early age.
00:14:52
We said you're third generation Mormon, perhaps.
00:14:55
You obviously grew up in in the church, so we think we'll start
00:14:59
well, let's start with your story with like what that was
00:15:01
like. So what was your early
00:15:03
relationship like with your faith as you're growing up I.
00:15:05
Was very, very devout, very orthodox, obnoxiously so at
00:15:10
times. I was trying, I was trying to be
00:15:13
righteous. There's a performative element
00:15:15
to Mormonism where you're trying to show how much you're keeping
00:15:17
the rules. I was very, I bought into that a
00:15:19
lot. You know, the testimony bearing
00:15:21
very performative. Again, always going up and, and
00:15:24
saying what I know about the church, giving that whole, I
00:15:26
know the church's true thing. So I was very devout.
00:15:31
I, I would get up at like 5:00 in the morning and cycle to the
00:15:35
local Chapel to do the church's seminary program, the early
00:15:37
morning seminary program. So before school, I would go to
00:15:39
church during the week and learn about church things for four
00:15:42
years before I would then go to school.
00:15:44
So I did early morning seminary for for four years and I'd got
00:15:47
100% attendance. That's crazy.
00:15:49
I, when I was growing up, I had a paper round and my parents
00:15:53
would have to like drag me out of bed and then I would pretend
00:15:55
to be sick so that they would drive me round on my paper round
00:15:58
and like, instead of having to cycle.
00:16:00
So. And that was like, I don't know,
00:16:02
7:00 in the morning. We had a very.
00:16:03
Impressed experience this time. Yeah, I was not as devoted to my
00:16:06
paper round as you were to your. Face.
00:16:07
Yeah, but your paper round didn't kind of dictate your
00:16:09
eternal salvation, did it? I hope not.
00:16:13
So when you were living this really devout life, was this a a
00:16:18
fulfilling and enjoyable life for you?
00:16:20
Yeah, it, it was also a life full of kind of constant worry
00:16:24
that I wasn't quite living up to what I was meant to.
00:16:28
And there's, there's a lot of guilt in it and a lot of, a lot
00:16:32
of scrupulosity. They talk about, you know, I had
00:16:34
problems with scrupulosity and, and really feel like I had to,
00:16:37
you know, get everything right. And I think I still see how that
00:16:41
affects my life now. You know, I'm very averse to
00:16:43
breaking the rules. You know, I was moving house the
00:16:45
other day and wanted to park a van up on the street and there's
00:16:49
a single yellow line. And on the other side of the
00:16:50
street, there's a sign saying you can only do it between these
00:16:52
hours on this side of the street.
00:16:53
Nothing. My brother's there going.
00:16:55
Well, we can, of course we can just park it.
00:16:56
There's no signage. But I just.
00:16:58
No, right? No, we'll have to put it
00:16:59
somewhere else because I just can't break small rules.
00:17:02
Not good at that. Because I still have this kind
00:17:06
of very innate fear of authority.
00:17:08
Maybe. Although, but the sounds of
00:17:10
things, you have a strong impulse to follow certain small
00:17:14
rules, but you're not all worried about transgressing.
00:17:16
Others like understand that you were banned from your religious
00:17:20
studies classes at school for being too argumentative.
00:17:22
This is, in a sense kind of going against the grain.
00:17:27
So how do you, Yeah, how do you think about these?
00:17:29
I could go against the grain as long as I feel like I'm right.
00:17:31
I guess I would have to, I'd have to be certain that I was,
00:17:34
that I was right in doing what I was doing and then I can do it.
00:17:37
So like, if there's a doubt that I might be wrong, then it's oh,
00:17:40
OK, I can't, I can't risk being punished.
00:17:44
I can't risk being seen to be wrong, you know, because my
00:17:48
religious upbringing was all about being right about, you
00:17:50
know, I'm in the right church. I'm in the church.
00:17:52
They've got a right above everyone else.
00:17:53
There's a big sense of self there about being correct over
00:17:57
others. So it's like, well, I can argue
00:17:58
with my RE teacher if she's wrong, Like if it says that all
00:18:01
Christians believe in the Trinity and I'm like, well,
00:18:03
actually Mormons don't have a trinitarian view of God.
00:18:05
So sort that out, you know, like, that's not a problem to
00:18:09
stand up in that way because you feel correct.
00:18:12
But if there's a chance that the police could come along and tell
00:18:14
me to move my van, no, because I can't argue.
00:18:18
I can't be right. You know that.
00:18:20
Yeah, I've got better at that. But yeah.
00:18:21
It says you, you have a high bar for transgressing the rules in
00:18:25
terms of like confidence. But once you, once you pass that
00:18:28
bar, you're very much willing to do it.
00:18:29
Because I think maybe leads us to your your journey from
00:18:34
commitment to the church to to beginning to doubt it, because
00:18:37
at some point you went from being, you know, very Orthodox
00:18:41
in your position to what you described as being quite
00:18:44
heterodox. Keep questioning the church
00:18:46
leaders and some of their claims.
00:18:48
So given what you're saying, was this like kind of a gradually
00:18:51
built and then there was a big revelation all at once or what
00:18:53
did that look like? Yeah, I felt like there was some
00:18:56
things that built up and then I discovered some dishonesty and
00:19:00
things that I wasn't told. And I think I'd grown up with
00:19:02
such a strong sense that honesty was a value that I needed to
00:19:05
hold onto and, and was something that Jesus taught that I'm like,
00:19:09
OK, well, it doesn't matter who it is that's transgressing that
00:19:12
thing. I need to stand up to that
00:19:14
because that's wrong. And I'm backed up by the
00:19:17
ultimate right, which is the teachings of Jesus.
00:19:19
That's kind of, that's what allowed me to do that ultimately
00:19:22
is to go, well, hang on. This isn't a problem with what
00:19:25
Jesus taught. This is a problem with the way
00:19:27
that church leaders are enacting or, or the way the church
00:19:30
leaders are acting, even though they're claiming to want to act
00:19:33
the way Jesus would. That's kind of, I guess how that
00:19:35
works. I mean, I'm, I'm looking back on
00:19:37
this now five years on, so some of it's a bit fuzzy, but I'll do
00:19:41
my best to to get it right. So in your your arc from your
00:19:46
Orthodox member of the church to to various doubts, I understand
00:19:50
that university was quite an important time for you in terms
00:19:52
of you stop believing that the Bible's a literal history book
00:19:55
and you were surrounded by people with different beliefs.
00:19:57
What, What? But I assume you would have come
00:19:59
across people with different beliefs your whole life.
00:20:01
What was it about this period that that caused you to start
00:20:03
changing your beliefs? I think there's something in
00:20:05
that being away from home, even though I was away from home on
00:20:08
my mission, I was very sheltered on my mission.
00:20:10
So that was maybe different. But I trusted these people.
00:20:13
I could see they were good people with their different
00:20:14
points of view, which made me willing to listen to them more.
00:20:17
I had no choice but to listen to them.
00:20:18
In some ways, you know, these were the people I was living
00:20:20
with. And I'm quite a sociable person.
00:20:22
And I think it's really hard to pin down exactly where this
00:20:27
moment is. And I don't think it is
00:20:28
necessary one moment. I think it is a build up of
00:20:30
things that makes the very Orthodox religious person start
00:20:34
to hold space for where they might be wrong about stuff.
00:20:36
And that. Yeah, that is really hard even
00:20:38
now to kind of articulate exactly how that went down,
00:20:42
other than what I don't think would have worked is just losing
00:20:46
everything all at once. It was a case of, OK, right.
00:20:48
So the Old Testament is maybe not literal, but that's fine.
00:20:52
Doesn't necessarily need to be. I think that's OK.
00:20:55
But I can still hold on to teachings of Christ.
00:20:58
For me, a big thing was still holding on to the teachings of
00:21:00
Jesus. That was like even up until, you
00:21:03
know, after my excommunication and even now to some extent, you
00:21:05
know, that's still a thing that guides me in my life is, is sort
00:21:08
of Christian teachings as found in the New Testament.
00:21:11
So that that's where you can kind of you can, if you're, you
00:21:17
can be supple I guess is what I'm trying to say there.
00:21:20
You can let go of some things in order to keep hold of other
00:21:23
things. There's this this concept in
00:21:26
psychology that I learned about recently called affective
00:21:28
tipping point, which is where when you start hearing evidence
00:21:31
against a view you, you have for the first while, when the first
00:21:34
bits of evidence come in you, you don't actually consider them
00:21:37
at all. You just kind of dismissed them
00:21:39
out of hand. But once there's kind of enough
00:21:41
of them that seem somewhat reasonable to you, then there
00:21:45
there's a change where you begin to actually start considering
00:21:48
the views for the first time. That sounds, yeah, I'd say what
00:21:51
you went. Through Yeah, I know I'd say
00:21:52
that's, that's fair. You know, I'm living with these
00:21:54
people. We're having these debates all
00:21:55
the time. We've got a Muslim flatmate,
00:21:57
we've got an atheist, we've got a guy who doesn't believe
00:21:59
climate change is real. We're having debates about all
00:22:02
sorts of stuff. And so I'm, you know, they're
00:22:04
teaching me how to debate in good faith, how to argue well.
00:22:07
And, you know, kindly saying, you know, well, that doesn't
00:22:09
work this because of that, there's a lot of frustration at
00:22:11
those times. And they were very patient with
00:22:13
me when I would just get frustrated because I just don't
00:22:15
know because it feels wrong. But I understand the logic and
00:22:18
and, you know, I think the moon is a source of light.
00:22:21
I think is that that was that conversation is like, is the
00:22:23
moon a light source Because the Bible says it is.
00:22:24
I was like, I don't know. Stop.
00:22:28
Yeah, something is so small. But yeah, I think there is there
00:22:31
is that tipping point where at first I'm just like, Oh no, I'm
00:22:34
Mormon. It can all bounce off me.
00:22:36
But then I hear about other things like, you know, about
00:22:38
about my Muslim flatmate's religion that I don't believe is
00:22:41
true. And I'm like, well, those
00:22:42
arguments applies to him, but then I guess they also apply to
00:22:44
me. It's being open to seeing how
00:22:47
those arguments apply to someone else and then realizing maybe
00:22:50
they they apply to you as well. And in your journey?
00:22:53
It seems like particularly. Important moment of questioning
00:22:56
for you and and other Mormons was when there was leaked
00:22:58
financial information that showed how the Mormon church had
00:23:01
hidden that it was sitting on this $100 million fund.
00:23:04
Can you tell us a bit about what happened there and what you
00:23:06
thought about the churches? That was November 2019.
00:23:10
I believe that that happened right before COVID.
00:23:13
I think it in some ways it got buried by COVID, but there was
00:23:16
this leak that they had $100 billion.
00:23:19
I was like, well, hang on a minute.
00:23:21
Why are we giving all our money to an organization that's just
00:23:24
hoarding it? I mean, Jesus said some pretty
00:23:26
strong things about the, you know, the rich young man who
00:23:30
needs to go and sell everything he had and give it to the poor.
00:23:32
And I always thought that my tidy money was going to do
00:23:35
charitable work and charitable good.
00:23:37
And I started to read this and I have no reason to doubt the Wall
00:23:40
Street Journal and the Washington Post.
00:23:41
You know, I'm not, there are some people in in Mormonism in
00:23:44
America who would go, well, that's just mainstream media
00:23:46
nonsense. And then they can dismiss out of
00:23:47
hand. But I had no shortcut to just
00:23:49
dismiss these reputable institutions out of hand as far
00:23:52
as I could see them. And then you've got quotes from
00:23:55
church leaders or, you know, the head of Enzyme Peak saying, oh,
00:23:58
we just thought we didn't want people to feel like they didn't
00:24:00
need to pay tithing. You know, that's not a good
00:24:02
enough reason to hide this from people because that sounds very
00:24:05
much like you didn't want us to know because you're worried we
00:24:07
wouldn't give you money. And so now I'm not going to give
00:24:10
you. And that's when I stopped paying
00:24:11
tithing. And that sounds exactly what
00:24:13
they're. Saying exactly it is exactly
00:24:16
what they're saying. So that's when I stopped paying
00:24:17
tithing to the church and started, you know, I'm paying it
00:24:20
elsewhere because I was like, well, no, I still want to do
00:24:22
charitable good. I want to do the good I thought
00:24:23
I was doing. But I can't trust the church to
00:24:25
do that anymore. In the prescription to to give
00:24:28
tithing within Mormonism, what's the more important bit?
00:24:31
The giving to charity or that it goes via the church.
00:24:35
Going via the church, which I argued a lot with my church
00:24:38
leaders and say, well, why does it matter?
00:24:40
Because there's a scripture and as much as you've done it and
00:24:42
for the least of these my brethren, you've done it.
00:24:44
And to me, the idea that whatever you do to the poor,
00:24:46
you're kind of worshipping Christ in that way.
00:24:48
So I was like, well, if I'm going out and helping the poor,
00:24:50
then I am helping Christ. That's like, that seems like a
00:24:53
reasonable way to look at this, especially when the church has
00:24:57
shown that they're not acting appropriately with the money
00:25:00
we're sending them. So if they can change, then you
00:25:04
can give it back to them. But I think it's stupid to give
00:25:07
your money to an institution that you can see isn't doing
00:25:10
what they should be doing with it.
00:25:11
So you want to make sure it's actually doing good instead, you
00:25:13
know? But in order to get a temple
00:25:15
recommended, in order to have to go to the temple, you have to be
00:25:18
a tithe payer. And it doesn't count to not give
00:25:21
it to the church because they say it's just about the
00:25:23
principle. It's about, you know, the being
00:25:25
willing to give 10%. But it's not just about that.
00:25:28
It's about it going through the church's.
00:25:30
Coffee yeah even if you you gave the sort of your receipt to like
00:25:33
I I don't get to give me what we can my 10% they'd be like no,
00:25:37
it's not good enough it's. Got exactly.
00:25:40
And so when you learnt about about this whole, this whole
00:25:42
issue, what did it reveal to you?
00:25:44
What did you think it might reveal to you about the true
00:25:46
nature of the Church as an organization?
00:25:48
I started to see it more as a corporate structure.
00:25:50
And again, it's, it's easy to, to lean back on and go right,
00:25:55
Well, this church was established for Joseph Smith.
00:25:57
Those things could still be true, but it's now lost its way.
00:26:00
So we need to say something. We need to get involved.
00:26:02
We need to, you know, push back on the ways in which it's gone
00:26:05
astray. There's a, there's a, I'm going
00:26:07
to keep calling scripture, sorry, but there's a Mormon
00:26:09
scripture to this. We've learned by sad experience
00:26:12
that is the nature and disposition of almost all men.
00:26:15
Once they get a little power, as they see it, they will begin to
00:26:17
exercise unrighteous dominion. So it's this idea that once men
00:26:21
get power, they start to do bad stuff.
00:26:23
And there's no reason to think that wouldn't also apply to
00:26:26
Mormon church leaders because you know, you can see some of it
00:26:29
happening. You go, all right, so they've
00:26:30
become wealthy and now instead of doing what Jesus would do,
00:26:34
they're doing what businessman would do and safeguarding assets
00:26:37
and blah, blah. And then you start to look at
00:26:40
the business qualifications of the people at the top of the
00:26:43
church and you realize that all businessmen, lawyers and the odd
00:26:46
medical professional at the top of the church, like almost
00:26:48
without exception, there's there's one guy who's APR
00:26:52
expert, the British guy who's at the top of the Moreland church
00:26:54
at the moment, he's APR expert. So you've got APR Guy, a Doctor
00:26:58
Who's the prophet of the church, another medical professional,
00:27:01
and then all businessmen and lawyers.
00:27:03
Yeah, much similar to the sort of make up of the C-Suite of a
00:27:06
major company you might have like you're head of marketing
00:27:09
and then some lawyers and some MBAs.
00:27:12
At the the risk of getting slightly ahead of myself, like
00:27:15
presumably given this this scripture that you quoted about
00:27:19
a warning against too much centralization of power,
00:27:22
presumably the church didn't start off this.
00:27:24
Way and it kind of became this way gradually over time yeah,
00:27:27
there was a time the church was bankrupt itself by overextending
00:27:30
in the 60s. They had to sort of build it and
00:27:32
they will come mentality that makes Field of Dreams look like
00:27:34
a quite a financially viable sort of thing to do.
00:27:37
They essentially, when we're going to build loads of chapels,
00:27:38
we're going to baptise loads of young men by getting them to
00:27:40
play baseball and telling them that in order to play baseball,
00:27:43
they have to join the church. So, yeah, so you get these young
00:27:47
men that that don't realize they've joined the Mormon
00:27:49
church. They've taken this paperwork
00:27:50
back to their parents. Their parents have signed a
00:27:52
consent form that they thinks to play baseball, but actually
00:27:54
they're being baptized into Mormon church, right.
00:27:57
So they've gone around and cleared all that up since going
00:27:59
around UK housing estates, having to excommunicate people
00:28:02
because at the time you couldn't just withdraw someone's
00:28:03
membership, you'd have to excommunicate them.
00:28:05
So you've got these like 16 year olds who didn't realize they'd
00:28:08
join the Mormon church getting pulled into an excommunication
00:28:10
meeting, getting excommunicated from religion.
00:28:12
They didn't know they joined and they thought, right, well, we'll
00:28:16
do that and that will bring in tithe payers and that will then
00:28:18
pay for the buildings that we're going to build in preparation.
00:28:21
And it all went wrong. There's a guy called Henry Moyle
00:28:22
did it and it all went wrong. And the church was worried about
00:28:26
how they were going to meet payroll in sort of the late, the
00:28:29
late 50s, early 60s. So the 1958 figures were the
00:28:32
last time the church ever gave a full breakdown of all their
00:28:35
money because they used to just give itemized breakdown of all
00:28:37
the money. Then they stopped because
00:28:39
they're like, well, first thing we need to do is not let the
00:28:41
members know that we're in deep trouble.
00:28:43
They, they righted the ship within a decade.
00:28:45
And then they've just never gone back to their financial
00:28:47
transparency. Even earlier in the church.
00:28:50
The church was, you know, they had what they called the law of
00:28:52
consecration where everyone just gave everything they had.
00:28:54
And it was kind of quite communal.
00:28:58
And they would, you know, try and set things up that way.
00:29:01
But then that disappeared as Brigham Young kind of took over
00:29:04
and became the chief businessman.
00:29:06
So this kind of obfuscation is a bit of a theme.
00:29:10
There's a particularly appalling instance you raised concerned
00:29:14
about when it comes to the use of electric shock therapy on gay
00:29:18
men by the church in the 70s. Could you give us a bit of
00:29:20
background about that? Yeah.
00:29:23
So in the in at BYU, the church's university that they
00:29:26
have, the church runs 3 or 4 universities now, but BYU Provo
00:29:32
is there sort of flagship campus and there was electroshock
00:29:36
treatments being done there at the time.
00:29:38
The second in line to be the president of the church down in
00:29:41
H Oaks was being interviewed at the University of Virginia a
00:29:44
number of years back. And he said, oh, electroshock
00:29:47
treatment didn't happen while I was there because the idea was
00:29:50
you can electrocute gay men into being straight by showing them
00:29:54
gay pornography and electrocuting them sort of as a
00:29:56
negative feedback. He said that never happened
00:29:58
under his administration. And without going into it, I was
00:30:02
very certain that it did and that he knew about it.
00:30:05
And I had evidence that he knew about it because there's
00:30:07
documents that he signed when they had meetings about the
00:30:09
public reaction to this going on under his tenure.
00:30:11
So I had a bit of A to do with him about over this.
00:30:16
And Sarah, how did they, how did the church respond when you kind
00:30:19
of confronted them about about this?
00:30:21
Well. They agreed to read the
00:30:23
document, 3 1/2 thousand Word document I put together
00:30:25
outlining the lives of the church leaders that I'd
00:30:27
observed. And the only one that down a
00:30:30
jokes addressed was the one about him at the University of
00:30:33
Virginia. He didn't address any of the
00:30:35
others and his his only response was to send me a link to a
00:30:39
church apologist institution, Fair Mormon, their article on
00:30:42
the matter and their article said there is no evidence that
00:30:45
he would have known. The problem is the document I
00:30:47
sent contained evidence that you would have known.
00:30:49
So in him sending that back as his position, he's lying to me
00:30:53
by saying, Oh yeah, it's my position that there's no
00:30:54
evidence I would have known. But I've just sent you a
00:30:56
document that shows the evidence.
00:30:58
Really. You didn't read it, or you're
00:30:59
not being honest with me, and I feel like you probably would
00:31:02
have read it out of sort of morbid curiosity if nothing
00:31:04
else. So someone being, you know, so
00:31:06
deeply committed to this, this church and it's teachings, how
00:31:09
did it make you feel? That's when I lost complete
00:31:11
faith in my church leaders when they just when when that's how
00:31:15
he responded to me and then said, that's the help I promised
00:31:18
to give you. Well, it's not.
00:31:19
You promised to investigate all these instances.
00:31:22
So there's still all this stuff that's left.
00:31:24
And he sent a letter to my state president that I've still never
00:31:26
seen that I'm still requesting from the church and they're
00:31:28
still refusing to give me, even though it's my right to see it.
00:31:31
There was a letter written. So it's my view that under GDPR
00:31:34
I should be able to access that. But they're they're obfuscating
00:31:37
currently so. And there's another big moment
00:31:39
that you you've spoken about before where you learnt about
00:31:42
how the church deliberately hid historical documents relating to
00:31:45
a key moment in the moment Arjun story where Joseph Smith had had
00:31:50
his first miraculous vision. And so looking at these
00:31:52
different examples of the church's wrongdoings, what
00:31:56
disturbs you more about them? Is it what the church did or the
00:31:59
fact that they lied about it? I think it's the fact they lied
00:32:01
about it slightly more than what they did.
00:32:03
You know, hiding something because it's difficult, I can
00:32:06
understand that's a human failing.
00:32:09
There's this issue within Mormonism where people say, of
00:32:12
course the prophets and leaves the church aren't infallible.
00:32:14
Of course they can make mistakes.
00:32:16
But if you invite a member to furnish you with one of those
00:32:18
mistakes, they won't, They won't give you an example of those
00:32:21
mistakes because functionally they are.
00:32:24
They are infallible. And that's the issue here is not
00:32:28
that they make mistakes, is that we can't just own up to them and
00:32:30
say, yeah, no, we did hide that because it was a difficult thing
00:32:33
to talk about. Because I think what they see is
00:32:35
that if we admit that we hid it, then we're admitting that
00:32:38
there's an issue or there's incongruence between the
00:32:41
accounts or any of this sort of stuff.
00:32:43
And that will cause people to leave.
00:32:46
But what they don't understand is what's causing people to
00:32:48
leave more is that how they just can't trust these leaders
00:32:50
because they keep finding out that they're lying.
00:32:52
So I think more people would stay if they just were honest, I
00:32:56
think, but I could be wrong and they may have done that maths
00:32:59
that I I'm not in a position to to work out.
00:33:02
Well, yeah, I mean, I think that brings us on nicely.
00:33:05
And as you say, many people did leave over some of these these
00:33:09
particular crises. But you decided to stay in the
00:33:12
church and became, over time, a real internal critic.
00:33:16
Why? Why did you make that decision?
00:33:18
It's all Socrates fault. It's all Socrates fault.
00:33:24
I have described myself as the gadfly of Mormonism before.
00:33:27
I think. I think it is important that big
00:33:29
institutions like this have a conscience.
00:33:32
And if they're not willing to be their own conscience, someone
00:33:34
else needs to be it. And that sounds lofty.
00:33:37
And it wasn't just me doing it, but I felt like as someone
00:33:41
within the organization who wasn't just staying for that
00:33:44
purpose, you know, there were other things I valued about it,
00:33:47
other religious beliefs that I held still.
00:33:49
So it wasn't just that, Oh, well, I'm going to stay because
00:33:51
I can cause those of trouble. But there is a part of it of,
00:33:53
well, I can be very effective in trying to make this institution
00:33:56
more honest and more accountable as a member.
00:34:00
And ultimately, that's better for the other people I know who
00:34:02
are still in the organization. That's better for my niece and
00:34:04
nephews, better for my brothers and sisters, my parents, you
00:34:07
know, whoever it might be. It's better for those people
00:34:12
that I love that this church is more honest.
00:34:15
It's better that if my nephew goes out as a missionary in, you
00:34:19
know, a few years time, as he might do, that he knows about
00:34:22
this stuff. He knows what people are going
00:34:24
to come out in with about his own religion and that he's had a
00:34:26
chance to decide whether it's something he still wants to be
00:34:29
part of, especially because he made the decision to join it
00:34:32
when he was 8. Years old which how much of A
00:34:34
decision at that point, you know?
00:34:36
Exactly. So yeah, that that's why I chose
00:34:39
to stay amongst, like I said, there's personal and the
00:34:42
community reasons. There is this understanding that
00:34:45
I can be effective as an advocate for change within the
00:34:48
organization rather than just walk away.
00:34:51
I've also said before, you know, it's their job to get rid of me.
00:34:53
You know, there is also that, right?
00:34:55
Why should I just walk away from an organization like this if
00:34:58
they if they don't want someone like me to, you know, to
00:35:02
critique and and try and help, try and help things improve,
00:35:05
They're going to have to tell the world that they don't accept
00:35:08
people like that. And I think that won't look good
00:35:10
for them. And for a long time, I think
00:35:12
they weren't willing to do that. And then for some reason they
00:35:15
decided, yeah, no, we're willing to take the bad press and just
00:35:19
get rid of them. Yeah.
00:35:20
So one of the ways that you stayed in the church and and
00:35:24
tried to kind of make change was through your YouTube channel.
00:35:27
And I understand you sort of started really by targeting
00:35:31
particular Mormon apologetics that you saw online that you
00:35:34
found especially offensive. And So what was it about this
00:35:39
particular work that offended you and could give a sense of
00:35:41
what it was that you were reckoning?
00:35:43
But there was, this is the show videos.
00:35:44
They were the ones I started on. And there's a document called
00:35:47
the CES Letter, right? And we could have an hour long
00:35:49
discussion about the merits and the drawbacks of that letter.
00:35:52
But I still look at it as, and it is, it is functionally a
00:35:56
document that many people engage with when they're leaving the
00:35:59
church. It presents a lot of questions
00:36:01
that people don't necessarily have the answers to because the
00:36:03
church hasn't told them about these issues.
00:36:06
Not everything in that letter is perfect and it's it's like a
00:36:09
silver bullet against the judge, but it does present some good
00:36:12
questions about the translation of Book of Mormon and so many
00:36:15
other topics. So I think it needs to be taken
00:36:17
seriously. These apologists were seeking
00:36:19
just to mock it and and be juvenile and sort of this SNL
00:36:24
type skit video that was just incredibly embarrassing to them,
00:36:27
I would imagine, but just embarrassing to the conversation
00:36:30
that hurts so many people when people discover this stuff.
00:36:33
It's a painful experience and they deserve to have a grown up
00:36:37
conversation about these things, whether they choose to stay or
00:36:39
choose to leave, they deserve for it to be a grown up
00:36:42
conversation. And I that was the thing that
00:36:44
drove me to action. I was like, I can't deal with
00:36:46
these people just belittling something like this.
00:36:50
And ultimately those videos got taken down.
00:36:52
They got removed by the organization to put them up
00:36:54
because I think even they realized they were embarrassing
00:36:57
and they disappeared. And and after they disappeared,
00:37:00
they then tried to get my videos taken down because they didn't
00:37:02
want them to exist anywhere on the Internet, but that didn't
00:37:05
happen, so they're still there. When you started doing this very
00:37:09
public critique of of people who are connected to the church,
00:37:13
were you, was there any worry there?
00:37:15
Were you kind of concerned about how this what their reaction was
00:37:18
going to be of the church or? Oh yeah, I was worried about
00:37:20
excommunication from day one. In fact, when I moved to a new
00:37:24
area, I called the state president.
00:37:25
I was like, I'm worried I might get excommunicated, but here's
00:37:28
who I am, blah blah blah. Because I always knew
00:37:30
excommunication was possible and some would say I was even daring
00:37:33
the church to do it and I wasn't shy in kind of pushing their
00:37:37
buttons. And you know, there's, there's a
00:37:39
weird sort of psychology to the church wouldn't want to be seen
00:37:42
by someone like me as saying, well, go on excommunicate me.
00:37:45
And then them doing it, they'll be like, oh, no, if that's what
00:37:48
he wants and believe it. So, you know, being a bit brash
00:37:50
is sort of a tactic to be like, OK, all right, if I'm just going
00:37:53
to brash about it, then they should leave me alone.
00:37:56
Ultimately it didn't work. But that's why people will say,
00:37:58
you know, he was asking for it. I wasn't really.
00:38:00
I was kind of just trying to be provocative, I guess in some way
00:38:03
to to make them leave me alone because I was being effective in
00:38:06
in different ways. And you not only, you know,
00:38:09
tried to make change just by contesting things through public
00:38:12
videos, but you also tried to push some of your criticisms
00:38:14
with the church directly. Ultimately, your attempts to
00:38:17
change things from within do you think you made.
00:38:19
Headway Yeah, I was part and I was stressed.
00:38:22
Part of a movement to get background checks done on people
00:38:26
that work with children and youth in the church, which the
00:38:29
church didn't have to do legally, but did due to, you
00:38:33
know, the discussions that were had and the pressure that was
00:38:35
put on them. And, you know, writing a letter
00:38:37
to every Bishop in the UK, right.
00:38:39
And, and sending them all out and, and doing irritating things
00:38:42
to spark a conversation. That was, that's something I'll
00:38:47
be proud of my part in. I can't take all the credit for
00:38:51
it by a long shot, but you know, I'm proud of being part of that
00:38:55
because I think ultimately that is making the church a safer
00:38:58
place for some people, right? Before ultimately being
00:39:01
excommunicated, you had made made some progress as you
00:39:04
described. What did you think?
00:39:06
Was possible. How hopeful were you about the
00:39:09
extent to which the Church could be reformed?
00:39:11
Well, I thought if we've managed to get them to put background
00:39:13
checks in place when legally they don't have to, it's to say
00:39:16
they can't do that in the rest of the world.
00:39:17
They don't have to in a lot of states in the US at the moment,
00:39:20
but they've shown to us that they just can if they want to.
00:39:23
So why not just do it more broadly?
00:39:25
That was the place to tend take it.
00:39:26
Next would be like, OK, you've done it here now, why not
00:39:30
elsewhere did. Did you think you might, you
00:39:32
know, get out the the rot at the core of the church, or did you
00:39:36
not think that was possible? I, I viewed it more as I would
00:39:38
hand on the baton at some point, even just with my death, like as
00:39:42
I get old, you know, the next generation would have to take
00:39:45
over like this. It's going to take more to
00:39:47
generational change to fix the church.
00:39:50
Some argue it just can't be fixed.
00:39:51
I've never held that position and I think I always viewed it
00:39:55
pragmatically as the church exists.
00:39:57
It's an incredibly wealthy organization.
00:39:59
If I can get it to shift even 1%, then that will be an
00:40:04
incredible amount of good. Like if I can through pressure.
00:40:06
And again, not just me, a lot of people doing a lot more work
00:40:09
than I've done. Have made the church give more
00:40:12
to charity like actual faith blind charitable donations in
00:40:15
recent years. Those people if they donated all
00:40:17
their wages their entire life wouldn't have done that much
00:40:20
charitable good to the tunes of the 10s of millions of dollars
00:40:23
that were done. So getting these big
00:40:24
organizations to shift is effective in in getting
00:40:28
charitable work done. So again, I looked at it as
00:40:30
well, if I can get them to be incrementally better, that's
00:40:32
still going to affect way more people's lives and make hello
00:40:36
more people way more comfortable in the religion they found
00:40:38
themselves in. Yeah.
00:40:40
I mean, how many bed Nets could you buy with $100 billion,
00:40:44
right? The church could end malaria I
00:40:46
think is an issue the amount of money they have.
00:40:48
I mean, if you think about the size of the recent cuts in the
00:40:52
UK to to aid, for example, and the Gavi vaccination program,
00:40:56
like, you know, these are these are the same similar kinds of,
00:40:58
you know, money. We could could do a huge amount
00:41:00
of good with with all that money.
00:41:01
It'd be crazy. One of the things that I the of
00:41:05
the sort of pieces of your kind of criticism that I found really
00:41:09
kind of instructive about who you are as a person was your
00:41:12
voting against church leaders. So for those who don't answer,
00:41:15
apparently it's part of the Mormon church to every every
00:41:19
time you have a meet a sort of Sunday meeting as.
00:41:22
I'd say it's like a big meeting. So it's like it's like 4 * a
00:41:25
year. You'll get all the all the
00:41:27
congregations in the diocese will all meet in the the main
00:41:30
building and that vote will then be conducted.
00:41:32
Yeah, and you and you, Everyone votes for the church.
00:41:36
They put their hands up to say we, we still like the church
00:41:39
leaders, except for you. So tell us about that.
00:41:43
Well, again, they shouldn't ask a question if they don't want an
00:41:45
honest answer. That's their fault really.
00:41:48
And again, this is where like stepping out is easy for me
00:41:50
because I'm well, there is a carve out for if you know of
00:41:55
something that should stop them being in that position, then you
00:41:59
should say something. Those are the rules.
00:42:00
Doesn't matter if you're going against the social norms, which
00:42:04
are that everyone just puts their hand and says yes, even if
00:42:07
they do know. I know of things that should
00:42:09
preclude the senior church leaders from being in a
00:42:11
position, IE that they're not being honest.
00:42:13
You know, these are significant things.
00:42:15
So I will oppose their sustaining.
00:42:17
I don't think they should be in that position until we can get
00:42:19
to the root of this honesty issue.
00:42:21
I think the one that's stand around the most is I sing.
00:42:24
I'm a choral singer. I caused all sorts of trouble by
00:42:27
singing with the Tabernacle Choir recently, but before that
00:42:29
I was in the stake choir, the sort of diocese level choir.
00:42:33
And they had, I didn't. They sat me behind the state
00:42:37
president during this vote and it was being live streamed, so
00:42:39
it got recorded, me standing up behind him and voting opposed.
00:42:43
It's quite a funny little little clip.
00:42:45
That is, yeah, that was the in. Front of 500 odd people.
00:42:48
And all the people online and just to be really clear, like
00:42:51
you're voting against. It is it's not like, oh, you
00:42:54
voted against. Like this is not the done thing,
00:42:56
right? This is like big taboo and
00:42:58
you're standing there looking out at 500 people as you do the
00:43:03
sort of equivalent, I don't know of like pulling down your
00:43:06
trousers in the middle of church sort of thing, right?
00:43:09
Like, but in a political way, like, what was that like?
00:43:14
It, it was nerve wracking initially and it became a bit
00:43:16
more comfortable and I think the people got used to it and it
00:43:20
was, it was funnier when I'd be elsewhere and I wouldn't know
00:43:23
that a sustained vote was going to be happening.
00:43:25
So I went to see, there was a special meeting in Ireland and I
00:43:28
went out there and they didn't realize they're going to do a
00:43:30
sustaining vote. I was like, well, they're asking
00:43:32
a question in front of me, so I'm going to have to answer.
00:43:34
So I stood up in front of these people know me well.
00:43:37
I say that I've never been to a since I started doing this on
00:43:40
YouTube. I've never been to a
00:43:42
congregation where someone hasn't recognized me, which is
00:43:45
interesting. Believing members who are like,
00:43:47
I know you, I appreciate what you're doing.
00:43:49
You know, by and large, they got used to me doing it.
00:43:51
And so it became less nerve wracking over time, but
00:43:53
certainly at first, very nerve wracking, very difficult to do,
00:43:58
lots of kind of heavy breathing. And I think ultimately, though,
00:44:02
it's still worth it. It's worth because I did have
00:44:05
some people come up and say, well, thank you for actually
00:44:07
standing up and voicing your concerns, if that's how you
00:44:11
feel. You know, not everyone.
00:44:12
I've got daggers from some people.
00:44:14
But, you know, there are people who understand that that is how
00:44:18
the system works. And just because these top
00:44:21
leaders have chosen to kind of function, make themselves exempt
00:44:23
from this system, doesn't mean that scripturally this system
00:44:26
isn't the way we should be behaving.
00:44:29
It used to be that you would go, if you went to General
00:44:32
Conference and did it, you'd speak to a church leader.
00:44:34
And now they're like, I'll speak to your state president.
00:44:36
Why? They're not that busy.
00:44:37
And there's not that many people at the conference.
00:44:39
Like, they could absolutely take the time to speak with the
00:44:42
people who vote opposed, but they choose not to because I
00:44:45
think they want it to be a sort of symbolic ratification of
00:44:48
their position, but they don't actually want to deal with
00:44:50
anyone's real opposition. Because that's what led my
00:44:53
letters to go to down their jokes and all that sort of stuff
00:44:56
and all that thing that was them.
00:44:57
I was trying to set a precedent for what would happen, but
00:44:59
ultimately they showed they're not really that interested.
00:45:01
It's interesting, like as far as sort of religious dissidents go,
00:45:07
you're actually not so much like a progressive or a reformer as
00:45:10
you are like a purist that's trying to hold the institution
00:45:14
itself to the rules that reports to follow is that.
00:45:17
Yeah, that, that is the key to it for me.
00:45:20
It's like these are the rules of the game that I was taught.
00:45:23
This is how the church brought me up.
00:45:24
And my sense of justice is that if the church isn't living by
00:45:29
the rules that they said they should be living by, then that
00:45:31
needs to change. And I've got room for people to
00:45:35
be fallible, but I don't have room for them not to face any
00:45:39
kind of consequences for their infallibility because I grew up,
00:45:42
like I talked about earlier, about the scrupulosity, about
00:45:44
feeling the need to repent for every little thing that I get
00:45:46
wrong. So to see institutional leaders,
00:45:48
the church, not enacting that repentance process is very
00:45:51
difficult to see them not holding themselves accountable,
00:45:54
not apologizing to those who need to be apologized to.
00:45:57
You know, if you've offended, if it's between you and God, you
00:45:59
can keep it between you and God. But if it affects the entire
00:46:01
church, which these people do, then their repentance process
00:46:05
belongs to the entirety of the church.
00:46:07
You know they need to see that. So yeah, it's interesting.
00:46:09
It's like your your loss of faith in this institution was
00:46:13
not a matter of an inclination to rebel, but an inclination to
00:46:17
follow properly. Yeah, it's essentially, yeah.
00:46:20
That's why I was saying like I still got this heavy rule
00:46:22
following. I've got better at it, but
00:46:24
there's still this heavy must follow rules to the point where
00:46:27
if I see other people breaking the rules, I kind of got to
00:46:28
snitch them in a little bit. Yes.
00:46:31
Essentially ratting on the leaders of the Mormon church for
00:46:33
not playing for the rules. Interesting.
00:46:35
So for some period of time for it seems like quite a long time,
00:46:40
they're broadly happy for you to continue to criticise from the
00:46:45
inside. You're standing up and making
00:46:47
your opposing votes. You're running your YouTube
00:46:50
channel that's growing and then it seems like a land Bible,
00:46:54
which is a basically a YouTube channel and media company in the
00:46:58
United Kingdom. They interview you and this is
00:47:03
kind of a unprecedented for you level of exposure.
00:47:08
And this is when you being around doesn't seem to be quite
00:47:11
so OK. No, like there's that that gets
00:47:13
filmed. I I fly to Texas and back in 72
00:47:16
hours. That's also key and I speak out
00:47:19
against the building of the temple because they're making
00:47:21
religious arguments that I don't think are actually religiously
00:47:24
necessary within our faith. So I'm pushing back against the
00:47:27
arguments they're making and they're not happy with that.
00:47:30
But my state president when I met with him after that said, Oh
00:47:33
no, that's fine, I'm not worried about that.
00:47:35
So you know, then LAD Bible comes out.
00:47:39
Then because of LAD Bible, BBC Radio reach out and they
00:47:42
interview me about my honesty box appearance.
00:47:45
And yeah, that's when it I get a letter in the post saying, oh,
00:47:49
we're calling this excommunication meeting.
00:47:52
Yeah, we're calling this membership council.
00:47:53
You can turn up if you want. If you don't turn up, we will
00:47:55
still make a decision without you.
00:47:57
It'll be On this date. And I managed to get them to
00:47:59
move the date a little bit. But fun fact, they had it on a
00:48:02
Monday morning, which no church meetings ever been on a Monday
00:48:04
morning before. But they wanted, if the media
00:48:08
were going to be there, they wanted it to be daylight.
00:48:10
So the optics would be better. That is 100% true.
00:48:14
That's what I was told, that it wouldn't be some gloomy shock.
00:48:17
And so this excommunication to see if people said it's, it's
00:48:20
almost like a sort of quasi judicial process, a very
00:48:25
secretive one, but it is there is a, a effectively prosecution
00:48:30
there. You you get to defend yourself.
00:48:32
You have some. You can bring some witnesses.
00:48:34
Yeah. Give us a little bit of a sense
00:48:36
of what this thing really is like I.
00:48:38
Was told kind of what the charges were like clear and
00:48:41
deliberate public opposition to the church, its leaders,
00:48:43
doctrines, policies, etcetera, intentionally working to weaken
00:48:46
the face and activity of church members.
00:48:48
Those were like the two charges, but they wouldn't tell me what
00:48:51
evidence they had to back that up.
00:48:53
They just wouldn't and so they brought some things up.
00:48:57
You know, we, I've talked about before, they brought up, you
00:48:59
know, some private communications that have been
00:49:00
shared with them. They brought up emails that I
00:49:03
had sent to my local leaders in this kind of how dare you reach
00:49:06
out to your local leaders about things which you really ought to
00:49:09
talk to them about. But they didn't like that the
00:49:11
things I was talking to them about might weaken their faith.
00:49:13
And they kind of didn't really point to the YouTube channel,
00:49:18
but yeah, they just, they just didn't like the way I was
00:49:20
communicating, I guess. But they were all so nonsense
00:49:23
because none of them really met the charges that things, a lot
00:49:26
of what they brought up wasn't public, so it couldn't be clear
00:49:29
and public deliberate public opposition to the church.
00:49:33
And a lot of stuff they brought up wasn't intended to weaken
00:49:36
anyone's faith. They can't prove that I did that
00:49:38
with the intent to weaken anyone's faith.
00:49:39
And there's no evidence that my intention was such, and it
00:49:42
wasn't. I was very sort of agnostic to
00:49:45
people's faith. They could remain or they could
00:49:47
leave. I kind of didn't really mind as
00:49:49
long as they knew what was going on.
00:49:51
In this like quasi judiciary process, is it actually possible
00:49:56
to win as the defence? Does this ever happen?
00:49:59
It it does, but not over things like apostasy, which is what I
00:50:02
was charged with, right? I was charged with the big A,
00:50:04
with apostasy. So yeah, like people, people
00:50:08
have walked away from it. People walked away from it with
00:50:10
lesser consequences, you know, like membership restrictions.
00:50:12
They can't do certain things for a little while and then it's
00:50:14
fine. But I think the the reason I
00:50:17
couldn't walk away from it was it seemed like it had come from
00:50:20
the top down. One day I might be able to prove
00:50:22
that. But that's that seems to be the
00:50:25
the case because it came out of nowhere and it came off the back
00:50:27
of some media appearances that my state president had said
00:50:30
we're fine and then all of a sudden weren't fine.
00:50:32
And then again, lad Bible wasn't brought up in my
00:50:34
excommunication, right as something I'd done wrong.
00:50:36
Neither was BBC Radio right. It was these weird, like it was
00:50:40
these emails that I'd sent to local church leaders, which I
00:50:42
taught to my Bishop, my state president, about months before.
00:50:45
And he'd said, OK, I wasn't very happy, but I understand why you
00:50:48
did it and you're not going to do it again, so that's fine.
00:50:51
So I didn't do it again. And then six months later I'm
00:50:54
getting called into an excommunication meeting over
00:50:56
those emails. And it's like.
00:50:57
Yeah, it's a weird kind of, it's a weird kind of show trial, but
00:51:01
a show trial in which you're not allowed to take any notes.
00:51:05
You know, there's like complete secrecy over this thing that is
00:51:08
also a piece of theatre, which is a weird kind of paradox, I
00:51:12
think. You know, as, as you allude to,
00:51:15
you don't win this trial excommunicated.
00:51:18
And this is no small thing, right?
00:51:21
Like this means you're you're not just not a member of a local
00:51:24
church, but I don't think you can participate in any church
00:51:27
anywhere. So the restrictions are
00:51:30
interesting. I can go to church if I want.
00:51:32
I just can't actively publicly participate.
00:51:34
So I can't like say a prayer, I can't teach a lesson.
00:51:37
I can't do any of those sorts of things.
00:51:38
I can't take the sacrament. I can't wear garments.
00:51:41
It cancels all my ordinances. So that that pathway I was
00:51:44
talking to you about earlier, it's as though none of those
00:51:46
things ever happened to me. So it's like I was never
00:51:48
baptized. I was never sealed to my wife.
00:51:50
So we've had essentially an eternal divorce.
00:51:54
So they chose to separate me and my wife for eternity, which my
00:51:58
wife, who was there and I, you know, managed to get her the
00:52:01
opportunity to speak. She made it very clear to them
00:52:04
that she was not happy that they, in their belief, were
00:52:08
willing to separate the two of us for eternity.
00:52:10
Over this. Everyone seemed quite trivial.
00:52:13
Yeah, it's, it's funny, isn't it?
00:52:15
Because if we assume that they believe everything, then the
00:52:20
people in the room are essentially saying that they're
00:52:23
going to separate. You know, as you say, the end of
00:52:27
the pathway is being connected to your partner for, for life,
00:52:30
sorry, for eternity. And they're going to undo that
00:52:34
for eternity because they were told to by one of the higher ups
00:52:39
in the church. And if if they believe
00:52:41
everything, that's, that must be what they're understanding
00:52:44
themselves to be doing, which is, yeah, I don't know, there's
00:52:46
something, there's something about that where you're sort of
00:52:49
like, what kind of what kind of psychology is going on there for
00:52:53
a person to who believes that this is the stakes that they're
00:52:56
engaging in? And, and this is a man who's a,
00:52:58
who's a professional lawyer, like outside of his church
00:53:01
service, he, he works professionally as a lawyer in a
00:53:03
big company. So like he's able to follow
00:53:06
rational arguments and these things, but he has to switch
00:53:08
that part of himself off when he's in that room.
00:53:12
It's, it's incredible the sort of mental gymnastics that people
00:53:15
are able to do and they do it all with a smile.
00:53:17
Can you bleep things on this? Yeah, right.
00:53:19
Because a famous excommunicant, Margaret Toscano, who's part of
00:53:23
a group called the September 6th, she described it as being
00:53:25
raped by Care Bears. It's this idea that these people
00:53:29
are pretending to be lovely and and, and nice to you, and with
00:53:32
all these smiles and this very Mormon niceness are enacting
00:53:35
this act of spiritual violence on you all with a smile.
00:53:40
Yeah, that's how she described it.
00:53:41
And I I would agree it's pretty horrible.
00:53:43
Yeah, tell me more about what this experience was like for
00:53:45
you. Well, I was meant to have the
00:53:47
whole high council there, so it's a group of 12 people that
00:53:49
should have been there. Six of them should have been for
00:53:51
me, 6 of them should have been against me and they weren't
00:53:53
brought in. I requested them.
00:53:54
That request was denied. It shouldn't have been denied,
00:53:56
but it was. And so again, I think to to
00:54:01
protect them from the mind virus that is me talking about these
00:54:04
things, right? The less people they expose,
00:54:05
even though it was my emails with these high councillors that
00:54:09
formed part of the issue. So they were trying to say that
00:54:11
someone's faith was weakened by the sending of these emails.
00:54:14
So why can't we have a chance to chat to the people?
00:54:17
And I say, right, which one of you had your faith weakened by
00:54:20
the emails I sent? Can you explain to me why your
00:54:22
faith is weakened by what I sent?
00:54:23
And maybe we can have a discussion about that.
00:54:24
No, they weren't. They weren't there.
00:54:26
So I turn up and we have it in a small room that's very warm.
00:54:30
I wore a white temple suit and to kind of try and signify my
00:54:34
innocence, but it's made of the finest American polyester, so it
00:54:38
was incredibly sweaty. It was a very warm room.
00:54:43
And you're you're brought in, you sign these documents to say
00:54:46
you won't record or any of these sorts of things.
00:54:49
And then the evidence is laid out against you.
00:54:51
Then you have a chance to respond.
00:54:52
Then your witnesses can speak and then they deliberate and I
00:54:55
brought 8 1/2 thousand words of defence that I put down a leaver
00:54:58
arch in front of each of them and made them read through it
00:55:00
with me. Took about 40 minutes to read
00:55:03
just going through how here's the problem with this argument,
00:55:05
Here's the problem with this argument.
00:55:06
Knowing that none of it would wash, but that then one day I
00:55:09
would be able to present that to the world, which I've never,
00:55:11
I've never published, but I will at some point publish my defence
00:55:14
and say here's why I shouldn't have been excommunicated.
00:55:18
Even if you think, of course the church wouldn't like the things
00:55:21
you didn't like, so many people look at me and say, well, of
00:55:24
course the church wasn't going to like what you did, that's
00:55:26
fine. But they have to actually
00:55:27
legitimately find me guilty of the things that they're charging
00:55:30
me with. They don't just get to
00:55:31
excommunicate me because they don't like what I'm doing.
00:55:33
It has to actually meet some sort of standard of not
00:55:36
acceptable as codified by the church's own rules.
00:55:39
They can't just, they can't just kick you out of the vibes,
00:55:42
especially when it has the eternal consequences that we're
00:55:44
discussing, right? Sounds like you should have been
00:55:46
able to like declare some sort of mistrial.
00:55:48
Yeah, I would. Yeah, it's absolutely because
00:55:51
they said they, they took into account all the evidence.
00:55:54
But if they had, they would have realised that the things they're
00:55:58
accusing me of weren't Publix. They didn't meet necessity of
00:56:00
charge one and they had failed to prove my intention to weaken
00:56:04
anyone's faith, so they couldn't meet that charge either.
00:56:07
So I should have been acquitted, as it were.
00:56:09
So at this point, you know, you've learned a bunch of things
00:56:14
about the church that that disturb you, and then you've
00:56:17
been treated personally in in ways that that disturb you.
00:56:20
And yeah, this is still like a institution you've grown up in
00:56:23
and have really deep connections with.
00:56:25
So when you're getting kicked out, do you at this point still
00:56:29
want to be a member? Yes, initially.
00:56:33
And then with some time away from it, I think I start to get
00:56:36
to realise that, OK, I've done more than a lot of people in my
00:56:40
position would have achieved. I was, I think I had some time
00:56:46
to get some perspective on it and think, you know, OK, I've,
00:56:48
I've not achieved everything I wanted to and they have kicked
00:56:51
me out. But in the time I managed to
00:56:53
avoid getting kicked out, I've made some big changes.
00:56:56
I've done impactful work and it's now very clear, if it
00:57:01
wasn't before, it definitely is now that this institution
00:57:03
doesn't want someone like me, doesn't want someone like me as
00:57:07
part of its organization. And so then at that point I can
00:57:10
start to go, well, OK, I'm, I'm OK.
00:57:12
Then I will find my own way, which I'm still working out, but
00:57:16
I can kind of let go of that now because they've made it clear
00:57:20
that they don't want me anymore. So in some ways it's good that
00:57:24
they did, because otherwise if I'd walked away at some point, I
00:57:26
don't think I ever would because I wouldn't have ever fully
00:57:30
realized because I was still being accepted day-to-day on a
00:57:32
Sunday, you know, I was still being well liked and cared for
00:57:36
and invited to do things and whatnot generally so.
00:57:39
Yeah, I wonder so, so there's the institutional peace and and
00:57:42
wanting to remain part of this community that you've been in
00:57:46
forever. But I guess one of the things
00:57:49
that we've discussed like your main, your main issues
00:57:53
throughout this has been not with your not a sort of falling
00:57:56
out of your Mormon faith necessarily, but with the church
00:58:00
as an institution. So I just wonder when you're
00:58:03
being excommunicated, like given your, your religious being at
00:58:08
the certain at the time, like is there any, is there any sort of
00:58:12
fear here about that kind of the kind of the spiritual
00:58:15
consequences of this or like, how are you, how does this
00:58:19
instance connect to your wider faith beliefs?
00:58:22
Well. Because the, the Mormon
00:58:24
scriptures say that if people excise unrighteous dominion,
00:58:27
they lose their priesthood authority.
00:58:28
At this point, the church leaders have no priestess
00:58:30
authority anymore as far as I'm concerned, right.
00:58:33
I'm looking at them again. They've, they've lost that.
00:58:35
And so any sort of spiritual thing then acts upon me isn't
00:58:40
really valid, you know, as it, it sounds like I'm just getting
00:58:45
to say, well, I don't believe in the rules of their club, so
00:58:48
doesn't matter. But I guess what I'm saying is,
00:58:50
you know, from that perspective, they've fallen so far from the
00:58:53
standards that you would expect from these of the church that
00:58:56
that decision is just one more bad decision they've made.
00:59:00
And so I think in the justice of eternity, Jesus will work it
00:59:06
out. That's kind of how how I'm
00:59:08
thinking at the time in in the room is kind of like, OK, well,
00:59:11
these men don't really. They they certainly they claim
00:59:14
to speak for God and they came to speak for Christ.
00:59:16
But this isn't what Jesus would do.
00:59:17
So I don't think he's going to hold them to this.
00:59:20
So, you know, I don't think I think he'll be like, all right,
00:59:24
yeah, I see what you're trying to do.
00:59:26
Maybe you didn't go back the right way, but yeah, they
00:59:28
shouldn't have done that to you or whatever.
00:59:30
Did you consider kind of starting your own breakaway
00:59:33
church? No, the Mormon church has too
00:59:35
many of those already. Oh really?
00:59:37
Oh so many? There's a chart online of just
00:59:40
so many breakaway groups. I have.
00:59:42
I have. Seen that chart?
00:59:43
Yeah, it's it's pretty crazy trick.
00:59:45
You didn't fancy being a cult leader or?
00:59:47
No, I, I, what is it? Creed says in the office.
00:59:50
It's like you have more fun as a cult follower, but you make more
00:59:52
money as a cult leader. The the the fact that there are
00:59:58
all of these splinter groups suggest that you haven't been
01:00:04
alone in your willingness to go against the granite.
01:00:07
Now, the difference is I don't. I didn't have such a grand sense
01:00:11
of self as to believe that they're wrong, but I'm right.
01:00:15
I knew I'm I know I'm flawed. I know that I'm not speaking for
01:00:19
God. I'm just doing my best to, to
01:00:22
live to the standards I was taught by the church and to hold
01:00:25
the church to those same standards.
01:00:27
And I could be wrong about that. And, and it's been a big
01:00:30
exercise in me, for me in being able to accept when I'm wrong.
01:00:33
This journey, a big part of letting go of being able to be
01:00:38
OK with being wrong. And part of that is putting
01:00:39
yourself out there online and getting comments all the time
01:00:42
and, and learning not to be immediately defensive when
01:00:45
someone critiques something you've done, but think, OK,
01:00:48
let's have a look at the critique.
01:00:49
Did I get something wrong? And when I do get something
01:00:51
wrong, I often put out videos and say, yeah, I did get that
01:00:53
wrong. Sorry guys, but equally seeing
01:00:56
when someone just attacks you personally, you're like, OK,
01:00:58
well then yeah, that's, that's not a critique on the substance
01:01:02
of my argument. That's that's just them being
01:01:04
mean. So it's also fine.
01:01:07
Yeah. So I I think that's, that's how
01:01:10
I kind of dealt with that. I didn't want to be another
01:01:13
leader amongst people or anything.
01:01:15
I just wanted to see this big institution, it's already well
01:01:17
established to be better. You are familiar with a bunch of
01:01:20
these dissident groups. You've also interacted with a
01:01:23
bunch of other questioning members of the the church.
01:01:26
Is there like a, a taxonomy in your mind of like different
01:01:30
types of people? It must be like psychological
01:01:32
profiles Is the person that questions it, but it has like
01:01:35
delusions of grandeur and becomes like a cult leader.
01:01:37
There's the person that questions it in, in the way that
01:01:40
you have. Maybe there are other types as
01:01:42
well. And then people that don't
01:01:43
question it at all. Like how?
01:01:44
How would you think about the psychology of these different
01:01:46
groups? Yeah, there's, there's lots of,
01:01:48
there's lots of different groups.
01:01:49
There's the people who would just turn away and go.
01:01:50
It's all nonsense. A good microcosm of this is 1.
01:01:53
Some people will come onto the ex Mormon Reddit, which is a big
01:01:56
site for for ex Mormons and they'll say, how can I get
01:01:59
excommunicated, right? They'll be like, how can I make
01:02:02
the church kick me out? And I will often comment about
01:02:05
as someone that has been excommunicated, don't bother.
01:02:07
Like it's, it's not a fun experience.
01:02:09
You think it's going to be really fun and cathartic.
01:02:11
You know, I see lots of people thinking like, that certainly
01:02:13
wasn't for me. You also get people who are
01:02:18
like, no, I resigned because I didn't want to give the church
01:02:22
the power to remove me. I want to take that choice for
01:02:24
myself. You see other people say I'm not
01:02:25
even going to resign because I'm not going to legitimize their
01:02:28
bit of paper that says I'm one of them.
01:02:30
I'm just going to walk away. So you get lots of do even in
01:02:34
that. There's that little microcosm of
01:02:35
the different attitudes you get. There's people who just want to
01:02:37
completely delegitimize it as an institution.
01:02:40
There's people who recognize that it's still an institution.
01:02:42
There's people that want to actively get the institution to
01:02:45
do something to them. There's people that actually
01:02:47
want to see the institution disappear.
01:02:50
I'm certainly of the camp that it's not going to whether you
01:02:52
want it to or not. It's too big, it has too much
01:02:54
money, it can't disappear. So the best thing we can do is
01:02:57
make it behave better. They, they've described a bunch
01:02:59
of different ways that people can change their mind with
01:03:01
regards to their relationship with the church, but the
01:03:03
majority don't they, they stay with it.
01:03:06
When we speak to our guests who've changed their mind about
01:03:09
different things and try to understand like, why, why are
01:03:11
they willing? It's often some version of like,
01:03:13
you know, I, I was Born This Way or something.
01:03:17
Do you think that's the case with you or is this something
01:03:18
that can be cultivated or what is it about?
01:03:21
No, I, I, I've always been like this.
01:03:25
I've always been sort of obstinate in my pursuit of
01:03:31
things being right or wrong or of, of justice.
01:03:33
And as I see it, and that can be difficult when you're wrong
01:03:35
about it. But realizing I was wrong about
01:03:42
the church, realizing the church wasn't what I thought it was,
01:03:46
didn't removing me the value set that the church, pardon me,
01:03:51
because I can still see value in that.
01:03:52
Whereas for other people they're like, right, Well, if the church
01:03:54
didn't once said it is, then I don't have to follow any of the
01:03:56
rules or any of the values that it instilled in me.
01:03:58
Whereas I'm like, well, no, I think the values are still good.
01:04:03
I can still see utility in them. I, I, it's a way I want to live
01:04:07
my life. And I'd rather see the church be
01:04:09
more like that. I want the church to be what I
01:04:11
thought it was because I think that is a good thing.
01:04:14
I think a big institution like that, doing charitable good is a
01:04:17
good thing. I think truly Christian churches
01:04:21
are a good thing for the world. When they actually are concerned
01:04:24
with helping the poor and using their wealth to improve the
01:04:27
lives of others, that's that's nothing but a good thing.
01:04:30
And if they foster a good community where people don't
01:04:33
come to harm because they're not dragged into interviews and
01:04:36
asked inappropriate questions or they're not, you know, abused,
01:04:38
and then the abuse is covered up or any of these sorts of things,
01:04:40
when when things go well, I think these things are good.
01:04:45
And the problem some people would come back with is, well,
01:04:48
you know, that's utopian thinking.
01:04:49
No group of people is ever perfect.
01:04:52
And I get that. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't
01:04:53
strive for good things. Doesn't mean we shouldn't desire
01:04:56
for good things. Otherwise, that's when nihilism
01:05:00
starts to kick in because, well, if we can't get there, what's
01:05:03
the point? Well, the point is in the
01:05:05
striving, in the journey, you do make improvements and some
01:05:07
people's lives are improved. It's interesting you say you've
01:05:10
always had this obstinacy, because you can.
01:05:11
That's definitely a thread throughout your story, but
01:05:14
another thread is a willingness to also kind of like look at
01:05:18
things differently, right? So at university you're saying
01:05:21
like, yes, you at that time you were at one point in time,
01:05:25
you're like, this is that my, I know that my faith is real, so
01:05:29
that can't be true, but that changes.
01:05:31
And I wonder what it is you think that gives you the ability
01:05:36
to do that when it seems like so many other people who heard
01:05:39
about the, you know, the financial scandals and all these
01:05:41
other things and they know they have been exposed to this
01:05:43
inflation that haven't gone on that same journey.
01:05:48
Is it Jonathan Heights fault? Did I read The Righteous Mind
01:05:51
and just work it all out? I did read that book around that
01:05:55
time and that was helpful to kind of understand how everyone
01:05:58
thinks they're right, understanding how everyone
01:06:02
thinks they're right and how everyone essentially it feels
01:06:05
it's more important to appear right than to be right.
01:06:07
And, and that desire is bigger than us.
01:06:10
I think if we can recognise those things in our self, then
01:06:12
we can become more willing to actually listen and actually
01:06:17
change. When we can recognise why are we
01:06:20
resistant to this idea? My resistance to this idea
01:06:23
because it reinforces things or reinforces paradigms within my
01:06:27
life that I need to reinforce because it would be too painful
01:06:30
for me to address. Yeah.
01:06:32
I also look at other people's motivations.
01:06:33
I was fortunate that my father had left the church when I was
01:06:36
6, right? And I had some siblings who were
01:06:39
in the church and some siblings who were out.
01:06:41
And while one of my siblings doesn't talk to me anymore
01:06:43
because of my actions towards the church and my sort of
01:06:46
activism and whatnot, I have other siblings that I have
01:06:48
better relationships with now than I did when I was very
01:06:50
self-righteous. So I think having other people
01:06:55
to to go to and not feel like I was going to lose everything
01:06:58
also helps because for some people, even if they want to
01:07:03
explore this, they could lose everything, their job, their
01:07:07
family, all those things. And that's one of the perks of
01:07:11
being a Brit in the Mormon church is you've got other
01:07:13
people around you, different people, non Mormon people.
01:07:16
If you're in the middle of, you know, Utah County, you work
01:07:19
potentially for the church or for a church member.
01:07:22
You you've got six kids and your wife's incredibly in and all
01:07:25
your family are in and you're the one that wants to step out
01:07:28
and go, no, it's not for me. That's just incredibly
01:07:30
difficult. So in terms of takeaways for for
01:07:33
people on how they can make it possible for themselves to
01:07:35
undergo really big changes like this, I mean, one that you've
01:07:37
just into that there is like having a diverse social world
01:07:42
and community, not having all of your identity eggs in one
01:07:44
basket. Are there any kind of other bits
01:07:47
of advice you would give to someone who's starting to
01:07:49
question their own deeply held beliefs and and wants to make
01:07:52
sure that they kind of have the the strength to follow through
01:07:57
and go where the evidence takes them?
01:07:58
I've just thought of this on the fly so people can rinse me in
01:08:01
the comments, but I would encourage people to ask
01:08:03
themselves, why do I want this to be true?
01:08:07
Why do? Because you will feel that that
01:08:10
desire that you need something to be true.
01:08:13
Why do I want that? And is wanting it to be true the
01:08:18
same as it being true would be the little steps I'd go with
01:08:22
with certainly. I think that reflects some of a
01:08:24
lot of my thinking is like, OK, why do I want this to be true?
01:08:27
OK, I want it to be true because it's the way I've grown up,
01:08:30
because it would mean difficulty in my marriage or XYZ.
01:08:33
OK, So these are these are the motivators for my reasoning that
01:08:36
I've now identified. And just because of those
01:08:40
external pressures, does that make the thing that I think is
01:08:42
true, actually true? And then you'll find the answer
01:08:46
is possibly not. And that opens that door for you
01:08:48
to then explore whether it's true or not.
01:08:50
But that's there's no silver bullet for particularly
01:08:53
religiously indoctrinated people.
01:08:55
There is no silver bullet to change in their mind.
01:08:57
And everyone is different. I think for me it was being able
01:09:00
to see the problems with the church as disconnected from
01:09:04
having to lose all my religious faith in one go that allowed me
01:09:07
to take that step into, OK, right.
01:09:10
Well, it's a problem with the institution.
01:09:11
It's probably the organization. And then start to see maybe the
01:09:14
religious beliefs, what they were as well.
01:09:16
Like certainly when it comes to church, the Old Testament thing
01:09:19
is kind of a precursor. That was maybe the first example
01:09:21
of me just changing my mind about anything.
01:09:23
But certainly when it comes to my bigger steps, it's being able
01:09:28
to like cut it into those bits. If it had just been, well, if
01:09:31
the leaders are wrong, then none of it's true.
01:09:35
That's too much for a lot of people to swallow.
01:09:37
Yes. They're not trying to bite off
01:09:38
the whole thing in one go, but finding an adjustable bit that
01:09:42
you can maybe question and then that opens the door.
01:09:46
Everything else. And for some people, they'll
01:09:47
never get past that digesting of small bits.
01:09:51
That's how apologists exist in the church, right?
01:09:53
There are people that have gone well, OK, yeah, this is a
01:09:55
problem, but I can justify it because these other things still
01:09:58
back me up. So that people that have started
01:10:00
down the road but have never made it to the other end of it.
01:10:03
And you just get other people that are like, that will remain
01:10:05
in the position that I was in at the time, excommunication
01:10:08
forever. Like, right.
01:10:09
Well, I've got a Christian belief, underlying belief, but
01:10:11
I've got problems with the institutional church.
01:10:13
And they'll take themselves to other places.
01:10:14
That's why not everyone that leaves the Mormon church becomes
01:10:16
an atheist because for some people, when they deconstruct
01:10:19
the Mormon church, they deconstruct all of religion.
01:10:20
But for other people, they're like, well, no, OK, Mormon
01:10:23
church wasn't doing it right. But I like Anglicanism.
01:10:25
That's my that speaks to me and my religious needs.
01:10:28
So I'm going to go there. And that's fair enough.
01:10:30
It's interesting, before we were recording, we were talking about
01:10:33
like how the people who run the Mormon church get kind of to
01:10:36
their headspace. And there's an interesting
01:10:39
parallel, I think between kind of what you're describing there
01:10:42
as kind of your journey and what we were hypothesizing might be
01:10:45
theirs. In that you sort of like, OK,
01:10:46
you start in one place and you go, OK, well, obviously like we
01:10:49
were saying, like the church is more bureaucratic.
01:10:51
So obviously not everything we tell the members can be true.
01:10:53
And you sort of you sort of build up.
01:10:55
But in your case this this process led to you to a good
01:10:59
place and maybe for them. Well, and, and I think it does
01:11:03
speak to just generally the way that people change their minds
01:11:05
perhaps is that it's done in increments and by degrees.
01:11:08
And we can't cope with a lot of big change in in one go.
01:11:13
That's what leads to existential crisis and things like that.
01:11:15
And and when too much changes, because we, I think as humans
01:11:18
think we like stability. I think we like things to be
01:11:21
quite. Constantly.
01:11:22
Yeah. I guess the the main difference
01:11:23
is what's motivating the change in your.
01:11:25
In your case, it's a desire for to be morally consistent and to
01:11:31
find the truth. And in their case, potentially
01:11:34
it's something that's a little more self-serving.
01:11:37
Yeah. Yeah.
01:11:39
Well, I think that's a good place to end it.
01:11:41
So, as always, our final question, what's the one thing
01:11:45
you'd like to see more people change their minds about?
01:11:48
I think more people should be willing to change their minds
01:11:50
about other people. And what I mean by that is in
01:11:54
the very tribal world that we seem to live in at the moment,
01:11:57
it's very easy to just lump someone into a label or a group
01:12:01
and then be like, well, that's who they are and just cast them
01:12:03
off. And being willing to recognise
01:12:05
them as an individual and change your mind about them.
01:12:07
That just because they vote one way or they have a certain
01:12:10
religious belief or anything like that doesn't mean that you
01:12:12
know everything about them. And that some of those
01:12:14
assumptions you may have made about them could be wrong and
01:12:16
you might have something in common with them.
01:12:18
I think that that that's something I would like to see
01:12:21
more of people change their mind about is other people that
01:12:24
they've made assumptions about or put into.
01:12:26
Camps. Well, thank you, Nemo.
01:12:28
This has been a fantastic conversation, really
01:12:30
interesting. Thank you very much for your
01:12:31
time. Yeah, pleasure.
01:12:32
Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to
01:12:35
Change My Mind. We're a new podcast, so if you
01:12:38
liked what you heard, consider giving us a star rating on your
01:12:40
podcast type of choice or sharing your favorite episode
01:12:43
with a friend. Either way really helps us get
01:12:45
the word out there. Special thanks to Harrison Wood
01:12:47
for editing and production. Support.
01:12:50
If you have any guest suggestions or feedback,
01:12:51
especially of the critical kind, we'd love to hear from you.
01:12:54
You can reach us at Hello and Change My Mind pod.