Serving a Mission at Historic Mormon Sites - What I Wish I Would’ve Known - Camille Jones p.1 - 1477

Hi, welcome to Mormon Stories Podcast. If you're watching this or listening, you will notice that I am not Jonalyn. I am Cara Burrell, and I am your host today. John Delin is right over at the desk, riding sidecar in my normal position.

Hi, John. Good to see you, Cara. Good to see you, John. So, um, today, you guys are in for a fabulous and interesting and introspective interview. Today, our guest is Camille Jones. And Camille, hi Camille, by the way. Okay, just do a cutaway for that for a second. Um, so, a quick overview of some of the things we're going to be talking about today. Camille was an administrative assistant, is that? Oh, no. Yes, administrative assistant to the Quorum of the Seventies in the Missionary Department. In the Missionary Department. All right, I need to get this right. Administrative secretary to the Quorum. Secretary to the Quorum of the Seventies. Because I am not looking down at notes, I am so just like going off memory. So, um, we had Linda Clyde and her daughter Savannah on a couple weeks ago, and that was a really fabulously interesting interview where she talked about, uh, being a copywriter for the church and a lot of the inner workings of how the LDS Church works. And, um, that was that was a really popular episode, a really fascinating episode. So, along that same line, we're going one step further, and Camille's here to talk about her experience, um, working with a lot of the Brethren, of a lot of the top leaders. And among a lot of the other things that we're going to be talking about is just, uh, also, uh, the dynamic between men and women in the workplace, and how the LDS Church handles, um, uh, women in the workplace. So, uh, welcome, Camille, to Mormon Stories. Um, is there anything else that you want to add or take away, um, about this intro that I just did?

I think it's a great intro.

Okay, great. I'm not nervous at all.

Okay. Um, John, what else would you like to add?

No, I, I'm really excited, Cara. Thank you, thank you so much for being willing to lead this interview. Camille, when we talked and met early on, um, I, you know, there, there are a couple major themes here. One is, again, working for a General Authority, uh, and in the Church Office Building. Being a woman in the workplace, like Cara said. But also depression, like experiencing mental health issues in the, in the workplace. And as I talked to you about your story, I thought, man, wouldn't be cool if Cara could lead this, kind of a woman-to-woman thing, because that's just such an important element. And so I'm really glad you're willing to do this, Cara. And, you know, it, I don't know if we're ever again going to have someone who works directly with the General Authorities, sort of, uh, on the show. So for all those reasons, I'm sure this is a bit of a sensitive thing for you. I'm, I'm sure it might be a little bit scary. So thanks so much for being willing to come on and tell your story.

Thanks. I'm a little nervous, but it'll be okay. It'll be good. You're in good hands. You can tell the story. Yeah. And especially, that's a good thing to start with is, yeah, thank you for being brave enough to come out and talk about the things that have affected you and that you're passionate about, and that people can kind of get a window into how the church works from your perspective and from a woman's perspective. So I think this is going to be really good and really important. Um, so, uh, should we get started?

Sure. Where does your Mormon story begin? Tell me about your, your upbringing.

Um, I am one of five girls, so I've got four sisters. And it was a very Mormon family. My dad was bishop for a number of years. My parents have had callings all the time. Um, and it was, you know, pretty typical Mormon childhood. Seminary, girls camp, all of the normal things.

And you said you just, you grew up just 10 minutes away, like right around here in Salt Lake City?

Yep, local here in Salt Lake. Um, I don't know, what do you want to know about my, my childhood?

Tell me about, uh, it says that you were bullied a bit. Was that, uh, part of kind of your development?

Oh, yeah. I forgot I put that in there. Um, so it was actually our ward was an unusual boundary line. We've got a condo complex within the ward that I grew up in, and, uh, most of those people were like retirees. So we had a very small youth program, and I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. And at school, I had similar problems where I was kind of the odd person out. So I didn't get a lot of socializing with people my own age as I was growing up. Got bullied while I was in elementary school, and just kind of learned to be on my own. And that played a part into something that happened while I was a teenager, young teenager. I learned to be good friends with adults rather than with kids. So I would go hang out at these senior couples' houses, and I'd call them Grandpa or Grandma. And there's a nice guy around the corner who taught me how to do some woodworking, and we made boats. And would play cards with this lady who lived in the condos. And when I was about 13, I started spending some time over at another neighbor's house, and she would do baking with me and taught me how to crochet. And she was a grandma age, and I called her Grandma. And then she had her son who moved in with her, and he was in his 50s, and he taught me how to play chess. And it just seemed like another one of those normal adult-child interactions. And I started to call him Uncle. And, um, then there was one night that he gave me a hug, and he wouldn't let go. And I didn't understand what was happening, but I knew I was scared. And I ran home, and I didn't ever want to go back. But I didn't know what to say about it because I didn't understand why I was afraid. And then he sent a letter to my parents saying that he would be willing to wait until I was 16 before he married me. And he was in his 50s. He was 52.

Oh my gosh. And you were 14.

So that's why I included that in my outline. Yeah.

Was he in a ward?

He was in the ward. And he was a member. He was married. Um, he was divorced.

Hmm. Okay. And so did he, he asked you or he asked your parents?

Yes, my parents. But of course, my parents called me in and asked, "What is going on?" And I said, "I don't know." Um, I don't actually remember much of what happened in that conversation because it was just, I had no idea what was going on. And I was so shocked that, you know, I hadn't even thought about boys. I mean, I didn't have friends my age, really. So it was out of the blue and unusual, and I had no idea what to do with it. Yeah.

So you said you were 14 at the time. Had your parents had any discussions with you about, like, sexuality or anything along those lines?

No. No. What sex was or nope. We did inappropriate boundaries or normal elementary school maturation program. And, uh, it was the summer before I started eighth grade year, which is when we do, you know, the sex ed class. So I hadn't even done sex ed yet. Um, yeah, I had, I had no, I had no idea. I, I didn't understand any of that. And then of course, I was traumatized when I went into the sex ed, and I was like, "This is what that means." Wow. Oh, wow. But we never talked about it again.

You never talked about it with your parents again? You never saw the man again?

Or well, I saw him because he was in the neighborhood. Okay. Um, you never like went over to his house again?

Probably freaked out. Yeah. Yeah, I never, I never went back, which was sad because I really liked his mom because he'd moved in with his mom there.

So did you continue on having relation, like not relationships, I mean, just like friendships with, with adults after that, or did that scare you off?

Um, I still had friendships with adults. Um, I was a little more cautious who I had friendships with. They ended up being mostly like Young Women's leaders. And, um, again, we had a really small Young Women's, and I just, I didn't ever feel like I fit in. I was kind of in that in-between. So we had people who were older, and we had people who were younger. There were a couple of my age, but it just never seemed to, to mix well with them.

To what extent did you have, kind of, a typical Mormon upbringing in terms of like family meetings, scripture study, orthodox belief? Was it a pretty normal home or not a normal home in, in the Mormon regard in Salt Lake City?

Um, what decade? What decade are we talking about? We're talking about, well, childhood, 90s. Okay. It was in the 90s. Um, we did kind of family home evening was on again, off again. We weren't terribly good at that. And I'm sure, um, my parents were always trying, but it just, it just, you know, it was a busy household, so it worked sometimes and most of the time not. Um, we were expected to do scripture study on our own. Uh, we did do family prayer every morning. Um, my mom's thing when we were leaving the house in the morning was to ask us, "You brush your teeth? You say your prayers?" And then she would send us out the door. So those were the two requirements in the day.

You know, brush your teeth, say prayers. Right. Good priorities. Yeah. Yeah.

So do you feel like you had, like, a developing testimony throughout your childhood or any spiritual experiences that you felt like tied you, um, to the church in, like, your own independent testimony kind of way?

Well, yeah, I mean, growing up, that was all the thing I knew, you know? You go to church on Sundays, and Dad has callings, and Mom has callings, and you're supposed to always accept your callings, and, uh, read your scriptures. And we had our little child scripture, with, you know, do you remember the ones that have the photos on them? And it had like, not quite the scripture, but kind of the paraphrase underneath it. So you were kind of doing a picture version of the scriptures. We started off with those. I can't even remember when, just, you know, little.

And you mentioned your dad was bishop for most of your childhood as well, so you probably had some expectations to live up to.

He was bishop my entire time I was in Young Women's. Oh, really? Okay. So I was the bishop's daughter. We all were.

The five of you?

The five of us. Yeah. Kind of like Pride and Prejudice.

Did you have any, like, other particular struggles throughout your teen years?

Um, I think I dealt with depression while I was a teenager, too. But, you know, we didn't do mental health.

What do you mean?

Um, it wasn't, it was no, it wasn't discussed. It wasn't, you know, I mean, you get the regular questions of, "How are you doing?" But, uh, if you were struggling, it's okay, we'll just go pray, you know? Or do you need a blessing? Or, and it was like, church was supposed to be the answer to all of the normal growing up mental health problems. Um, yeah, I think a lot of people kind of grow up with that paradigm that if you are feeling depressed, there's some other box you're not ticking. There's another prayer you just need to hold closer to Christ.

Did you, did you feel like relief? And did you feel like God loved you and you felt good when you prayed? And that, like, alleviated your depression? Or sometimes it can go the other way where you just feel like you're never feeling any better and you're not doing things right?

Um, I never felt like I was doing enough. There was always something more that I was missing. And so I don't think I ever felt like praying more was helping me. Um, but of course, I didn't, that's looking back. Looking back at it, while I was there, it was like, "Okay, I just, I just need to do more. I just need to pray more. I just need to read more often. I just need to be more. I just need to do more service. I just need to do, you know, there was always more that I had to do."

And how did that, like, translate into your, I guess, self-image or what you thought about yourself?

It was about the same summer, I think, that this neighbor issue happened. I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, "I don't like what I see."

Did that stick with you for the majority of your teen years then?

Yeah.

What do you think was going on with this, like, so, for, I think for some of us that were raised Mormon, we might have a sense for what was going on in the mind of this grown man who was hugging you for way too long and wanting to marry you when you were a child. But for those who weren't raised Mormon, who wouldn't even understand what might have been going through his mind, what would you guess was kind of happening with this guy and you as a 14-year-old?

I mean, 14 is a special age. Those of us who know about Joseph Smith and church history, that's a special age. So were you a few months shy of 15?

Yeah, exactly. If you count six is a few months shy, maybe.

[Music]

I didn't know before the issues with Joseph Smith and and young girls. Um, I honestly can't speak to what was in his mind because I never saw him again. And the only way that I knew him before was his, um, kind of, you know, this avuncular sort of figure in my life because I called him Uncle. I called his mom Grandma. And so in my mind, I was treating them like family. Yeah.

Just recently, uh, I was, I was interviewed for a documentary about sexual abuse in the church. And so I, I wanted to be prepared. And so I put out a call to my listeners on Facebook and everywhere else, just, "Hey, if anybody experienced sexual abuse in the church, and particularly if the church, like, covered it up or protected the abuser at the defense of, you know, at the expense of the victim, I'd love to hear about it." And I just, it was so depressing. I got like over 100 personal narratives of people's experiences with abuse, mostly women. And I got really angry at the end because I just, I realized time and time again, the church, number one, it just seemed like the church was this culture of abuse where men were abusing women and young women. But secondly, that the church somehow was just set up to, um, to protect male abusers at the expense of victims, even where victims would not only be pressured to forgive, but even punished for not being willing to sort of believe in the atonement and immediately forgive the abusers when oftentimes the abusers weren't even punished. And the reason why I'm bringing all this up is, I concluded, and this is for the listeners who don't know about Joseph Smith and the founding of the church, because we have a lot of never-Mormons who listen. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, married several 14-year-olds and 15, 16-year-olds, mother-mother-daughter pairs, sister pairs. He married over 30 women and, you know, sexually active with with many to most of them, probably. And so we have baked into the origins of our church a, a proclivity to defend, I hate to say this, but sexual predators, because our founder kind of could easily be viewed as one. And so when I think about this man, I don't know how much he knew about our church history, but I'm assuming that maybe he knew that Joseph Smith tended to like young girls. And so how could he not feel, I'm just speculating, but how could he not feel permission or license to do what his beloved founding prophet did? Does that make, I, I don't want to just project that on, but, but I just, I just wonder about that. I wonder if you wonder about that.

Um, I have wondered about that a little bit, especially recently. Um, I did ask several years later, "What happened?" You know, my dad was bishop, so the only thing that they told me was that they would take care of it. And the only thing I saw from my perspective was he stopped going to church. And so as a youth, and especially growing up with the, you know, into Young Women's where they start teaching you about, okay, morality and sexual purity, and I started worrying about, "Was it my fault? Did I do something without realizing I was doing something?" And he would stop going to church. And so I asked my dad at one point if, um, if I had done something. And it turned out he had had a, um, disciplinary council. And he was for that or for that for hugging you? For, for proposing to marry me, I think is what it was. Um, and he had expressed somehow in this council, and I was never told that this happened, so I had no idea that anything had actually even been done until I was 18, 19, something like that. Um, but he'd expressed in this council that he believed in polygamy. So I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, if he had known about Joseph Smith and his child rights, I guess.

Yeah. And what was the punishment?

He was just fellowshipped.

Okay. So he was not excommunicated?

He was not excommunicated. He was disfellowshipped, and then he went inactive.

Like, how do you interpret that? I mean, the church excommunicates, for example, Sam Young because he basically told the church, "What you're doing, allowing 12-year-old girls to be alone with bishops, is harmful and maybe even grooming behavior." And so he leads a march to say, "Hey, church, protect children better." He's excommunicated. This neighbor, who hugs you forever, proposes to marry you as a 14-year-old, and tells the church he believes in polygamy, he's kind of let go with, for a slap on the wrist, four months, just disfellowshipped, and then he's back in full, full membership. Like, what does that tell you about the church and its priorities?

I don't know if he ever made it back to full membership because he did go inactive. He stopped going to church. But he wasn't excommunicated. No, he was not excommunicated. Um, I don't know if I've ever thought about that. That comparison that you just drew is pretty stark in my mind, and I don't like it.

And he mentioned in your outline that that wasn't the only time that that happened, is that right?

That's right. In, in terms of him? Or just, oh, no, somebody else did that to you?

And we don't want to jump too far ahead in the timeline, but is that almost like along the chronology that after the disciplinary council, the, you said you mentioned when you were 18?

Yeah, so I found out. Well, I found out that he'd had a disciplinary council when I was 18. Again, nobody told me anything. It was just, "We'll take care of it." And then my viewpoint was, he just stopped coming to church. So I was worried that I was a cause of his losing his faith, which is pretty heavy to bear as a young woman and as a victim who's already, yeah. Yeah, I guess that too. Yeah, because I was also worried that I was the reason that he had done what he had done, whatever it was. I didn't under, I still didn't understand what had happened and why I was afraid. Um, I didn't understand how people could look at me that way as a 14-year-old. Um, so it wasn't until four years later when I asked, you know, "What had happened to him?" Because he had just died of a stroke. So he was still inactive when he died. And so I was dealing with all these feelings of, "Was it my fault?" And so I'd asked. And it was about six months later or something like that, that a boss, he was an employer, um, invited me into like a supply room. Mormon guy, Mormon guy, married, had children. He was still married, I think he still is. He, he invited me into this room at work. And asked him, you know, why? Because I thought, you know, we were collecting supplies for the day, and I thought, "Did we forget something?" And he came over and he put his arm around my waist and he says, "You just feel so soft today." And I immediately, you know, went around with this, we were outside, and I went around to the other side of the car and I was like, "No, I think we have everything we need." And he apologized. But, you know, that was, that was, that was freaky. It was that was another one of those that scared me. Yeah.

That's really, that's really frightening. And you said it was your boss?

It was my boss.

So did you, were you able to tell anyone? Or what, what happened from there?

Again, I told my parents. He was a friend of the family. And I don't know if anything happened. I don't know if he's ever had any kind of church discipline. And later, I started to worry that he, I was not his only one or his first person that he'd tried that with. I was working with, there was a group of us coworkers working on an area, and she made a joke about how, how gross it would be if somebody who was, you know, that old, you know, wanted to make out with somebody. And I started to wonder if maybe I wasn't the only one.

Well, yeah, usually people who are kind of like that, like the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, like it would be rare, I would, I think, if there's just, oh, like somebody has a one-off proposition of a young lady. It's probably more their personality to, uh, subjugate women or harass women in the workplace like that.

Well, I hope for her sake and for him and for his family that I was the only one, right? I don't want there to have been anyone else.

What was it like to have that happen twice? Because, you know, within a four-year period, you're barely an adult, and you've already had two men, Mormon men, adult, way older than you, Mormon men, sexually proposition you, basically. What does that do to, in your mind, again, you said you wondered the first time whether there was something you were doing wrong or whether it was your fault. What went through your mind when it, when it happens the second time?

Well, as an, as a 19-year-old, I'd learned a little bit about flirting. And I was wondering, really, at that point, "Did I do something wrong? Was I dressing wrong? Did I say something? Was I too friendly?" Because I'd never thought of him in that way. So I knew I wasn't purposely flirting with him, but did I do something where he could have construed it that way? I really, I really wondered if it was my fault.

And I wonder where you would have ever gotten the idea that, yeah, how you dr, how you dressed or how you behaved influenced or influences someone else's behavior.

Oh, you wonder. Do you spell that out? If you don't?

Yeah, I was about to ask, do you remember any particular lessons, whether like implicitly or explicitly, throughout your time, whether in church or family home evening lessons or anything that would just form your conditioning to feel like it was your fault that somebody was, um, harassing you like that?

I don't know if I remember anything in particular. We've got the Strength of Youth book that, you know, we're supposed to read all the time. I went to BYU-Idaho, and we had something where we had to, whatever religion course I was in, had to read that through, that, and like write things out on each one of them. If I was wearing anything at home that was like borderline, I'd get a comment.

What's a borderline?

You really should put a camisole underneath that, you know, like the, the top was a little too low or, um, for, and why would the justification be that if you didn't then what?

The implication was that it was, I don't know, it was immodest, and therefore was a problem. If a woman dresses immodestly, it's our responsibility, I guess, our modest dress makes it our responsibility to keep things pure and holy. And, and tie it to young men. Just, I really want to spell this out for those who have no idea what we're really talking about here. Tie it to the young men.

Am I, am I making that up?

Or no, I think it just depends on whatever conditioning you get, whatever messages you get, what you pay attention to throughout your adolescent period. So some people get it heavier than others about their responsibility to not turn on boys around, and they need to cover their shoulders and make sure their shorts reach a certain length.

So when you're mentioning, like, you're wondering, you know, "Is this my fault? What's my responsibility in this?" Were you, like, thinking to what you were wearing or what you could have possibly done that would tell your married employer that you'd be interested in something like? Were you just scanning your brain for what you were wearing and what you could have done differently?

I was wondering if, you know, should have worn a camisole underneath my shirt because if I bent over, then, you know, you'd see my back or stupid, stupid little things that shouldn't be a problem anyway.

Yeah, there's not a reason in the world where anyone should have skin showing or no skin showing that an employer thinks it's their place to proposition, um, one of their employees like that. Like outrageously, yeah, inappropriate. But also that somehow your instinct was that it must have been your fault. I, I just have to feel like that's conditioned in some way based on our Mormon upbringing.

Yeah. Yeah, and I'd agree with that.

Is there anything else that you want to say about that period in your teenage years? I'm totally curious about, like, what it's like. Explain for our non-Mormon listeners, what the role of a bishop is, maybe a tiny bit, and then why that would be hard to be a teenage girl and have your dad be the bishop, or, or maybe it wasn't hard, maybe it was amazing and awesome.

I don't think it was necessarily hard. Well, it wasn't hard on me. I think it was harder on maybe my mom. So the bishop is over the ward, over the congregation, and the congregation will have several hundred people in it. His job is to make sure that everybody's taken care of, that they're all, um, spiritually progressing, that all the lessons on Sunday are accurate to, you know, what church headquarters wants the lessons to be, you know, they're following the manuals. Um, he, my dad did a lot with the youth. He really felt that the youth was, uh, important, and that was probably because he had five daughters, three of which were in Young Women's. Um, so he was at all of our girls' camps. I know he went to some of the young men's camps. But there, there was some pressure to, you know, live up to the standard, live up to the, the idea that this is, this is what a Mormon family ought to be, right? You know, our house looks clean, we're all at church on time, sort of, because, you know, five girls trying to get all of us out of the house on, at, on the same time schedule. You had like a couple bathrooms?

More than one curling iron?

Oh, yeah, definitely. Um, but yeah, and then we did evening firesides occasionally, and every once in a while, Dad would announce one from the pulpit, and it would be for that evening at our house. And I remember watching my mom's face go, you know, you know, firesides, you have to have refreshments, right? Yeah. And you have to have a space to set up in. So, you know, we'd get home from church, and it was, "Okay, bake brownies and make more brownies." And then we got to get enough chairs set out, and all the youth are coming over, and their leaders. And yeah, it was, there's definitely some responsibility and some expectation and a bit of a limelight on the family, right?

So if your dad was bishop, how did you navigate bishops' interviews or temple recommend interviews? Was it fine? Was it just like talking to your dad, or did he kind of like switch into bishop role when he would interview you?

It was more talking to my dad. They were very comfortable, and I was used to talking to my dad. I like to talk to my dad.

So you really having, so, well, you talked about a lot of the limelight on that. You just totally skipped all of the, like, common, uh, uncomfortable bishops' interview problems that a lot of teens have then?

Worthiness? Yeah, the worthiness interviews. Yeah. It was, it was very much talking to my dad. And he'd go through the questions, but it wasn't uncomfortable conversation. I really do enjoy sitting down and just having a good chat with my dad. And, yeah, it was normal. And he didn't go into any detail on the sexual questions that I know some people have had trouble with, that they had uncomfortable interviews with priesthood leaders on. Yeah. Yeah.

So there's nothing throughout your teen years you felt like you had to go to your dad, the bishop, to repent for? Nothing in particular? And it was just talking to your dad? It was nice.

So overall good bishops' interviews, nothing scarring there?

No, nothing scarring. Yeah. Uh, the older men in the ward, not so much on, not so positive on that, on that front.

And then you went to college. You went to, did you do seminary?

I did do seminary. Was that important or not important or significant?

It was important. Um, my older sister was on seminary council, and, uh, we were close enough in age that we overlapped a little bit. So she was part of seminary council while I was in high school. And seminary graduation was important for us to, you know, we had to get to graduation. It was up there with high school graduation. You know, you had to get to, you had to get both of them.

And did you do any dating? Like group dates? What was the atmosphere for dating that you participated in?

I didn't do a lot of dating. I went on a handful of dates, mostly with just two or three guys. My social life in high school was choirs, and it was just, I don't know, it was awkward. I didn't do very good at the dating thing.

Didn't do very good at the dating thing? No. Did that depress you or were you?

I definitely knew that there was a difference watching friends go out on dates and I was not. And when I got to college, there's a couple of us, and we created a group called the Dateless Wonders because we made lemonade out of lemons. Okay. We tried. We'd watch movies on Friday nights because we didn't have dates.

Yeah, that's better anyway. Oh, teenage boys, like, who needs them? Really. The first year was great. Then you get into, you know, your second and your third year, your fourth year, and you're still not doing much on the dating scene in college, and it's like, maybe the Dateless Wonders aren't that great anymore.

Did you have, [Music]

I was going to ask, did you have, uh, any, I totally forgot my question. I hate when I do this. Oh, yeah, I remember it now. Um, so with everything that you just mentioned with these men proposing marriage to you and all of these uncomfortable interactions, did that scare you away from boys? Did you see, did that influence your perception of men at all and the way that you viewed dating or sexuality? How did that work out?

I've definitely been much more self-conscious. And yeah, I always view dating less as getting to know someone or having fun with someone as this is for marriage. And since we never talked about it as a family, and we never talked about sex or, you know, dating was just a thing that was supposed to happen at some point. And, um, never talked about the problems that I had with adult men, I was just kind of left on my own to try and figure out, well, I'm supposed to be dating, but I'm not.

Did it make you feel like there's something wrong with you?

Oh, yeah.

What do you think? First of all, I couldn't figure out why nobody was dating me. And I'm sure I was giving off some sort of vibes of, you know, being really uptight or, um, uncomfortable, or, and I was a bit of a nerd, so I'll just be straight up and say, I, I looked like a nerd. And I sat around with my books, and it wasn't terribly sociable anyway. But, you know, a lot of nerd.

What are your nerd credentials?

Oh, I don't know. What are nerd credentials? Uh, Harry Potter, you know. Oh, yeah. Read Harry Potter. I was there for the midnight releases of the books, not just the movies, but the books. Uh, I was reading. I, there was a summer I read a novel, well, I definitely read, I, I think I read 30 novels in a month.

Whoa. Um, a novel a day?

A novel a day. This means in the summer though, so you don't have like school. Yeah. Yeah. During, during the school week, your school year, it was more like a novel a week.

It's a lot of reading. It's awesome. I love nerds. I think nerds are awesome.

Oh, I read Shakespeare when I was 10.

What?

Yeah, I picked up the Shakespeare sonnets and read all. I didn't understand him completely, of course, but I could read Shakespeare when I was 10.

I mean, I'm speaking for guys. Like, one of the things I hate about what I know about teenage guys is that if a girl's super smart, they're going to probably be less interested, potentially, because they're intimidated. I, I don't like saying that, but I think that might be true. It's probably not just teenage boys. I think probably adult men too, are probably not always wanting a, a partner that might be more intelligent. I hate that. But who cares what men want? They want so many different things. I'm not here to try to find a window into what teenage men or six-year-old men want. Who knows? They sound kind of messed up.

Absolutely. We were just doing our sound check and before this started, and Camille's over here reciting Shakespeare, and I have to do my sound check. And I was just describing the Egg McMuffin I had for breakfast in great detail. So we're basically like Shakespeare, McDonald's menu. We're kind of like, I, we have the same exact vlog. We're basically like, what's the difference? Basically. So anyway, okay, just for clarification, I pulled out Shakespeare because I was reading it last night. Somebody had said something and it reminded me of the speech from Henry V at Agincourt. So I had to. Anyway, that was just on your mind. It was there. It was already there. Radio Free Mormon would be proud because he's a huge Shakespeare fan.

Oh, great. Yeah. Sorry, you'll have to go to his podcast next. This is not the Shakespeare, no podcast of Cara. This is, uh, McDonald's menu. I like Shakespeare. I am not a Shakespeare scholar. Don't put me in that category. I'm not that much of a nerd. But I think we were actually just talking about, like, boy attention to boys when you were a teen.

Yeah. And you were, you were theorizing that it might have been because you were more bookish.

I, I'm sure that that was part of it because you can't go on dates if you're not socializing. And I was doing a lot of reading. Um, but I was also wondering why other people who did a lot of reading were going on dates and I wasn't. And, you know, in college, you'd try and do a little more socializing. You're not with family, and, you know, you live with a bunch of other girls, so you're seeing guys to come over to see the other girls. And, you know, you've got classes and whatever. And I was still not dating.

So this was at BYU-Idaho?

BYU-Idaho. Which BYU-I, there's no shortage of ring by spring. Yeah, there's no shortage of men looking for dates with women there.

So you said that your roommates were going on dates while you weren't.

Oh, no.

How does that make you feel?

Just lonely. I mean, that was a lonely way to spend evenings if they were all doing stuff and I was by myself. Which is why we made our little Dateless Wonders group. Yes. Yes. Gotta, like I said, make lemonade out of something. My high school friends had, uh, the Virgin Lips Club for all the girls who hadn't been kissed yet. And then they slowly would one after the other be kissed, and then they got a certificate to leave the club. So I was kissing boys too young, so I was not involved in this club. But I get it. I get the solidarity that ladies need to have with each other when they're being asked out, especially in Mormon culture. Yeah. And there's just, yeah, like a really strong, uh, need to have everything revolve around getting married, you know, young.

I could throw one more uncomfortable interaction with men from college days in between semesters. I was working at a bookstore. It was a Seagull Book for those who are Utah people and know that that's a church sort of focused bookstore. We had a customer come in, and I was helping him find something in the Doctrine section. And he let me know that if they ever did reinstitute polygamy, that he'd like to have me as his second wife.

What the hell? What, what is up with these Mormon men in Utah?

Don't ask me. I'm not, I'm not a Mormon man. I can't answer that question. I, that's what I told him. That's what I was saying. I was like, "Who knows what's going on in their heads?" But John was onto something. When you have a church that's founded by somebody who was just, "Hey, lady, hey, lady, you want to be my wife?" Joseph was just offering and propositioning women to, you know, he probably had what, up to 40 wives? So it's not that far of a stretch. But somebody's in the Doctrine section at Seagull Book, they're like, "While I'm looking up the founding of our church, let me live up to our founder's ideals about polygamous marriages here."

That one didn't affect me as much because he was a complete stranger. It was like, "Okay, well, that's weird." But it still happened. And it's still part of that, you know, mental makeup of who I am as a woman in, in a Mormon culture. But all joking aside, one of the really cool interviews we've done is with Carolyn Pearson, who wrote a book called The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy. And she is so beloved, uh, within progressive and post-Mormon circles. But she just wrote this book about how polygamy is still on the books as Mormon doctrine. It's in Doctrine and Covenants, section 132. And, um, and it basically, you know, we all grow up as Mormon men learning about it, believing that it, God's a polygamist. We know that Russell Nelson is a polygamist. Alan H. Oaks is a polygamist. These are the two top leaders in the Mormon Church right now. And when I say polygamists, they are sealed to multiple women in the afterlife. And like, you know, what the Mormon Church leaders, I think, want to convey to the world is that, "Oh, polygamy is something we stopped a hundred years ago. We don't believe it anymore." But the, the whole point of the book, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy, is that it's still very much with us today. And it colors how men look at women, and how, and how women look at themselves. Tell me if I'm wrong. Have you read that book?

I have not read that book. I've read so many books, and we haven't gotten to that one. You could write that book, probably.

Have you heard about it?

I have heard about it, but only through listening to this podcast.

Okay. Yeah. So she's like, I know where you're going with this, John.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So, you said it kind of colored just the way that you viewed your role as a woman in the church, that that's how people are going to look at you.

Yeah. I mean, all of these things combined, and the upbringing that the greatest thing that you could be is a mother in Zion, you know? You were meant to get married, you were meant to have children. My patriarchal blessing told me I was going to marry a righteous priesthood holder and bring choice spirits into the world. That was that was my role. That was my, you know, fulfilling the measure of your creation.

What age did you get your patriarchal blessing?

14. Oh, interesting. Interesting. Yeah. All those things. So all of those things kind of intertwine, yeah, into your perception of your role as a woman in the church.

So this Seagull Book was in Rexburg?

No, that was here. Oh, it was here. Okay. I was in between semesters. Oh.

So do you want to get into anything else about just the culture of BYU-Idaho and your experiences there? And to our, especially your non-Mormon listeners, what it's like going to BYU-Idaho?

Oh, well, church schools are like the indoctrination centers. I'm sure the church is happy to have so many students who, you know, they, they have to go to religion classes, and if you don't take your religion classes, you're not going to graduate. So you really get church from all perspectives. You go on Sundays, teachers or professors are encouraged to bring it up in classes, uh, to talk about morality that way. I studied English, so, you know, we're talking about, "Okay, well, this is the morality of that time frame. This is why it fits or it doesn't fit." I remember I had one, kind of, I considered her an edgy professor because she taught Nietzsche a little bit. We were doing the more modern British literature, and it was, it was to me, it felt edgy. You know, "God is dead, and we have killed him." Holland would like to have some words with her, maybe. And I didn't, I didn't really care for her at the time because I was definitely true blue. I was into the whole church thing, and the idea that, uh, this kind of opposite worldview could exist didn't sit very well with me at the time.

What do you mean by opposite worldview? "God is dead and we have killed him." Did they teach it like in a, that this is what some people believe and like, it's just be smart to be open to these ideas?

It was just, well, we were analyzing literature from the modern British time frame, okay? So James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, you know, those kind of authors, and this loss of faith. The, okay, so it was [Music]

How to say it? My last assignment in that class was this great big paper, and we're supposed to pick a modern British author and do some sort of an analysis on their life or their work. And it was supposed to be more of a broad look, so not pick a book or a story and and analyze it and write about it. It was all of it. Um, and I picked C.S. Lewis. You know, modern British author, right? And we were supposed to put together this outline and turn it in. And I was taking a really heavy credit load because I was really trying to graduate that semester, and I just did not have time. And she wrote back and said, "C.S. Lewis is not a modern British author. He lived in the modern time period, but his mentality and his viewpoints on the world were Victorian. Pick somebody else." And I'm going, "I don't have time to pick anybody else." So I still wrote on C.S. Lewis, but I wrote about why he was a Victorian in the modern time period, what, you know, how he was different from everybody else, um, despite having gone through the world wars, despite having seen what he'd seen and experienced all of the modern sort of stuff that changed the way people viewed the world. I got a good grade on it, so it, it worked. It was a bit of a gamble after she told me to change, but it worked. But what it told me was that he was, he was a Victorian because he had faith in God. And that was kind of what the premise ended up having to be in order to make that paper work the way she wanted to compare modern versus Victorian. And she was the one who was also teaching, "God is dead and we have killed him." So it was.

Anyway, a bit of an edgy class, unusual for BYU-Idaho. Put faith in a different light. Instead of "faith is what we want," it was okay, people lived without faith. Yeah, so how did your time then at BYU-Idaho, between that class and generally, how did that affect your testimony? Was it overall a positive experience?

Overall a positive experience. A little hard for it to not be with all of the, I mean, you're getting doctrine from everywhere, right? You called it an indoctrination camp. It really is pretty much that kind of a thing. You're getting all of your normal education, so you learn how to do all the, the things. I learned how to edit, I learned how to do rhetoric, I learned how to do all of the things that I was supposed to do. But the professors are encouraged to bring up doctrine and include those if appropriate, right? And then you have to take your, your Gospel Doctrine and Church History and certain religion classes. And then you go to, you have to go to church on Sunday. If you're not active, then you don't qualify for, what's it called again? I forget what it's called. BYU, you have to have your ecclesiastical endorsements.

Yes. Yep. So you were pretty faithful throughout your time there. You at Idaho, were you praying every day?

And praying every day, reading my scriptures every day. A little hard to go to the temple because we didn't have the Rexburg temple at that point.

Oh, really? Yeah, they broke ground while I was there.

Oh, I didn't realize. How could they have BYU-Idaho without a temple there? This is like completely blowing my mind. I didn't realize that.

Yeah, yeah. It's still a pretty new, um, still a pretty new temple. It hasn't been there for terribly long.

So, okay. So the temple was there later. So overall good experience at BYU-Idaho. And then did you end up, I guess, putting intermission papers then?

I went on a mission.

And where did you get called?

Um, I got called to Rochester, New York.

Rochester, New York? Was it English speaking?

English speaking. Um, it also included the Hill Cumorah Visitor Center and the historic sites of Palmyra.

Oh my gosh, that's actually really cool. That's where my dad got baptized.

Oh, really?

It was through, yeah, that mission was what baptized my dad into the church.

Oh, where did he live?

Uh, he was a traveling hippie. He was with a ponytail who was traveling through and went to like the pageant there and met with the missionaries there.

Yeah, so that has a special place in my heart a little bit.

Yeah. See, I'm not, I'm not mad that my dad joined the church there. It was good for him, you know.

So, good. So you opened your mission papers. Were you excited?

I was excited. It was a busy weekend, uh, when I got my pa, when I got my call. Um, so some mixed feelings. We were tired. Okay, going back to the having family members that weren't actually family members. We had a couple that I grew up calling Grandma and Grandpa, and we all called him Grandma. This one wasn't just me, it was all of us. And he, he passed away the same week that my call arrived. I was up at school, my call arrived on a Wednesday, drove home on a Friday, we went to the funeral Saturday morning, and I opened my call Saturday night. So super tired, emotions were, you know, really raw because, you know, we loved him. He was a wonderful man, and he really was like grandpa to us. Um, and I opened my call and I see the New York Rochester mission and Palmyra historic sites or something like that. And I remember feeling kind of disappointed because I wanted to go foreign. I wanted to learn a language. And here I was gonna go sit in a visitor center, and I wasn't thrilled. And I really had to work to be okay with serving at a historic site.

Later, it was great. Later, I was like, yeah, this is, this is wonderful. I got to bear my testimony every day, all day long. People come to me, which is really nice as a missionary instead of having to go knock on all the doors and find people who wanted to hear something gospel related.

And you're probably like, in an air-conditioned building.

Yes, during the summer. Might be understated, really. Except when you went out on the tours.

Oh, you did go out on the tours?

Oh, yeah. That actually sounds kind of fun.

It could. Yeah, it was. It was. Except when nobody would show up, and then you just sat there and did nothing. But well, you read your scriptures, Church History, Peter Whitmer Farm, might go in and play the piano. And you're only allowed to read and do church-approved things during that time.

Did you have a hard time just staying restricted within the mission roles?

I read the entire mission library within the first. Which, which consisted of, oh, well, you had your scriptures. And I guess I didn't read through the entire Bible while I was on my mission, but I'd read it before. I read the whole Bible before I went on my mission.

Really?

Uh-huh. I would, okay, finish what you're going to say, cause I'm asking something. I love to talk to people who have read the entire Bible. But go on.

Okay. Um, so you had your scriptures, and I read all the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants multiple times. Um, there's Jesus the Christ, True to the Faith. Uh, there was something else I can't remember. Miracle of Forgiveness? No, that was not part of the, the mission library.

Yeah, okay. I would have read it if it had been. We were allowed to ask permission from my second mission president, uh, if we wanted to read something else. And so I read the institute manual for Church History, um, the big green one.

Yeah, yeah, the big, the fat green one. That was actually one of the beginnings of the end of my, my testimony.

Was it? Yeah. Uh, what manual? It's called Church History in the Fullness of Times. It's a, it's a dark green institute manual, super thick. And it, it doesn't, it doesn't go into detail, but it mentions a few of the more controversial things where it's just like, whoa, I didn't know that, you know, kind of like Mount Meadows or the Kirtland Bank stuff, or a little bit about polygamy, just enough to kind of think, huh, maybe I'll dig a little bit deeper. Yeah. And I don't remember catching any of the question marks there. I did have a question mark was at the MTC though. At the, they have the resource trait. They are, what do they call that? Where you go in and you can do practice discussions with volunteers? So you're not teaching another missionary, you're teaching somebody you've never met before, and they're supposed to play the role of an investigator. And I was teaching the first discussion there, and this person asked, so what happened to the plates? And I immediately said, well, the angel took them back. I remember going, that sounds absolutely crazy. And I had to just kind of swallow a little bit and go, okay, well, yeah, the angel took him back. So we don't have him anymore, and we have no proof. And to somebody outside the church, that is going to sound absolutely crazy. And I'll just have to be okay with that.

Yeah. You're already in deep. You're in the MTC. Swallow that one. Is that the only thing that he said? Between reading the entire Bible all the way through and all these different manuals and things, uh, was anything else that stood out as bizarre to you or difficult to swallow?

Um, not. I mean, I was never particularly comfortable with polygamy for some reason. Had you known a lot about it from your reading? Like you understood that Joseph was a polygamist and the coercion that happened with his wives? Were you like, I knew that he had taken other wives, but I was under the impression that it was in name only, you know, it was the, "have to obey the, the law of the Lord because the angel of the flaming sword told me I had to, but I am still faithful completely to my wife, Emma," sort of view of the Prophet Joseph Smith.

Yeah, I'm sure that's a pretty common view that people need to have to continue their testimony and make sense of why Joseph would do that. So which is funny because we're all okay with Brigham Young having as many wives and children and having sex with them, not just. Yeah, yeah. There's this weird, there's this weird apologetic move in Mormonism where, um, we, we acknowledge apologists acknowledge that Brigham Young on had sex with all their polygamous wives, but we don't want Joseph to have had sex with any of his polygamous wives. So we say there's no evidence. There's no evidence of Joseph having sex with any of his, you know, I don't know if they want like VHS, VHS tapes or like, you know, video or or like, you know, descriptions and journals of of the sexual act. Like I don't know what people want. But that's a typical apologetic move to just say, well, there's no evidence of Joseph Smith having sex. Uh, makes no sense to me. I think they can't really own up to it because there's comments about how he was commanded to by the angel of the flaming sword, and he really didn't want to. And all the times that he had said that he didn't have, what, you know, other wives besides Emma, but he already did. So it's a pretty hairy spot for apologetics to get into.

Anyways, avoid at all costs. Yeah. There was one other question I had on my mission. Um, and this is kind of funny. Uh, living near Palmyra with all the sisters that were needed at the sites, we sometimes had more than one companionship living in an apartment. And there was this one sister who managed to get a hold of chai tea. And I thought it was just an herbal tea. And she had this great big thing of it in the cupboard. And she made us all a cup of tea one night. And I, you know, thinking it was just an herbal sort of Indian spice-based something tea. And I thought, oh, this is wonderful, this tastes so fantastic. And then I went and I read the ingredients label, and the first ingredient is black tea. And I felt so terrible that I was drinking tea and that I liked it. Um, and I didn't turn her in. It was one of those, like, I just, you know, it's her choice. If she thinks she's okay to drink this, then that's her choice. Maybe she doesn't know, and ignorance is bliss. So I'm not going to say anything. And I didn't. But I also never forgot how good chai tea was.

Uh-huh. Because what is the implication if missionaries are breaking the Word of Wisdom?

Oh, Word of Wisdom. You lose your temple recommend, right? Yeah. You can't drink tea. He can't drink coffee. No alcohol. No. Well, the other thing with the Word of Wisdom is we don't actually really teach all of it, you know, eat meat sparingly, every fruit in its season. We don't do that. That won't keep you out of the temple. But a couple of chai tea could. Oh, yeah. And depending on maybe the discretion of the person interviewing you. But I think that's a pretty strict line. Is black tea, green tea, that's a big no-no. Herbal tea, you're fine. Which is funny.

Anyways. Yeah, it really is confusing. And I'm especially sure, like, if you had investigators, you have to ask the baptismal interview questions, and they would probably be able to get baptized if they were drinking chai tea, right?

I don't know. Depends on who's interviewing, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does. So do you want to explain for a second why Palmyra and, uh, just why Palmyra is important to the church? Yeah. And kind of what, as a missionary, that you did there?

So Palmyra is the location that Joseph and his family lived in when the First Vision happened. So, uh, there were four historic sites in my mission. One was the Hill Cumorah, which is where the Book of Mormon, the plates, the golden plates were buried. And then there was the Joseph Smith Farm, which of course is where Joseph Smith lived and had the Sacred Grove, where the First Vision occurred. The Book of Mormon publication site, which is fondly called the Bumps.

What, what does that mean? Book of Mormon publication site?

Okay. Bumps. Okay. Bumps. Yeah. Book of Mormon publication site. Yes. Also called the Grandin Building. Okay. Because Grandin was the, um, publisher.

The editor, publisher.

Publisher. And then further south near Waterloo is the Peter Whitmer Farm, which is where the church was organized on April 6, 1830.

And is this part of, like, you'd have a tour guide type speech that you'd give to?

Oh, yeah. We had site manuals. Um, so we had things that we could study, so we knew the history, we knew what we should be telling people who came to the sites. It had, it was basically stories that were attached to those locations as well. So you had the basic history, you had other stories that you could tell, and you just pulled them out as to what you thought or felt impressed or were inspired to share with those visitors to the sites.

So when you're doing this tour guide, you're obviously a missionary, and you're trying to build faith, whether it's just people who want to go on a mission, like a Mormon tour around, or like youth trips, right?

Youth trips or something that my parents are probably booking right now because they love that kind of stuff. So like active Mormon couples now, I'm sure, and family trips, like all different types of people because, like, Mormons travel to Palmyra like, like Muslims go to, like, Saudi Arabia or the Hajj or whatever. It's like Nauvoo and Palmyra are probably the big two, right?

Palmyra, exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, it's, it's, I remember when I went to Palmyra. I don't know if you ever did it. Like, not, yeah. So, like, I remember I'm in college. I think it was after my mission. And I'm just like, I've never been. So you go to the Sacred Grove, and you want to have this moment where you kneel down and maybe pray, and you can maybe see God and Jesus, or at least get a witness from the Holy Ghost, like Joseph Smith did. And you want to go see his home as a child, the log cabin or whatever. I don't even, he would have been born in Vermont, but, but at some point, you know, the house. Anyway, it's, it's almost like a pilgrimage, like a, a Mormon, orthodox Mormon pilgrimage to one of our most sacred sites to learn about the church, but also to have some sort of spiritual experience.

Do you work for the marketing for this place? Because I want to go now. I am sold. John, I'm buying the next plane ticket to Palmyra for that reason. No, but I love your question, Karen, cause I think I, I would love you to convey like what your role was, what, what people were coming to you for, and then what, what your role was. And I would love you to even share kind of like the most important stories that you would tell as missionaries to build up faith in these four sites that you mentioned, to build up faith in the members or in investigators that were curious about the church. You would also want to make them curious. Maybe you're a missionary, the whole point is possibly to get people to show interest in the church and maybe even get baptized. So I would love you to take some time just talking about the way you guys told stories about the history in the sacred, I say in air quotes, in the sacred site to help build faith with Mormons and non-Mormons.

Yeah. Or am I? Oh, do I have it wrong?

No, no, you're right. And about 90% of the people who came were members. Maybe, maybe a little more. So it wasn't for us, not the rest of the world, even though you're missionaries. Mostly for us. We did have investigators, of course, being missionaries in the area. It was like, okay, we have the sites, we are going to, you know, we're going to teach you about the First Vision, and then we're going to go to the Sacred Grove, and you can go in, and you can feel it yourself, and you can find out. And we'll even give you a moment in the Sacred Grove, and you can pray and know for yourself. So we took full advantage of the sites while we were there to help teach our investigators anything and everything we could about, you know, the doctrine, the, the, the normal dialogue.

So probably the first site people think of is the Sacred Grove, and that's part of the Joseph Smith Farm. Um, and on that, did, on the Sacred Grove story where the First Vision happened, what was the narrative that you were telling the people on the tour? Were you ever aware of the other First Vision stories?

I think I'd heard about them, but I didn't really look into them until after my mission.

So you had one narrative?

I had one narrative put forward by the church, the official church narrative. We had it memorized.

You weren't trained that there had been like up to eight different versions told and that it changed over time?

No, you were just taught the 1838 version.

Yep. Okay. We knew the 1838 version, and that was the only one that was in the site manual as well. So, um, the Joseph Smith Farm has two different houses, and the Sacred Grove, you start off in a, in kind of a visitor center. Sometimes you would do a little kind of introductory spiel of some sort. Um, and then you would take them out the side door and down this little dirt lane to the log home, and you talk about what life was like for the Smith family. Um, all the, you know, the number of children and this one small little house. And then you take them upstairs and you talk about Moroni and the story of Moroni appearing to Joseph Smith while he was there, and how he had a vision and it lasted all night, and Moroni told him all these things he was supposed to do when he was 17 about the plates, and how it mentioned things about temple work and family history and, you know, all the, you and you just bear your testimony. And you're always bearing your testimony. You bury your testimony in the visitor center basement of the, of the log home, the upstairs of the log home.

And were you told, and this is just me geeking out to the extent that I can, like, there's confusion that Joseph had different accounts? That it was Nephi that appeared to him, or Moroni that Joseph changed, you know, over time, who the original angel was? Were you ever, were you ever informed about that?

No. Okay. No, I had no idea that there was a story that it was Nephi, not Moroni.

Yeah. And that's what's funny is like, you just mentioned that you were bearing your testimony of these things over and over and over again about a narrative that had kind of been handed to you. Yeah. But you didn't know that there were different narratives, that there were different changes. So to the extent that missionaries sometimes are bearing their testimony, it sounds like you're saying they're kind of regurgitating a testimony, sort of.

Except, I mean, we really did believe it.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, like the spirit can walk over you and like you can feel like you're doing the right thing, that the Lord wants you to do. Yeah. There was one day I took a tour, and it was the, I can't remember which year anniversary of Moroni appearing to Joseph. So September 23rd, I think, is what it was. And I was taking a tour, and we had, um, there was somebody on the tour who was a questioning Mormon, so faith was starting to waver. Did they announce that, um, every once in a while, if there was somebody who was with them, it was usually them with somebody, you know, like their parents, and they've got a struggling teenager. And so, anyway, the other person would usually say something about, uh, this person needs a little more. Take you to the side and be like, I need you to really bring the testimony. Yeah. Something like that.

Actually, it actually happened. Oh, okay. I will. This person's struggling. You know, they just really need a strong testimony. And you're like, okay, I think I can do that. And I remember on that anniversary day of Moroni appearing to Joseph Smith, that it was a really powerful day. You know, the idea that that had happened in not that room, because the house has been rebuilt, but in that same airspace, as we used to say, because Moroni didn't touch the ground, anyways. So of course, like an airplane and an airplane hangar, the airspace going on. But it was, it was a powerful day, I'm sure.

Yeah. By the time we left the upstairs of the log home, pretty much everybody was crying, including me. So, you know, we really did believe what we were saying. I really did believe what I was saying. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt on that. Yeah. But, but there's this interesting, and we can come back to this, informed consent problem, because you're, it's not just like an average member that that is believing. You're not believing something, you're now in the official role of a spokesperson for the church, and you haven't been given all the information. To me, that's kind of a next-level seriousness because if the church knows that you're, uh, representing the church officially, I think they have even an extra responsibility to make sure you know the full story so that you're not, I guess, emotionally manipulating people with a narrative that is incomplete or, or in some cases, just totally dishonest.

And I had no idea. We were told that as missionaries in the Palmyra area that our entire mission, we were meant to be gatekeepers of the restoration. That was a title we were, we were given by mission presidents. We were meant to protect and defend the story of the restoration. And not just while on our mission, that because we were called to that mission, we were supposed to be gatekeepers of the restoration for our entire lives.

Wow. That is quite the title. Quite the mantle. Kind of intense.

It was intense. And I think it was meant to be intense to try and get us to be as involved and as passionate and to, to build that fire in the bones sort of experience as much as possible so that when we left, we would be strong forever. Because to somebody who's investigating the church, what is the perception that you're supposed to be giving them about Joseph Smith and about the restoration?

That it's all true. Absolutely and completely. It's all true.

Meaning what?

Meaning of all, all the stories, all the stories that are miraculous, that Joseph Smith saw God the Father and Jesus Christ in the Sacred Grove, that Moroni appeared to him in his bedroom as a 17-year-old and told him about the gold plates, um, that he found the gold plates in the Hill Cumorah and then had to go back every year on the same night for four years before he was able to receive them, and he received divine instruction during those four years, that he translated it by the gift and power of God. Um, yeah, that the Book of Mormon is the most correct book of any book on the earth.

All, all. Why are you smiling?

Because we'll come back to that.

Are we jumping narrative now?

Yeah, right. Yeah. We'll keep with the chronology because the Book of Mormon said Joseph Smith's own words that he said that it's the keystone of their religion. Yeah. So it's foundational to a testimony in the Mormon church. Everything else that comes with it is testimony that Joseph Smith did what he said he did, received the revelations that he said he did, the Book of Mormon came in the way that he said that it did. Yeah. And all of those things need to work together, um, to create a strong testimony, or at least the top half of the building of the church will fall down.

Right, right, right. So you mentioned three other sites, right?

Right, right. So that, um, after the log homes, it's still Joseph Smith Farm. Um, after the log home, you actually walk them further down the lane to the frame house, which is mostly original. Some of it has been kind of restored back into that proper time period because they've made changes to the house. And there's a nice little viewpoint in between the two houses where you can look up the hill at the temple. The, the Palmyra Temple is right there. So it's, looks, you've got the temple on one side, and you've got the Sacred Grove on the other. So you've got this nice little spot where you can stop and tell stories and look both directions at these holy places.

Is it kind of choreographed?

Oh, it's definitely choreographed. For, with what purpose? Um, so the story goes that when the temple was built, that they wanted to be able to look out the windows of the Palmyra Temple and see the Sacred Grove, but there were trees in the way. And they weren't supposed to trim the trees because it wasn't part of their land. I don't remember exactly why they weren't supposed to trim the trees, but they weren't supposed to trim these trees back to create this viewpoint between the two buildings or between the building and the Sacred Grove. And the, the story goes was there, there was a wind. And, uh, the joke is that the wind is actually, uh, I, well, I don't want to say his name because I haven't asked any permission, but there's a caretaker who takes care of the grounds there in the grove. And, uh, that the wind was named this man's name, and he would just very slowly, he trimmed a couple of branches here and there until you had this nice little V-shape where they could see out from the Palmyra Temple towards the grove. But it also let us see from the lane, the grove and the temple at the same time. Like this holy Bermuda Triangle.

[Laughter] That's what it sounds like. And then there's another site that you mentioned as well that you had.

Oh, wait. Was there anything more about that? So you, you'd walk them down the, the road, stop, look at the temple, look at the Sacred Grove, go to the frame home, and you tell stories about how difficult it was to keep the plates safe, um, all the stories about all the people who were trying to get a hold of the plates and how they hid them. And, uh, more information about the Smith family, about when they moved, stories about Alvin Smith and how he died and the, you know, the celestial kingdom and the sealing power. You tell all those stories. And then you'd take them back out the front door and you'd sit, or the back door, depending on how busy things were. And then you would send them off into the grove on their own. And that was the Joseph Smith Farm.

Anything about Joseph Smith's treasure digging, stone in the hat, Sally Chase, and just all of the folk magic, treasure digging stuff that happened in those first?

Yeah. And I wanted to ask, did you know about the stone in the hat translation process as you're describing this?

Those are separate questions. Yeah. I knew he had a seer stone. I did not know about the stone in the hat. So no. Never taught anything about that.

I'm not even sure I know what Sally Chase means.

He got the rock from, oh, is that the, well, that he found the rock in?

Okay. Uh, and I did hear about treasure digging. But the way we were taught it, and the way that if somebody brought it up, we would reply was that it was a job. He was a hard worker. He was, you know, a farm laborer. It was a labor job. He would go dig. Somebody would pay him to dig a hole.

Oh my gosh. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. So somebody could come to the missionaries at Palmyra and they could potentially give you a real, like, narrative about the way that Joseph, 18 different treasure digs, I believe he had that he went on, you know, purporting that he could see underground, uh, that there's buried treasure on farmer's land and kind of get away with, what's the word I want to be too mean, but fraud. Yeah, I guess, you know, defraud farmers. Um, somebody could come to you with that, and you were, your reply would just have been, no, he was just digging holes because he was a good old digging guy. He was a, he was a hired hand, he was a laborer, and he wouldn't have thought a second thing about it. And maybe, maybe there were other missionaries who had a different narrative, but as far as I knew, that was what was the truth.

And for listeners that don't really know this history, what we're talking about, the way it really happened, according to actual history, is that there were neighbors in the Smith family in Palmyra who believed that there was buried treasure hidden all throughout the New England coast because of Spanish conquistadors and pirates and all this folklore. And so Joseph heard about his neighbor using a seer stone, Sally Chase, to dig for buried treasure. That's where he got the idea. He ended up getting a quote magic stone, both from her, but also from others, and started this multi-year career as someone who had the reputation of being able to find buried treasure underground. So, so I think what's really important about Palmyra is, you know, if you're going to be talking about the history, is to say, hey, this is how it all started. And then slowly over time, when Joseph ended up getting arrested and getting busted for this treasure digging, which was illegal then, he turned and sort of converted that, uh, that practice into the Book of Mormon. And in fact, the Book of Mormon maps directly onto the treasure digging narrative. There's a treasure buried in a hill, which is the golden plates. There's an angel protecting the treasure, which is Angel Moroni. Um, and then there's Joseph Smith was with his stone in the hat being able to find the buried treasure. You know, and so, and so it's again, it's just kind of weird that that the church is known forever that that's kind of how it all began. It was in Palmyra. It was with his family. Everyone knew about it. All the neighbors knew about it. And yet, what I, what I hear you saying is that was all completely not told to you, kept from you, um, both in terms of your learning, but also in your advocacy for, uh, relating the church's faithful narrative to members and investigators.

True. Yeah, that was not something I knew. And we weren't supposed to teach anything that was not in the site manuals. And it was definitely not part of the site manual.

What I know could have thought. Yeah. And I'm sure, I mean, I guess you could, it's hard to know what the missionaries are teaching now, that enough time has gone by and enough of these things are, enough podcasts, the podcasts have been aired, and it's starting to make its way into the inoculation of members, the Gospel Topics Essays. I'm just wondering maybe if your script would have has changed since then, if this is missionaries.

I would assume that it's changed. I would assume it's changed, but I would also assume that it's still going to be pretty whitewashed because it is meant, uh, to strengthen the testimony of members, to teach the gospel to investigators, and to ultimately help indoctrinate and strengthen the testimony of the missionary.

Right. I mean, I have to say that if you were told that Joseph's role was as a manual laborer, treasure digging, that's outright dishonest. And the church has known at least since the 60s and 70s that Joseph was leading the treasure digs as the one who claimed to have the special power to find the buried treasure, even though there's no account of, like, in the 16 or 18 digs of him ever actually finding buried treasure. The church has known all this. So for them to communicate to you as a missionary, knowing the, the truth, but then telling you that he was just, uh, the, the shovel digger, is is really, is really deceptive. And it has to be intentionally deceptive because it's embarrassing for them to say he was into folk magic and was claiming to see underground with the stone of the hat. That happens to be the stone of the hat that he also claimed to have translated the Book of Mormon when the plates actually weren't in the room. Like the fact that they didn't tell you any of that, but then told you a false narrative is kind of troubling to me.

Well, all the stuff that I didn't know was still troubling to me. So yeah, going out and serving for 18 months without having a lot of, like, John likes to say, informed consent. Yeah. About different conflicting narratives and what actually really happened in Palmyra, because you were there at the ground zero of the foundations of all of these stories, and everything that happened. I'm sure those treasure digs were right around the, the, the places there in Palmyra.

We were just like completely oblivious to it. I have no idea. I still don't know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, the next site would be the Hill Cumorah. Okay. And the Hill Cumorah is a formal visitor center. So you walk in, it's got a, you know, a meeting area, you've got a desk where you've got a missionary who sits. You've got a Christus statue in a Christus room. There are a couple of little theaters where you can show movies, like the church's movie on the restoration, which is, I think it was a 20-minute movie. And then there was an hour-long movie more about Joseph Smith. And then you just kind of, you know, let them walk out the side door and up the Hill Cumorah where there's a monument at the top. It's a, it's a very, it's a much shorter tour. The longest part is the Christus room. And I did that often enough that for a while, I had the Christus narration memorized.

I can imagine. Was it boring, or did you like it, or do you feel a spirit when you're repeating the same kind of tour guide?

A little bit of everything, I think. I mean, there were times it was like, okay, I'm going to listen to it one more time. And then there were times when it was like, you know, there's some interesting stuff in here, and I wonder where they found all the scriptures. And then you go through and you find all the scriptures, and you can piece the narration together off of, you know, whatever 20 different scriptures they used to create the narration. And then you start to study those. And so sometimes it's interesting, sometimes it's like, okay, I've heard it five million times, and I'll just listen for the key word at the very end that lets me know it's just about done. And, you know, pull my thoughts together quickly so I can bear my testimony at the end and find out where they want to go from there.

Did you have that thing where I feel like a lot of times in the church, when you're struggling in an area, you're like, what does God want me to learn out of this? And so you seem like a very smart, very capable person that wasn't being utilized very much on your mission, having to repeat the same kind of testimonies, just kind of play tour guide for the church. Did you feel like, okay, God is trying to have me learn something? And your thoughts are kind of turning towards, what does he want me to get out of this mission continually?

Well, I always wondered what he wanted me to get out of the mission. I never really understood why that was my mission. At one point, I thought I was there for my companions, which sounds very egotistical to me now. You know, I am there to help my companions, but I don't know if I ever came to a good conclusion as to, I'm called to this mission because I just did the thing. You just do the thing. You just stand up and you, you take the tours, and it's your turn to take the tour, or it's your turn to take the tour, and you just get up and you do it. So I took the tours, and I really, I liked working with people. So having a crowd to interact with, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed having conversation with them, and I didn't mind that part of it. It's a lot harder to go knock doors than it is to take a tour.

I was going to say that, Cara, like, yeah, it may be boring or lame to be just reciting these road history tours, but it is really lame to be knocking doors, having people like make fun of you, slam doors in your face. Like, that's actually, but at least you feel like you served a real mission, like you got, like blisters in your shoes, you have like a story to tell.

I wore holes in my shoes.

Really? Yeah. I did. My, I had a pair of shoes that I wore, uh, almost every day I went to the sites because they were comfortable and looked nice, and I had to throw them away about a month before I came home because they started getting rocks stuck in the, in the soles of them because there were holes through them. And they get, they assigned you some really bad clothing and shoes. Just in general, weren't very good shoes anyway. I felt super frumpy at times. We tried really hard to not look frumpy, especially since we were at the sites, and you know, you wanted to present a really nice image because you didn't know who was going to come through that door, right? You did not want to be terribly, or I did not want to be terribly frumpy, and their conversion could completely be dependent on your lack of frump, or frump-centric conversion could be dependent upon impressions.

Yeah. And having a good impression was very important. And they actually taught us that in the MTC, that we were supposed to look the part. We were supposed to wear makeup. We were supposed to dress nicely. We were supposed to fill this, um, specific model of this is what a sister missionary ought to look like. And it's, you look good. And they tend to call, I, I don't know how else to say this, but like attractive sister missionaries to Temple Square in Salt Lake City, to some of these sites. Um, and, and sometimes there's even a real concentration of eating disordered sister missionaries, I've been told, at these church history sites, including Temple Square, because you're, you want to look thin, you want, you know, you want to look attractive because it's where foreign dignitaries come, it's where VIPs, both inside and outside of the church, come. And so, just speaking to your kind of conversions based on impressions, you, you want the most attractive. And it's mostly sister missionaries, right? There's not even for, I don't even know, did they even explain to you why it was sister missionaries at Temple Square or the church history sites and not men?

Um, I don't know why they don't call elders. We did occasionally have elders help with translations. So if we knew we were going to have a group that needed ASL or Spanish or Chinese or something, we would have an elder, uh, from one of the nearby areas, a processing mission, a processing missionary come in and translate for us, which was weird. I was never very comfortable with translation, but it works, I guess. Um, but we were told that it was the younger sister missionaries who were supposed to take the tours and not the senior couples because we always had a senior couple at the site too. It wasn't just the sister missionaries. And the younger missionaries were supposed to take it if at all possible. And one of the reasons was because the older missionaries tend to ramble on and they took much longer.

Are you saying that the younger sister missionaries are more into rule following, and then the older senior couples, uh, have lived an entire life and had some stories that they like to interject within the script?

Yes, they would, they would get off topic, or they would just tell more stories, some of them from the manuals and some of them not from the manuals. So sister missionary, young sister missionaries stay on script. But also, I, I have to think they're also more attractive. I've never, don't write me letters. I've never seen an unattractive sister missionary. Don't send me letters. Don't send me pictures. Across the lighting or yeah, church history sites. And I also, I mean, all the sister missionaries I know were when I was Mormon anyway, and I just saw a glow emanate from them anyway. So I think there's something about sister missionaries that are, they're smiley, they're cheerful, they do like have nice dress and grooming, and they, they have a bubbly personality. I think sister missionaries, like, in and out, are just like beautiful people. I think I'm, I think I'm invoking an interview I did with Juliana Villegas Haas, who's a, a woman of color, post-Mormon woman of color from Belgium, who served on Temple Square. And so these thoughts I'm having about thin sister missionaries, attractive sister missionaries, eating disordered sister missionaries at church history sites in Temple Square comes from that interview with Juliana Villegas Haas. So I'm going to share a link to that because I don't think I'm not making this up. That's all that's all I'm saying.

I don't know if we had any eating disorder type problems with our sister missionaries. I don't think it was as much of a push or a, you know, a pressure to look a certain way because we weren't Temple Square. We were Palmyra.

Ah, okay. And there was a difference. Yeah. Okay. Okay. She was Temple Square. The argument could be made that the budget that missionaries get for food is kind of like an eating disorder budget. They don't give you a lot of money for food. That argument could be made. We had very good members in our area. They fed us regularly.

Okay. So the members helped out a lot. Lovely, lovely people there. Really quickly, and I'm, I feel a tiny bit like an attorney asking you some of these historical questions, but it's fine. One of the problems with the church's historical narrative of Cumorah is that the church, because of DNA, because now you know Native Americans in North and South America and Central, their DNA ties to Asia, not the Middle East, because there's no geography. I mean, I mean, the Heartland theory, orthodox Mormons are going to yell at me here, but basically, I'm sorry, yeah, there's no, there's no geography that maps the Book of Mormon to actual US or or North Central South American geography other than Central America. And the idea that Moroni could be dying and carry the plates from Central America all the way up to Palmyra, New York, carrying them to them, bury them in the state of Laban, walking on foot, and yeah, and all that stuff, like it makes, it's made past Mormon apologists teach that there's actually two Hill Cumorahs, that in Central America, Joseph Smith, I mean, I mean, Moroni actually buried the plates in a Central American Hill Cumorah, and that somehow through teleportation, God moved those plates to the Palmyra Hill Cumorah for Joseph Smith to uncover. And so I guess I'm asking a question that I probably know the answer to, but did the church ever train you guys about the two Hill Cumorah theory and the, the small geography theory, which all the current Mormon apologists sort of, um, use, which is that everything happened in a super small area in Mesoamerica, which would make it impossible for the plates to end up in Upper Stepper State of New York? Was any of that kind of made known to you, uh, as a missionary, so that you could have kind of the full real story?

No, it was kept super simple. Yeah. We had, I had a series of conversations with a senior elder. He and his wife were serving at the sites. So, you know, they'd be assigned. And when we were there, we would talk church history. Um, and we had conversations about, you know, where was the land of the Book of Mormon? You know, is it, is it Niagara? The narrow neck of land? Or yeah, we, we had some good debates. But, uh, uh, it was all based on faith. And, you know, I had a very limited library at the time. So it was, I will take whatever I'm told because that's, or I'll take whatever I can get. And he did occasionally bring in other stuff that we could read, you know, printed off some contraband material.

Contraband material.

Heartland Church history.

Yeah. Contraband church history. Because the basis of a Mormon testimony is always like, faith is the first, what's, what's the spiel? First principle?

First principle of the gospel is faith. And so you lead with faith. And then, you know, sometimes you fill in your faith with other supporting evidence, and you cherry-pick things, and you find, uh, motivated reasoning to support the faith that you already have. And then anything else that.

Doesn't make sense. You just kind of go, "Garbage can that." Uh, so on your mission, I feel like there's already so much motivating reasoning for the things you're saying, the reasons that you're there, the stories that you're telling to investigators and members who want to learn about these things. You don't have like any space in your brain to like deviate that there's any other narrative besides the church's official narrative, right?

No. And I had heard at some point, somewhere before my mission, issues with, uh, the genetics of the DNA of the Native Americans. Yeah, the DNA for Native Americans and the issue about there were no horses before the conquistadors arrived. But I think I, I don't know if I just kind of dismissed it or threw it out. It never crossed my mind. And then after later, when I was like, "Oh, well, yeah, well, I knew that. I knew there were issues." I had just never bothered to really think about it.

You had a motivated reason to kind of shelf things? Yes. At the time, I mean, what you just explained is, is inoculation theory, which is that if the church can, and this is what they're doing now. Now that they, and we're getting off your story a little bit, but this is important. Now that the church, through the internet, has been forced to come clean about the history that it hid from its members for over 100 years, it has to find a way to save the younger generations and not have them feel like they were deceived like the older, older generations like me do. And so they're just dropping a stone in a hat, uh, DNA, uh, polygamy, you know, they're dropping those things to the kids when they're teenagers in seminary and in Sunday school so that they just know a tiny bit about them. And, and that kind of almost like a, like a vaccine, ironically, helps inoculate them for questions that come up later because in their mind, they're like, "Oh, I'm not surprised by a stone in the hat. That was mentioned to me while I was in seminary."

And you're kind of saying that that's how it was for you? Yeah, with DNA. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. Well, I didn't even think about it. It was just, and it didn't come up on the mission because our, our mission was mostly, you know, the church history. So it wasn't apologetics. It wasn't, and you just teach the basic, the basic. All of it's just bottom level, and bear your testimony, and it's, and it's enough.

And is there anything else about the Hill Cumorah narrative? Because I'm always so interested in that. Like John was saying about the apologetics, they have to come up with a two-Hill Cumorah theory. Which if the Hill Cumorah had, you know, uh, brass or whatever swords, and if it had, uh, breastplates, and I've had skeletons, if it had, um, all of the things that were left over from that final battle. Oh, right, right. That's what I'm trying to say is limits and shields and swords and, yeah, from that horse bones and mountains of bodies, mountains of bodies and stuff. I don't know why when I was Mormon, I never put two and two together that there should be concrete evidence, um, at the Hill Cumorah. Right. Yeah. Like, right.

So, like, it just, the narrative that I'm sure that you're telling is that there was this giant battle, right, at the Hill Cumorah? Is that what you told? So, one theory that we came up with was that there were actually the two Hill Cumorahs. So this, this senior elder who talked about it said, gave me a little bit of idea that there could have been two. So that the battle could have taken place at one, and the Moroni, in however many years he wandered by himself in the wilderness, could have wandered as far as New York and buried it and also called it Hill Cumorah because it was a place of meaning for him.

I'm sold. No, just kidding. Logan's razor. No, I was just going to ask, cause like, so, yeah, like that would make sense only because you kind of need something else when you realize, in, when Joseph Smith's time, when he's making and creating these stories, he's not really thinking long-term that one day we're going to go digging around at the Hill Cumorah and find that there's no evidence for the things. Right. Archaeology was kind of a new field at the time. Yeah. Like, had they even discovered dinosaur bones like by that year? Like, like, even a lot of that stuff was still, like, we hadn't even known what was underneath the ground. And so I'm sure in Joseph Smith's mind, he's like, "Yeah, and I'll add this story, and they'll be like wooden submarines and like, who cares?" He'll just throw any kind of fun things that he wants into his kind of like fun Bible fan fiction type of narrative and make it like super duper interesting. But then when we actually develop techniques around, like, archaeological digs and the evidence doesn't make sense, they're still sending missionaries out to teach Joseph Smith's narrative from like the 1800s, and they don't, they don't care that like these things actually, they don't fit together anymore. Like we have, we have modern technology and we know that this, like Occam's Razor, it, it has way too many, um, what's the word I'm looking for? Allowances. Uh, what's the word I'm looking for, John? You know that word. I mean, just, just it's, it's too cut. The, the explanations, the back bends and the back flips and the somersaults you have to do to make it all make sense. I mean, I was struck by, you know, when you, when you were told that the plates were conveniently taken back out by Moroni, and in your brain, you're like, "Hmm." And I'm also struck by how much you read and how intelligent you were and are. And so what I'm, I'm enjoying as you talk about this is knowing how smart you are and knowing how you're being exposed to things that should and would cause a normal, super intelligent person to go, "Wait, that is fishy." Like the fact that somebody's trying to explain to you, "Well, maybe when you said Hill Cumorah, there's actually two. There's the one where the battle happened, but then then he walks from Central America, you know, to upstate New York carrying 80-pound plates, which are super heavy to carry, and then he actually buries them in a second Hill Cumorah." But of course, the Book of Mormon doesn't mention two Hill Cumorahs. But, but in your mind, you're just like, "Yeah, whatever. Like, some that happened because I have faith and the church is true and so, you know, it's all good."

Yeah. And I never actually thought about it that way. The one that got me was horses because you can't get away from the fact that horses are in the Book of Mormon. They're called horses. Joseph Smith knew what a horse was. I mean, you can't call it anything else. And for those people are like, "Maybe they were tapirs." And you're like, "No, you can't call them tapirs." But we have no evidence of horses not around that time period. No, not a chance. Yeah.

And just a lot of the, the metallurgy and the things that shape societies. If you've ever read *Guns, Germs, and Steel*, it's a great book about how if those things really existed, whether in Palmyra or Mesoamerica, that would have completely radically changed the people and the environment and everything that goes into building a civilization at those times. And like I was saying, like when you just start with faith, yeah, you'll fill in and then just like, "Wait till later when God will explain it to you." So, and you're willing to overlook a lot. You're willing to overlook a lot if you're super smart, even if you're super smart and you're asking all the right questions. And I was, I was very willing to wait. I was like, "Okay, there's got to be an answer, and we'll either come up with it at some point. We're still learning things about history. We're still learning things about science. Eventually, we'll find the answer, or God will just tell us, you know, on the other side when we die. We'll, we'll find out the answer eventually."

And I just want to like point out the irony that in the MTC, they do these like actors that come in to like, you're saying, pretend to be investigators so that you can practice. And then you get on your mission and you're still talking to members, mostly. Mostly like the, the irony there is also kind of a little bit bittersweet.

So, overall, it sounds like you had a good experience on your mission. Is that a good way to frame it? And that for the most part, I did. We're not done. We're not done. I've got two more. I've got two more church history sites to go through. Oh, yeah. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. No, you're only my second interview. John. No, it's good. It's good. Yeah.

Anything else? Anything else about Hill Cumorah before you go to the last two sites? Um, later in my mission, we were allowed to tell some of the stories of Willard and Rebecca Bean, who were the first sort of mission presidents in the area. Those were fun stories to tell, and I would tell some of them at the, the Hill Cumorah.

What types of stories? Just to give us a sense. Oh, so the plates were supposed to have been buried on the northwest side of the hill. And during sometime in the 19th century, a lot of that hill was deforested with people who were frantically looking for more treasure because there's also the story about, uh, the side of the hill opening up in a room full of plates. I don't know if, yeah, absolutely. What, like a vision? Yeah, yeah. So it's not just the gold plates. There are, yeah, it's sort of labeled full of plates. It's like sort of Laban, it's treasure, it's the breastplate, like visions of of all sorts of things in caves because again, it's the magical worldview where they can see underground and see all the treasure. Yeah, right. Yeah. So like the whole side of the hill was deforested and people were digging around trying to find this room full of plates.

And then did they find it? No. Darn it. No. We'll have to keep looking. What? They never found it. Nope. Don't give up the faith. We'll keep trying. Uh, so Willard Bean, first sort of mission president in the area, he reforested the hill. He planted a whole bunch of pine trees, which is funny because it's not really the kind of forest you're supposed to have in that area. Um, and then he started the Hill Cumorah Pageant. So up on the side of the hill, that's where they have the Hill Cumorah Pageant, and it's a crazy couple of weeks for the missionaries.

Was it? Was he planting seed so people would stop looking for the caves and the and the treasure? He actually got all the missionaries out there to plant it, and they, I think they were seedlings, if I remember. There was a photo, and I think they were, you know, small trees, seedlings of some sort. But if there's trees, it makes it a lot harder to go around digging, looking for stuff. Yes. But it was also church property by that point, and a lot of the digging, I think, happened before it was church property. Yeah, yeah. Well, the church wouldn't want people to get around there because people, it's not a super large hill, right? And so it's actually a fairly sizable hill. Okay. It's, yeah, it's good-sized. And a lot of it is still forested, but again, it was supposed to be the northwest side of the hill where the plates were.

Did you mention, um, during the tours that the hills were made out of glaciers? No. I just wanted to, I just wanted you to do that because in my mind, I think that's kind of cool that you're able to talk about, like, if you were able to talk about, uh, like the Ice Age and things that are technically go back farther than Joseph Smith. John, you're reading my joke. Yes. That was the punch line. Anyway, continue. Go on. Yes. I did believe that the hills were made from glaciers during an Ice Age, and I never considered how that would work in with the timeline that I was taught.

Well, if it's in the Doctrine and Covenants that the earth is 6,000 years, D&C 73 or something, I don't remember that. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Doctrine and Covenants says that the earth is six or seven thousand, seven thousand, seven hundred years old. Don't worry, I looked it up yesterday in a discussion I was having online on Twitter. So I'm like, not that I just know this knowledge, I just happened to look it up yesterday. Anyway, I must have missed that scripture. There's something more for me either or something. Yeah. We have to start this whole entire interview over until you have read more. Camille, obviously, you're not well-read enough for this interview yet. Okay. So, okay.

So, Hill Cumorah, Cumorah, next place, the Grand of Building Publications, Grant Press, right? Yep. Um, and that one, that one's a little more technical because you're actually talking about how a book is made. Yeah. You tell the stories and how much it would have cost for somebody to buy the book, why it was a sacrifice, why it had to be that much money because, you know, even though it's a book of scripture, it cost this much to make. And so you kind of just define the cost of the Book of Mormon from like 100 and something years ago, which is funny. Anyways, um, and then you take them through the, the building and you show them, you know, here's the bookstore, take them up the stairs, and you show them, here's where they bound, and here's where they print, and here's how it works. And you're supposed to sprinkle in little stories about, you know, how it was translated. And they actually, they've got a little display area that's set up to look like a kitchen in one of these log or frame houses from the time period. And on it, they have a replica of the plates covered with a cloth. And so on quiet days, as missionaries, we'd go up there and we'd look at these, this replica, we'd uncover it and take a look at the replica of the plates.

You peeked? You peeked? Oh, we peeked. We didn't just peek. We, unlike Emma, you peeked. Yeah. And they had it, even had like engravings on it, so you could kind of see what it was supposed to look like. This replica, and parts of it were bound with this big old, you know, sheet of metal, so you couldn't flip through all of it, but you found the bound portions. The bound book? Yeah, yeah. We, we peeked. We looked.

So going back to the whole stone in the hat thing, the implication of having this on the table is there was no stone in the hat. You had the plates on the table for the translation. But it's work. But it's worse because, yes, you would, you would want the stone in the hat to be there. But now we know that the plates, when Joseph allegedly translated the Book of Mormon, the plates weren't in the room. They were in the forest. That's exactly what I mean. Looking into the stone in the hat, supposedly channeling the plates in the forest. So they even have the plates in the room is is deceptive. Am I right? That's what, that's exactly what I mean. Yeah. Yep. That's why I brought that up. Right.

And then, um, you've got a facsimile of the manuscript, so you can see, you know, the kind of spidery handwriting. I think it was all over calligraphy and a couple of small corrections made on that page, which was supposed to be an indication of what kind of, um, editing went on and why they went back and edited to put punctuation in. And that was, that was supposed to be, "This is what has been changed and why." And what's your opinion on how much has actually been changed versus maybe what you perceived had only just been changed? I, I, it's not something I've really looked into. Oh, the Chinese in the Book of Mormon? Yeah. Honestly, I've not actually looked into what kind of changes were made in the Book of Mormon. Yeah. There's some, there's some pretty big ones this through the years. But I think a foundation of a lot of people's testimony is the idea that it's just minor changes and that the copy that we have in front of us in church is literally Joseph Smith's, um, one that was scribed out back in that room. Yeah. And only minor grammatical changes and moving them into chapters and headings, when that's not really the case at all. And that was, that's again, going back to informed consent, like a lot of people, I think, base their testimony on these small changes, not understanding the wide ramifications, the printer's copies, and how many edits, major doctrinal edits have happened over the years. Yeah, yeah.

We recently interviewed John Larson, who talked about the 1832 version of the First Vision. And at the time, Joseph Smith recounted his first account of the First Vision, he believed that God and Jesus were the same being. And so in that version of the First Vision, it's the Lord who appeared to him. And coincidentally, not coincidentally, in the original version of the Book of Mormon in 1830, it was always God and Jesus were one. Mary was the mother of God, not the mother of the Son of God. And the original Book of Mormon would have said, you know, "Jesus, Mary was the mother of God." And then later, Joseph Smith would have changed subsequent versions of the Book of Mormon to say "mother of the Son of God" because his own views of the Godhead had changed. And so I, I guess that's a long way of asking the question, when they taught you about the book and the Book of Mormon, they taught you to probably teach people it was the most, what? The most correct? What's the most correct book on the earth as far as it is translated correctly? It is the most correct. That's the Bible. Yeah, I know, but the Book of Mormon is supposed to be the most correct book because it's been translated correctly, right? Yeah, yeah. So these little gigantic changes that I think, uh, members should be more aware of, that they should have the right to know. Little gigantic changes. I like it. You know, just trying to like use some finessing, nuanced language there. Thanks for catching it. So the members, I think, base their testimony, um, on, like I was saying, that it's just this one, uh, manuscript that didn't have all of these major doctrinal changes. Joseph Smith never had an evolving theology. If it was, you know, uh, revealed to him and translated one time, why would God need to update it and translate it again? Yeah. If he's reading off a stone? Yeah. But if he's literally reading the words as they appear on the stone or the Urim and Thummim, why would the Book of Mormon's text need to be changed across multiple, right, additions? Right, right. Yeah.

So take them through the printing room, take them downstairs, you take them through the binding room, and again, it's, it's quite technical because you're talking about the process of it all. And then you finish off in this little picture gallery. And a picture gallery was my favorite part because, um, they had a number of the Arnold Friberg paintings on the wall. And I happened to be sort of a distant relative of Arnold Friberg, so I always felt this kind of kinship to the artwork. And, you know, you'd tell a story or something about the Book of Mormon and bear your testimony, and that was the end of the tour.

Beautiful. And were you bearing your testimony at each site too? Like, oh, yeah. Multiple times at each site, but definitely at the end of each tour. Okay. So people would come to these sites and just kind of sign up for a day's worth of missionaries taking them around these different sites and hopefully have some miraculous, beautiful spiritual experiences because this is kind of like John was saying, like, like a mecca and like this holy gathering place for Mormons. And they're putting a lot of their faith that their family is traveling there and that you're gonna, like, bring a powerhouse testimony that's gonna make the whole thing worth it. And we had some people who would do all four sites in one day. We had people who would space it out over a week and do a site every day, or do a site and take a couple of days off and go see, you know, Niagara Falls and come back and finish, or, you know, but, yeah, basically it was, they were coming to hear the history of the church and the testimony of the missionaries.

I'm kind of sold. I know I do this for a living, but my husband, like, wants to go to, maybe, I don't know, Hawaii for our next vacation. I actually want to go to Palmyra. I'm quite sold. It sounds fascinating. It's beautiful. Yeah, it's a beautiful place. And if you want to go, I can definitely give you some pointers on where to stop besides the church history sites. They're going to say, and where to stop the sister missionaries in their spiel, and where to ask questions. I would not do that. I am very nice to missionaries. I promise. Okay.

So, is there any other sites that we didn't get to? One more. Okay. It's the Peter Whitmer Farm, and it's about a 40-minute drive from Palmyra. It's in Waterloo, or just outside of it. And that's the place where the church was organized officially as a church on April 6th, 1830. It's, um, it's a church house, so you have an actual chapel there. Visitor center is in one of the wings of the church building. And there's also a log home. So they've changed it recently, so nothing that I know about that visitor center is going to be accurate anymore. But I can still tell stories about it if you want me to explain what it used to be.

Whatever you think would be interesting to the audience. Well, it used to be mostly just like a picture gallery, so you'd walk in and show them these pictures, and here's the, here's the testimony of the three and the eight witnesses, and you talk a little bit about that. And you had some of the photos on the wall, or the portraits of them on the wall. And then, um, you had this series of artwork, all by the same artist, that went around a gallery of the wall, or a wall of the gallery, excuse me. And each one was something about the process of the church becoming the church. So you had Joseph Smith Sr., you had Lucy Mack, you had baptisms, you had the translation. I don't remember everything that there was. And you would just tell stories as you went around. And then you take them out to the log home and show them this building, which we now believe is very inaccurate to the building that was there. It's been rebuilt. And talk about how the church became the church, and the number of members that were there. There were 30. But there was actually more people there, but only 30 were the official, you know, beginning of the six. Oh, six. Six. Six, right? Weren't there six members at first? Was there? Yeah, six. There were six members, but the, uh, I got to go back and read my site manuals.

No, that's good. I think I think there are six original members. Okay. Yeah. People observing. Absolutely. Yeah. Then we tell the stories about the translation of the Book of Mormon. And, uh, the Mary Whitmer story was a very favorite for the missionaries.

What? Why? Well, the story of Mary Whitmer is, um, she had a lot of responsibility as far as keeping things going. And you've got Joseph Smith, and you've got Oliver Cowdery, you've got all these people who are coming to visit the prophet, and he's trying to translate, and she's playing host, and she's tired, and she's getting worn out, and she has no witness that these things are true. And Moroni shows her the plates. And the reason it's supposed to be a really powerful experience is she's a woman. Moroni chose to show her the plates. And it's not that he came, that's really magnanimous of Moroni. Oh, yeah. Um, and it's not that he came in like glory or anything. He came as a man, or looking as a man, and showed her the plates so that she would have something to keep her going because things were hard for her.

What do you think? What are you guys thinking as women? Is that cool? Is that interesting? I always wondered why it was Mary Whitmer and not Emma Smith, right? Because I think Emma Smith had a really hard time too. And how come she didn't get to see the plates? She was complaining too much. She had, she murmured. She murmured. Yeah, yeah. God had a lot to say to Emma, as we read D&C, we know. Yeah, one whole section dedicated just to her. She was not up for the task of looking at the plates, for sure.

All right. Well, go Mary. I'm, I'm happy for Mary. Sad for Emma. Thank you for Mary. Yeah. Good for her. She got to see the plates. And by the way, it's nice of Moroni to show the plates to a woman. Like it was mostly men, but he stooped, maybe he stooped a little bit in his magnanimity. I've, I'm being a little sarcastic. Yeah, I can tell. Leave that to me, John. Hey, this is stepping on my punch lines and my sarcasm. No, John, viewers at home. Well, you did switch chairs. I'm in the sarcasm chair right now. That's true. I'm, I have, taken the reins of this interview and I'm taking them back. So anyway. Okay.

So, Camille, we went through the historic sites for the founding of the Book of Mormon. Is there anything else you wanted to mention about your mission? And I guess you must have been given some type of leadership roles throughout your mission. And I was reading your outline about how the internet was used in various ways that were kind of new and like a new frontier. Yep. Yep.

So my first mission president, uh, was, he was only there for my first about six months. And when he left, he became the director of internet proselyting for the church. And they gave him this assignment. He says, "I don't know anything about it." And they said, "Well, I guess you better try it out before you come home." So we became the, the test mission for internet missionary work, right at the very beginning. There was, I think it was two companionships of elders, myself and my companion, and two or three companionships of senior couples. And we were the first missionaries online. And we were told to start a Facebook page and to start a blog, and we were supposed to do it at least once a week.

What year was this? That was 2010. So 2010, first online missionaries. And it was basically blogging and sending messages via Facebook to like random people, like, "Hey, are you in the area?" Or is it international? Just trying to look for to drum up some interest in your local mission. It was to see what we could get. So if we, if we found people outside of the mission, that was fine. We could teach them and then pass them off as a referral to their actual mission. Okay. Um, we were supposed to befriend as many of the members in our wards as possible and use it as a tool. So if they thought they had a friend, we could contact them via Facebook, or if they could talk their friend into, you know, befriending us on Facebook, we could start a conversation. And then we would create blog posts and create links onto our, our Facebook pages for those blog posts.

Nice. And so since you didn't have a lot of proselytizing, was that exciting? It was like a good task that you were like, "Willing to take upon you?" It was exciting. It felt like a good step forward for the church because the world is online. And until then, missionaries were not. Yeah, 2010 is kind of late, actually, to get the Facebook pages going. If anyone's on like Instagram or Facebook now, missionaries are all over. They're doing TikTok dances. Missionaries are like, they are in the lane for sure to to proselytize through like literally TikTok dances, dancing. It's mostly dancing with Book of Mormons in their hands. They're singing in the car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rapping. Always rapping. Yeah. They've got all kinds of creative ways. And I don't know, tell me if this sounds familiar. It kind of makes me a little bit sad or more worried, or that you kind of have these ideals in your head of what a mission is going to be. And if you're just like rapping in a car because nobody wants to listen to your message, everyone's slamming their door, or like, it is so difficult to get people to listen to your message that you're going into a Facebook group and you're messaging random people, and it just feels like it's pulling teeth almost, just to like beg somebody to listen to your message. Was that kind of how it was? Or did you, all missions are pretty much begging somebody to listen to your message. That's true. That's true. I'm not surprised that they're coming up with these. My one of my companions and I, we made a board game. And we would go to members' homes for family home evening, and we would play this board game that we created. And it was, we call it Mormon Life. And so, you know, you had missions, and you had marriage, and you had all the things that you're supposed to do as a member. So you would take callings, and you would have a change of callings, and you'd have, you know, I mean, it was based off the game of life. It was a total rip-off.

Did it have a covenant path? No. No. The whole thing was, the whole thing is the covenant path. Yeah. The whole thing is the covenant path. Of course, it is. Yeah. I did not win that game. Even if I didn't win it, I guess I lost interest or something. I'm not playing it anymore.

So, a lot of symbolism here. [Music] Getting ahead, I guess, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We are getting ahead. Okay. So, yeah, you're trying to find as many ways to just teach, yeah, in any creative way possible that you can, pretty much. And I think that's the same today with, you know, the Instagram and the TikTok and whatever else they're doing. But, but I remember maybe when we talked at breakfast that one time, you saying that you felt, uh, maybe like a bit special, like you were given, you were given kind of an opportunity to, to use your brain, to use your writing talents, to even show some leadership that that later, uh, you kind of wished you had had at the church. And we're kind of foreshadowing a little bit, but do you want to talk about any of you, yeah, how that made you feel to have these types of responses?

Sure, I can talk about that. Um, we were the only companionship of sisters, myself and my companion. And we were one of just a handful of companionships in total that were put online at the very beginning. And it did feel kind of special that, uh, the two of us had been singled out. And I thought maybe it was because I had a degree in English, maybe it was because, you know, this was maybe it was foreshadowing what I was supposed to do with my life, you know, become a writer for the church or, you know, work for the Ensign or something along those lines. And I was very happy to have that experience. And I did feel like it was, I'd been singled out for some reason, and I didn't know why. And then later in my mission, towards the end, I actually got to help teach some zone conferences on how to create a, a good blog. Yeah, I had a degree, you know, and I was the same age as a, well, I was a little older because I had a degree, but, you know, appear to help them understand what went into writing a good message online.

So that probably boosted your confidence in a spiritual way? And then just like that, you're intelligent and capable. And it made me feel good. Yeah. Yeah.

Any converts come from any of your blogging or Facebooking or any of your missionary work online? Nope. Nope. All of my converts were in the area.

Um, but you did have converts? I did. Okay. I did. I had, uh, one, one sister, one single brother, and a family, which was good for that area. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually surprised. But yeah, I'm surprised. Like, you seem obviously very intelligent and that you could bring a powerhouse testimony that would make people convert. But, yeah, it's difficult. I, I know people who go an entire mission in the US in that area, two years, that don't have a single convert. So that's actually, that's really interesting to hear.

Is there anything else that you want to add that would be influential about your mission that would come into play later? Maybe, uh, I could say a little bit about, uh, some leadership issues with women in the church from one of my wards. Okay. The last ward I served in had some really interesting dynamics in the leadership. The, uh, there's a ward council. So in the ward council, you're supposed to have all the leaders of the ward. It's headed by the bishop. You're supposed to have your Relief Society president, your Elders Quorum president, your High Priest group leaders, board, mission leaders, all these people, and the missionaries assigned to that ward. And they're all supposed to get together on Sunday morning and discuss the needs of the members and how best to help them. And this particular ward, the Relief Society president attended for her section, where she shared her thoughts and her concerns about the sisters in the ward. And then she was dismissed. And there was a lot of problems. A lot of the sisters in the ward were saying that they felt like they didn't fit in, they didn't feel connected to the ward, they felt sort of isolated within the ward. And, you know, when we get five or six sisters within a transfer telling me the same thing, I thought, "Okay, the bishop needs to hear this." But the sister missionaries weren't part of, hi, of the ward council. We were not invited. The elders in the ward, they were. So we had to get permission from the bishop to attend ward council, which we should have already been attending anyway. And we went in and presented this problem. The bishop looked at me and he says, "Who are the sisters?" I said, "They wanted to remain anonymous because they didn't want to be singled out." This is a problem for the ward. We've got this many people who are feeling this way. Some of them are in leadership roles, and they still feel isolated, singled out, and not connected to the ward. So this is, this is a worldwide problem. And he says, "Well, if you don't have names, then we can't do anything about it." And we were dismissed. The same time the Relief Society president was. So all the women in the room left together, and they went on and finished their council meeting. It was just, it just didn't fit well. And you had a lot of women in that ward who did not feel included in the ward.

Were you able to voice these concerns like with the Relief Society president, with your companion, say like, "Well, what the heck was that?" The Relief Society president and I did have conversations. So it's, uh, you're being vocal about feeling kind of ostracized and not being able to express. Oh, I wasn't the one who felt ostracized. I mean, I was a missionary, but yeah, members of the ward felt ostracized, including the Relief Society president. And just that old adage of what is it that, uh, Ruth Bader quote, like, "Women deserve to be in the room where decisions are being made." Is that the quote? There's things that are going to influence the dynamics of the ward, and you have a very dismissive, like male council who, I don't, what was your perception that they just, um, that these people were being, to the women, if they don't want to name, nay, if they don't want their name to be put out there, that it's, I guess, not that big of a problem? Or what do you think the bishop was trying to do?

Well, he was obviously dismissing the problem. Uh, I think he wanted to believe that it was an individual issue, that these individual women, half dozen or so of them, had a problem. And if we can address those six women, then we take, we've taken care of the problem. You know, we'll, we'll just send, we'll just send the Relief Society president out, and they can meet with these women, and everything will be fixed. Not realizing that the Relief Society president also did not feel like she was included, partially because she was always dismissed from ward council.

So that sounds like it's going to come into play a lot, like this male-female dynamic within leadership roles, once we get into the second part of your story. Um, I don't know if it's going to play hugely, but it definitely does touch into it. As you had studied English at BYU-Idaho, have you been introduced to the concept of feminism or patriarchy? Would that have even been on your mind at the time as a missionary?

I'd definitely been introduced to feminism because it's a, it's a theme in literature, especially as you get into later literature. And I definitely considered myself, growing up in a mostly female household, you know, pretty strongly in favor of female rights. I didn't look too hard into problems. I didn't want to know, I guess, in some respect, how deep the problems went. So I wanted to keep it all just, you know, the surface level is okay, we're improving, the world is improving, you know, women's, uh, wages are finally starting to reach the same level as men's wages. I wanted to believe the best. And so I just, you know, I looked at that one ward as, uh, a hangers-on to the old way, right? That they hadn't yet caught up to this idea that women and men, um, were equal, even though we never have really been equal in the church because we can't hold the same kind of leadership roles.

Yeah, that's really, that's a perfect way to put it. Uh, and I'm observing just this continuing pattern of you seeing evidence or breadcrumbs of problems in the church, but just like wanting to believe, wanting to be good, and so just, "I don't want to know." "I don't know if like putting things on the shelf is the right metaphor for you," but it seems like you are kind of, as you're slowly confronting problems here and there, you're saying, "Well, okay, it's not a big deal. Okay, I want to be good. Oh, I want to do what's right." And so you're kind of pushing those aside as as they present themselves.

I, I didn't know what putting something on the shelf meant, but I think in some respect, mentally, I really was doing exactly that. I was just pushing it back. I was pushing it away. I was pretending it didn't exist, which is what it means to put something on the shelf. Yeah.

Um, well, if it's okay with you, um, I think we're going to group this into part one, and then maybe just kind of wrap up if you have any other final thoughts about this part one through your mission, or anything else that you didn't get to mention. And this will be kind of the section about your teenage years and your mission, and then we will start and come right back to a part two right now and get into everything about you working, uh, for the church. So, is there anything else for this section that you'd like to say?

Nope, this sounds good. Okay.

Well, this concludes part one. Stick around, we're going to come right back for part two, where we will be discussing, um, Camille Jones and her administrative assistant role in the missionary department, and again, going over a few of the other themes about the imbalance of power between men and women in the LDS Church employment, and her work as a secretary to the Quorum of the Seventies. So, are you pumped?

I'm pumped. This has already been really fun. Thank you so much, Camille. Um, this has been very fascinating. Lovely talking about all of the church history stuff. Me and John felt like we were nerding out, so this has been a really spectacular interview and discussion so far. So thank you so much. And viewers, don't go anywhere. We're coming right back for part two.