Why LDS Polygamy and Joseph Smith Historian Left and Came Back to the LDS Church (Pt One) | E0012

I threatened to sue the church. I think I have never actually mentioned this before.

On today's episode of Let's Get Real, we'd like to introduce John Bradley Don Bradley, author of The 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Missing Contents of the Book of Mormon.

Hello everyone! He's an independent historian and researcher who received the MHA Best Article Award for his work on the Kinderhook plates.

Back when I was an ex-Mormon and an atheist, I got hired by Brian Hills to research Joseph Smith's employment. I promise that the presentation itself will be similarly dramatic.

Pioneer Day 2005 was the day that I hand-delivered my letter of resignation from the church. I met with the stake president, and one of the last things he said to me was he had a feeling that I would be back.

People say losing my faith—what does that mean for you? We have an exemplar. If our faith is centered on something other than God, then our faith is misplaced.

When we experience that doubt, the positive function is to tell us. People think if someone knows the details of the history of the church, that's like a one-way ticket out of the church.

I could make pretty good that I know sources on Joseph Smith and polygamy. Was anybody? And I did come back. So how'd that happen?

There's a little-known account on the First Vision. Joseph Smith says that at the beginning of the vision, this is—oh my gosh, just my mind is just so blown right now. This is exploding in my head.

So when I wanted to come back to the church, I went and met with the bishop, and I was like, "They are never letting me back in the church." I called the bishop in tears, and he said, "If anyone wonders, right, if the church really forgives."

This was obviously the culmination of a journey up to that point, right? But I had come to the determination that the church wasn't true, that Joseph Smith wasn't a prophet, that he was in fact an opportunist.

I had decided that I probably would be excommunicated someday for things that I was going to write. At this point, I was an atheist, so I thought I would just kind of take things into my own hands and excommunicate myself.

I had my name removed from the records of the church. I wanted to bar that door shut, and we can get to the reasons why, right? I laughed at what built up to that.

But at that moment, I actually thought that at some future point, I might want to come back to the church. I didn't want to do that.

In my exit letter, I bore my anti-testimony. I raised at least half a dozen issues, maybe eight or ten issues, that I thought I would never be able to answer later.

So do you mention any of those? Oh sure, like just Joseph Smith's polygamy, the Book of Abraham, text not matching what was on the papyri.

I'd have to think. Yeah, it's okay. I'm just gonna get an idea. A few? Yeah, those were a couple. But at the time, you didn't think that you'd be able to answer?

I thought I would never be able to answer these. So I thought if I put these in my letter, then if I ever tried to come back to the church, they wouldn't let me back because I would have to explain these things that I put in my letter.

I thought, "I'll never be able to explain these things, and so they'll never let me back." I don't think I've ever mentioned this.

As you know, I've done several podcasts where I talked about my spiritual journey. I think I've probably never actually mentioned this before, but one of the things that I did to bar myself from coming back is I threatened to sue the church.

So my employer—I was living in Utah, I was living here in Springville—and my landlords were LDS, my employers were LDS. I thought if I leave the church and they find out, maybe they'll kick me out.

It wouldn't be legal for them to do that, but maybe they would evict me or maybe they would fire me or whatever. So I thought, well, one way to avoid that is in my letter to let them know this needs to be kept absolutely confidential.

If it's not, then I could sue the church. I thought, well, and that would also help me to never come back because if I threatened to sue the church, they're never going to let me back.

At that time, I had called the ward executive secretary to set up an appointment because I knew from reading online.

So if people want to—yeah, you can't leave the church. So this was—I like to say I had a faith crisis before it was cool, but because 2005 was before the big sort of rash, if you will, of like faith crises.

But I had read—there was still a lot of information online about what to do if you want to leave the church. So on exmormon.org, there was all this information about here's a sample letter that you can adapt for yourself.

Here's the direct number for Greg Dodge, who handles membership resignations at Church Headquarters. Here are sort of legal considerations for your letter and so on.

I read all that really carefully, and they said once you send your letter in, the Church Headquarters will want to send your letter to your local leader, and they will want you to meet with your local leader.

They said, "Don't meet with them; they're just going to try to talk you out of it." My thought at the time was, "So I couldn't—if the church sees this as being part of the process, they would like me to talk to my leader."

I'll talk to my leader. I wasn't going to shy away from that because I thought it was uncomfortable, right? Okay.

So I called and I scheduled an appointment. I think the bishop had appointments on like July 23rd or 24th, and I was like, "24th? That's Pioneer Day! I can set up my own ex-Mormon pioneering right on Pioneer Day."

I was on the phone with my best friend outside the church building, right? He was giving me encouragement. I hung up, and I went in and hand-delivered my letter, and that was what started the process of leaving.

So you, in your mind, you're like, "There's no way that I'm coming back," and I'm going to make sure that I outline these specific pieces.

At that point, you're like, in your mind, you're like, "There's nothing that could ever convince me to come back," and you wanted to make that clear.

I wanted to make it clear. I also thought that in a way I would be tempted to come back because I thought that—I didn't think I would ever be able to believe again.

But the church was—I had some people describe having like a terrible experience growing up in the church as a child. I don't know what they're talking about, but like, I mean, everybody obviously has a different life experience, but mine wasn't that way. It was wonderful.

So I thought, well, maybe at some point I would want to come back to the church just because, you know, it's like a beautiful community. I thought, well, I need to make sure I don't do that.

So I thought if I actually lay out in my letter the reasons why I don't believe, then I'll never be able to go back because they'll ask me if I try to come back, "Well, what about these things that you said you didn't believe?"

And I'll be like, "Well, I thought I'll never be able to answer those." So that will keep me from ever thinking that I can come back.

Wow. So July 24th, 2005, you send in the letter and you walk away. Tell me about that moment when you walked away. Did it feel—was it refreshing? Was it sad? Was it happy? What was that like?

It was exhilarating because I really thought that I was—even though it was hard in a way, I had to sort of build myself up to it. I thought that I was really liberating myself.

I thought that I had bought into a religious system that, however powerful it was and whatever good aspects it had to it, I thought it wasn't true.

So I thought that I was freeing myself to go on and have whatever sort of authentic life I might have, you know, with my non-belief.

The bishop actually had me talk. I had a really hard time with that, obviously. So I actually tried to kind of—this might seem ironic—I tried to kind of comfort him.

Really? Yeah, like, "I'm okay," because I totally understood why he would think, from his perspective, that what I was doing was like harming myself eternally, right?

He said, "Well, the stake president will want to meet with you." I said, "Sure."

So weeks later, I met with the stake president, and I've talked about this before, but one of the last things he said to me before I left was that he had a feeling that I would be back.

I was thinking in my mind, "I know I'm never coming back to the church," right? But I thought, but it's not like literally logically impossible. It's not like a married bachelor; it's not impossible, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I thought just to make him feel better, I'll say it's possible, meaning that it's never actually going to happen, but it's logically possible.

Yeah, yeah. And so that's what I said.

Then, little did I know, right? But like, then it was a couple months later when I got my letter telling me officially, you know, "Your name has been removed from the membership of the church," and so on.

I had expected that to feel liberating, and actually, I felt really sad.

You felt sad? I felt like cut off, right? Because, like I said, the church was a beautiful community. I felt like this is the only real community I had ever known.

I had very fond childhood memories of my ward in South Bend, Indiana, where I was really connected with caring adults.

I remember when I was eight, when I got baptized, how I wanted to follow Jesus and so on. Even though now I was an atheist, I still thought, like, well, I wanted to do something good by joining the church.

I felt like, why did I undo that again? But then I thought, well, the deed is done now. I can't—there's no going back.

While I had actually not believed for about five years before I left officially, I had seen that it was like a good community.

So then, you know, when suddenly I was actually out of the church, before it had been like, well, since I was in the church, even though I had lost my faith, I could still stay in the church.

Yeah, yeah. But if you're not a member of the church and you want to join the church, they kind of want you to believe.

Yeah, yeah. And so I knew that I thought I'm never going to be able to believe again, and so I'll never be able to go back.

So I just accepted the fact that, okay, well, I've done this. I've done what I had decided. I've left the church, and that kind of initiated a sort of a journey from there.

So let's go back to what led to that point. So you're in the church for five years even before—where did it start? Because I'm assuming that it didn't happen in one day.

Anything but rant. So I do sometimes talk to people who, like, they found out Joseph Smith practiced polygamy, and they were gone. Like, they immediately lost their faith or something.

I really wrestled, struggled over a long period of time. So my first doubts came when I was a teenager.

Okay, so my parents were East Coast converts to the church, very strict Latter-day Saint family. I was like a good LDS kid.

I wasn't like hyper-devout as a child, but not many children are, right? I read the scriptures some.

The things that I did learn about church things really stuck in my mind, you know? But when I was about 15, I was taking seminary, and I had a wonderful seminary teacher.

He really taught us about setting goals, including spiritual goals. This was the first time in my life I started to really set goals in different areas of my life, and that resulted in me growing a lot spiritually.

I was trying to learn more about how to keep my baptismal covenant better and other things like that.

That ended up leading into me learning things about the history of the church. I had initially just been trying to learn scripture and doctrine, right, and sort of applied application of the gospel to my life.

Then, when I was 17, I talked about this. It's a weird incident, right? Maybe it's partly the hand of Providence in my life, right?

But my first doubts came because of family home evening. That's just the way it came out, you know? It wasn't anything about the lesson or anything.

My parents were great about having family home evening, but we had the lesson and all that, and then we would also have a family activity.

This night, our activity was that we went to Deseret Book. My dad took us to Deseret Book in Orem, and he offered to get us each a church book on any subject that we wanted.

Okay, so there I was looking in the General Authority section, so not the most likely place to find something that starts your doubts, right?

But there, in between the books by, you know, Boyd K. Packer and Joseph Fielding Smith, they had books by B.H. Roberts.

Yeah, and I knew who B.H. Roberts was. He had died way back in the 30s, right? But I knew that he had been one of the church's great intellectuals, one of the term authorities from the Seven Presidents of the Seventy.

I knew he had headed the history of the church, and I had another book by him on doctrine.

This book, though, was titled Studies of the Book of Mormon. Back in the early 1900s, B.H. Roberts had encountered some questions from a well-meaning non-Mormon, like someone investigating the church.

He saw what he thought were some real flaws in the Book of Mormon. He noted that the Book of Mormon, for instance, talked about the Native Americans all originating from one group of people like 2600 years ago.

At least this was how the text was understood at the time, right? There was hemispheric geography. Lehi is the ancestor of all Native Americans everywhere, you know, like their main progenitor.

He noted that if you look at all the languages, the linguistic diversity of Native Americans today, that degree of linguistic diversity couldn't have developed in just 2600 or 2500 years.

But Roberts decided he wanted to study these kinds of arguments more. Basically, in modern terms, you could say he was sort of trying to steel man the critics' arguments.

He was kind of making a devil's advocate case against the Book of Mormon, arguing the Book of Mormon could be a 19th-century work.

Joseph Smith could have written it to prove that it was right, well, in order to—so that Latter-day Saints would know what they're up against.

You can't answer the questions and the criticisms if you haven't figured out what the best questions and criticisms are, and so he was trying to figure out what are the arguments that people haven't yet brought against the Book of Mormon but they will in the future.

He wanted to lay them out first so that Latter-day Saint scholars could start working on them.

Well, obviously, he had never intended for this to be published as a book. This was privately circulated among authorities and such.

So several decades later, after his death, this was published by the University of Illinois Press, and the title seemed pretty simple, right?

The buyers at Deseret Book clearly did not know what they were getting, okay? Because otherwise, they would never have stocked this book, because it's not a faith-promoting book; it's like the opposite.

And so I'm probably the only teenager in the entire church who picked this up at Deseret Book, especially during family home evening.

Okay, so I just think it's interesting, you know? It's kind of hilarious, right? So like, because it's such an unlikely thing to have happen.

Yeah, yeah, it's so unlikely, but it happened, right?

And so the book looked interesting. In parts of it, he was analyzing Joseph Smith's dreams and talking about all kinds of just fascinating things. I was like, "Oh, this looks cool."

So I had encountered anti-Mormon literature at the local library, but when I read that B.H. Roberts book, you're saying—no, no, that's so—okay, no, no.

Yeah, at the local library previously.

Okay, but when I read that stuff, like Daryl and Sandra Tanner's Mormonism: Shadow or Reality, when I read that stuff, I had my guard up.

These were anti-Mormons, right? This was B.H. Roberts; this was a general authority. So this came in under the radar. I didn't have my guard up, right?

And so I just read his arguments, and I was like, "Whoa!" You know?

I like to say it's true that, like, up until this time, like, Nephi had been as real to me as George Washington. I had no more questioned the reality of one than the other, right?

And so it really shook me. Even though I'd been very devout, there were all these questions now that I didn't know. I didn't have any idea how to answer.

And so then it raised questions about not only the Book of Mormon but the validity of the church in general, Jesus, God, life after death.

And so I just kind of blew up these questions for me, and then for several months, I was wrestling with all this.

And I actually started going up to—we moved, actually. We moved at the end of that school year.

When you say wrestle, tell me about that a little bit more. Because you read the book, and it kind of brings up some questions.

Sure. And how are you wrestling with it? What was that like?

I was trying to consider lots of things. I had had powerful spiritual experiences, and so I was wondering, what do I make of those?

One of the things I wondered is, were those from God, or were those just from my own mind? You know? I mean, I had these experiences. I knew I'd had the experiences; I wasn't questioning that.

But I was questioning what did they mean? You know, can I rely on these experiences?

I had been a science kid, so this is when I was first getting into history. I had not been a history kid; that was my older brother.

Okay, okay. I was a science kid, right? Very systematic, logical.

So I took one of my classes in high school. I took an honors class, and they had us take something called the Wexler Test of Rational Thinking, and I scored the highest in the class.

Right? I just was like—this was how I thought. I thought systematically, rationally, and science really had helped train me to think that way.

Okay, science.

And so now, as I was reading these arguments by B.H. Roberts, I could see that there was a logic to these arguments, right?

There was a power to them. And, you know, like the limited geography theory had not really taken hold very far yet.

It had been published on by this time by John Sorensen, but it hadn't spread much. And that kind of argument helps to answer a lot of B.H. Roberts's criticisms, but I wasn't familiar with that.

As far as I was concerned, it really looked logically like this really undermined the Book of Mormon.

And so I was wrestling with, well, what do I make of the things that seem—there did seem to be evidence in favor of the Book of Mormon too.

Yeah, and there was the evidence of my own experience with the Book of Mormon and the gospel, but then there were these rational arguments that he laid out.

I had questions about how to weigh that all out. So it was almost as if a lot of the wrestle was basically I can see how logically this could be possible, but then how do I reconcile the fact that I had these spiritual experiences?

And that didn't make sense. Is that what you're saying?

So right, the evidence didn't seem to all be on the same side.

So I think I was—I might have already been familiar with the fact that there were things like chiasmus in the Book of Mormon.

I knew of things that favored the Book of Mormon, and I had a book somewhere in this time. I read a book—I read Richard L. Anderson's book Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses.

Yeah, I knew that like the eight witnesses had never denied their testimony, and the three both, right?

And so on. So I saw reasons to believe, but now I also have seen reasons to not believe.

And so I was kind of caught on the horns of the dilemma, sort of. It was like being stretched between two points.

Yeah, you know? So at the end of that school year, we moved up to Salt Lake, and I was like a shy high school kid, right?

And suddenly I was in a new city, far away from the friends that I knew, and I had a lot of time on my hands that summer.

I started going down to the church archives. I don't really become interested as a high school kid. I was 17.

You were 17, and you're in the archives?

I was wearing knee-length shorts, like tropical shorts, and a t-shirt, and going down like about four days out of five every week to the church archives, spending several hours.

I researched like the origins and demise of the Adam-God theory.

Are you serious? That was my first big archival research project at the church house when I was 17, 18 years old.

Wow.

And I was reading stuff about the Book of Mormon. So B.H. Roberts had proposed the idea that others have criticized the Book of Mormon's antiquity claims.

They've used that Joseph Smith had encountered the book called A View of the Hebrews.

That's right, I know.

And so I actually read A View of the Hebrews. I went to the church archives and found it and read it.

Right? And I was reading this Spalding manuscript when I was reading arguments for and against the Book of Mormon's historicity.

And that's—I spent a lot of time that summer doing that.

And then when school started up, I went to East High in Salt Lake, and I would catch the bus.

I didn't have a last-period class with my senior year. I didn't have a last-period class, and so I would leave school early, take the bus from East High downtown, go to the church archives, spend a couple, you know, two or three hours there before they closed, and do research.

And so I did this all through the summer and all through 12th grade.

That's amazing.

So you read a lot of this just on your free time just because you were interested. Were you looking for something, or were you interested?

Oh, I mean, that's the same thing. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Like, were you trying to—was it part of the wrestle, or was it just more of the interest?

It was both. So it started out being the wrestle, right? Because I wanted more information to kind of weigh all this out because I was teetering on the edge.

During the summer, I basically became agnostic. I was just maybe just very slightly, just like a hair on the side of belief, but like I was basically right in the middle, just like slanted ever so slightly toward belief and was sometimes slanted away, right?

But usually slanted slightly toward. And so that was really painful for me psychologically, emotionally.

You know, just like I said, I felt like I was being like torn between two things, and this was stuff that mattered to me, of course, right?

I had always had a drive to understand like the ultimate meaning of life.

And the restoration had provided that for me because I thought—I remember thinking about different notions of the afterlife and what life is all about and thinking about what I understood about traditional Christian beliefs on that, like Buddhism or whatever.

And I remember thinking, well, Latter-day Saints are saying that like when we die, like the ultimate point of our life, our ultimate destiny is to participate in God's life.

That's right.

And I thought God is ultimate, and so like if what else could our ultimate purpose be than to participate in God, join God in God's life?

And so that just made so much sense to me.

Yeah.

And so now to have it all thrown up into question, was that really the point of our life? Was there a point of our life at all?

So now I got to find out all right. And so I wanted just more information.

And so there was both kind of—there was both a kind of desperation to find out things and growing just like a curiosity because now that same curiosity that I'd been putting towards science as a kid, when I was studying like bugs as a little kid, like watching how ants behave, and then like later in my teenage years, well, when I studied later like fossils and evolution, and like cosmology, yeah, origins of the universe.

Now I was turning—now I started that curiosity started to be turned to church history because I started to realize, wait, there are open questions in the history of the church, and it's like this fascinating—some fascinating puzzles.

And I started to realize by reading good scholars, I started finding that sometimes I disagreed with them, but I disagreed with them because I was seeing things in the evidence, the sources that they presented that they weren't seeing.

Interesting.

And so that gave me like—this is obviously a gift that you have.

So this is—yeah, okay.

This gave me some confidence, like, wait a minute, you're seeing that I'm seeing something that this guy didn't see, then I should pursue this further, you know?

I can do something here at 17.

Yeah, 17, 18.

Wow.

Yeah, so you're at BYU, and this is after the mission.

Yeah.

You served the mission; you kind of came to terms with some of the questions that you had to agree, right?

And then where do you go from there?

Ah, so when people read in the history of the church, when they read a book, let's say by Richard Bushman, the person who has written that work has kind of already gone through the process of sort of digesting this information, kind of integrating, making sense of it intellectually and making sense of it spiritually.

But when you are the one doing your own research, that burden falls squarely on you.

You have to be the one to make sense of it intellectually and to make whatever sense you're going to make of it spiritually.

And so I was finding new things for several years, but I was coming up against some limits of making sense of them for myself.

I was finding that in many ways, the story that I was finding and the story that I had been told were different.

There was a gap between the two stories, so there's cognitive dissonance, right?

Yeah.

And so that led to some faith questions, further faith questions.

So the faith questions that I'd had when I was like 17, 18 started to emerge again and kind of more insistently now because I was making new discoveries, and I didn't know always what to make of them.

And so I did not realize for much of this time that I was gradually losing my faith.

What I was ending up believing was less and less like what I had started believing.

There was—I was believing less, and if this is kind of the total amount that I was believing originally in terms of history and doctrine, with time that was shrinking.

And I didn't realize that until kind of late in the process.

Wait a minute, am I in the process of losing my faith? Because I was just trying to explain the data that I was seeing.

I was just coming up with new mental models to explain it, but I was in the process—I discovered that I was believing less and less.

Well, I have an interesting thought on this, and I've always wanted to ask somebody this because I hear people say losing my faith in the doctrine of Christ.

You know, it's faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, right? Totally right.

And so what is your perspective of that when somebody says that? I lost my faith in that context.

You know, semantics—you could say there's a lot of different ways you could see it, right?

But like, how do you see that perspective of losing my faith in Jesus Christ?

Like, what's—what would you do? Do you think that the same was the difference when people say that?

For you, what does that mean for you when you say, "I lost my faith"?

Right, so at the time, I mean, that I was losing my faith, like in the restoration, but what you're hitting on, Stephen, is like a really—I think a really important point.

Okay.

And I was thinking of saying this after talking about my journey, but I can slide it in here, right?

Like, if you look at all the things that Joseph Smith was called to in his revelations, or he's called to be a prophet, a seer, a revelator, or translator, he's the president of the high priesthood, he's various things—never once is he called to be an exemplar.

Yeah.

We have an exemplar in the gospel; his name is Jesus, right? Not Joseph.

Right.

And so even though, as I see it now, right, Joseph Smith had some really powerful character traits. He had some great strengths which we might well emulate, right?

But if we're looking to anybody to be our exemplar, even if they're prophets, right, if we're looking at Joseph Smith, or Brigham Young, or whomever as our exemplar, they're going to let us down.

They're going to disappoint us because that's not their role—to be our exemplar.

They're not divine, right? They're not perfect; they're human beings like us with different callings.

Yeah, right.

And so one of the roles that I now see in retrospect that doubt—so we think of faith and doubt. We think if you were to ask someone, "What's the opposite of faith?" I think a lot of people would say doubt.

Yeah.

Okay, doubt can play a purifying role in our faith.

Doubt can help purify our faith. If our faith is centered on something other than God and God manifesting, revealing himself in Christ, then our faith is misplaced, and we will be let down.

And that will produce doubt.

And when we experience that doubt, the positive function of that doubt is to tell us you've been putting your faith in the wrong object.

You were never supposed to have faith in Joseph Smith or Brigham Young or whomever from the history of the church.

Or if you look at the Book of Genesis, right? I mean, it starts with, you know, Adam and Eve get themselves kicked out of the garden, right?

Noah, like, saves humankind, but then he's like laying there drunk, right?

He puts a curse on his grandson, right, because of something that his son did, which makes no sense, right?

Abraham's story—Abraham, his family is not like a picture of domestic harmony or something, right?

Isaac and Rebecca show favoritism with their two sons in ways that are awful, dreadful.

And Jacob, like, bilks his brother out of his birthright and his blessing.

Jacob's sons are a total disaster. Reuben sleeps with one of his father's wives.

Joseph is like a little snit who doesn't seem to realize that he's making his brothers feel inferior to him, right?

The brothers try to kill him, and then they're like, "I know! We won't kill him; we'll do something better. We'll sell him into slavery for the rest of his life."

You know, like you can just keep going, you know? Solomon—well, David, right? Man after his own heart, he commits murder and adultery.

Solomon, the wisest man in the world, he builds God's temple and then he fills it with idols and so on.

You know what a mess! Even in the New Testament, Peter, right? "I'll never deny you!" And that's the first chance he denies him three times.

This is not a book of exemplars. This is not what it's meant to be, right?

We have the book has an exemplar in it, right? It's Christ.

These other people are not meant to be our exemplar.

So if we look at church history and we're expecting this is church history is like a book of exemplars, yeah, we're going to be disappointed.

They will let us down just like these guys in the Bible let us down.

That's not their role.

And so doubt is—doubt does not have to be a bad thing. One way that doubt can help us is it helps sort of purify our faith, purge our faith of like putting our faith in the wrong things so that we can center our faith more exactly in the right place.

Are you saying that doubt can identify that that's what's happening? Is that what you're saying? Is that what you mean by that?

Yeah, like if you—if doubt is showing up, are you saying that it's a sign that perhaps it's in the wrong?

I think often, at least often, okay? Doubt can be a sign that, hey, maybe I put my faith in the wrong thing.

I mean, think of it like this: if what you're looking—if someone were looking for a peace of mind and a sense of security, and they found that they kept putting their sense of security on the stock market, yeah?

The stock market's going to like give me financial security or whatever, and then that keeps being a source of trouble for them.

They feel insecure, then maybe the stock market is not a good source of security, right?

I mean, so same thing here. If you're putting this sort of trust in—you're placing your concerns for security and your desire for an exemplar and so on in like one of the people from the history of the church, yeah?

And that's not working out for you; they're letting you down.

Yeah, maybe that's telling you they were never where you were supposed to be putting that faith in the first place.

You put faith in Christ, and then that doesn't mean that God doesn't use these people. Of course, he uses us, and we all know how weak and fragile and broken we are.

Yeah, right?

And so that like—it actually—we actually learn good things, I think, by seeing that the people in the Bible and people in the scriptures, the people in the history of the church were human and had weaknesses like us because it tells us that God works with fallible humans like us.

Hooray, right? Like that's good news!

Yeah, it just makes me think of in the Book of Mormon, at the very beginning, you see Lehi. He has this vision, and it's like he sees Jerusalem being destroyed.

And the next words that come out of his mouth is, "How great and marvelous, how merciful the Lord is!"

But this place is destroyed! Yeah, they destroyed it; they messed it up, and he was still merciful to them.

And then he follows to say at the end of that chapter, "I'm going to show you even more examples," right?

Over and over and over again how merciful God is, right?

And I find it interesting to see that a lot of this journey that you're on, it's that attack on the Book of Mormon because, well, I'm saying a lot of the research of, you know, the Book of the Hebrews, right?

Is the Book of Mormon true? Because once you take that away, you know, that's that primary truth.

It just—everything else falls. Once you determine Joseph Smith, right?

If Joseph Smith isn't a prophet, then if I can—if I can get it there, then down goes the rest, right?

And I know that's a very cliché thing at times for people to mention, but the more I'm hearing your story, I'm feeling like it's like a lot of it's back at the person, the person, and then, oh, the book.

But it's never—never is not the right word to say. I want to say the exemplar that you mentioned of it being in Jesus Christ, right?

Right.

So the focus—so what is the Book of Mormon a witness of? It's a witness of Jesus Christ.

When Joseph Smith makes—when Joseph Smith starts telling his family and others about having been called to be a prophet, he's saying that he saw Christ, right?

He's called as an apostle of Jesus Christ. He calls a prophet by Christ.

So the faith there is actually centered on Christ. Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon are just instruments through which Christ is working.

The instrument is not the thing itself, right? The instrument is not the focus of our faith.

The focus of our faith is Christ. But then we realize that we learn things about Christ through the instrumentality of the Book of Mormon.

So the Book of Mormon itself doesn't have to be perfect, and in fact, the Book of Mormon says on its title page, "This book is not perfect."

Right? It says, you know, "Don't throw away the things of God," right?

And the things of Christ, right? Because of the weaknesses of man.

And so that's a—I mean, that kind of says there what I've been saying, right?

Like, don't put your faith in like the things that may just be the weaknesses of the authors coming through in this or the faith in them, faith, right?

Or in them or the translator, whatever. Put your faith in what they are pointing to, which is Christ.

So at the time, I was questioning whether Joseph Smith was a prophet and whether the Book of Mormon was actually scripture.

You asked earlier before we started recording, yeah, you were asking about sort of what was—excuse me—what was kind of the last straw for you?

For me, and like when I did stop believing at that point, and it's—I don't know, I've talked about this on other podcasts, which is kind of weird.

I had come to question whether I could rely on my spiritual experiences. I'd had them, but like I said, the idea had occurred to me like maybe these experiences are just coming from inside of me.

Maybe I'm not coming from outside of me with God, right?

And so I was looking—and like I said, I had been like a science kid, very sort of rationally grounded.

And so I was looking for historical evidence to show me that Joseph Smith really was a prophet.

And I had found a couple historical sources that I was aware of, a couple sources that had not been published before.

And one of them was the Nauvoo Journal—were purported to be in the Nauvoo Journal of Sarah Stoddard that told like a miraculous event that Joseph Smith had been part of.

And because it was recorded in a contemporaneous journal, I thought, well, there you go. That shows, you know, this happened.

And then another source that I became acquainted with was actually a set of sources. It was a collection of sources created by the family of Joseph Smith's brother, Samuel Harrison Smith.

And that turned out—so that had a lot of prophecies that Joseph Smith had made that had been fulfilled, like to the letter, like exactly.

And so I put a lot of stock in these sources. They came down through the families of the people who had created them, and they seemed really legit, right?

And then I was planning—so I was basing some of my remaining—I had been losing my faith, but some of my remaining faith I was kind of putting on those pillars of those sources.

And then I started investing in the sources a lot more closely because I wanted to quote those sources in things that I planned to write.

And so I wanted to verify for sure, are these sources 100% legit? No question about it.

And I ended up discovering that in both cases, the sources were pious forgeries that had been created by the families of the descendants.

There were just a number of clues that showed that.

And so because those had still been like some of the things that I was grounding my faith on, right?

Like if my faith only had like a few pillars left, you need to take a couple of them out, right?

It's done for you, you know? And so that—my remaining faith collapsed.

And I still thought that the church was a good thing.

Like I said, my childhood experience with it had been wonderful. I thought it was good in people's lives.

So I didn't leave at that time. I stayed active, but then I started to become kind of increasingly alienated.

There were just—in some ways, there were just a lot of things that bugged me. I would go to church; people would say dumb things.

Please don't just notice all of it, and I started feeling increasingly alienated.

I started feeling I didn't really want to go to church anymore.

And so—and then I started—in my research, I was continuing my research all the time, but I started in my research taking—adopting the models.

So one of the things that I do as a historian is I create explanatory models, yeah, right?

So the question is not what's the absolute truth here because absolute truth about history is hard to come by, right?

What we can do is we can create a model to explain, well, this is this person's motivation, okay?

Then here's what we would expect them to do. Yeah, we should be able to predict their behavior based on those motivations.

And if they're doing things that line up with that prediction, that tends to confirm the model.

Or you might have another competing model, maybe the opposite motivations here, right?

So maybe the model of Joseph Smith as well, he's religiously sincere here, and then the model—but like he's a man; he's a con man or opportunist here.

And then you can keep that consistency, right?

And then you compare, right? You compare how much does this model explain versus this model.

Yeah, so at this point, I had ended up adopting the model of Joseph Smith as opportunist.

There were some things that I was seeing in the history where I thought, well, you know, that could be explained if Joseph Smith was actually—he was just saying it for himself.

He was just trying to, you know, money, sex, power, right?

And so that was the model I was working with.

And so this brings us to where I left the church, right? Because Joseph Smith had been—well, he'd been a hero figure for me.

He'd been an exemplar for me, yeah, right? He really had.

And I had had like a really intense sort of emotional bond with him.

I have two dads, so my mom was married multiple times. I have a natural dad and an adoptive dad.

During my teenage years, my natural dad was back on the East Coast. We talked once in a blue moon on the phone, but I didn't see him for several years because we lived 2000 miles apart.

My adoptive dad and I weren't getting along, partly because he didn't like some of the controversial subjects I was digging into in my history work.

So for a while, as a teenager, 17, 18 years old, I felt like maybe I didn't really have a father-like relationship with someone.

And so I kind of slotted Joseph Smith into that role.

Like Joseph Smith became a kind of spiritual father figure for me.

So when I started thinking several years later that he was basically a con man and he was an opportunist, that was devastating for me.

It was devastating because he had been a hero; he'd been emotionally important to me.

He'd been an exemplar to me. I had taken the restoration so seriously; I had taken the Book of Mormon so seriously.

But I thought he hadn't, and that just was like so disillusioning and painful to me.

And it was during that time that I decided to leave the church.

I thought, like I said earlier, I thought instead of waiting for the church to excommunicate me, I'll take care of that myself, thank you, right?

Like, it's more efficient. Much more efficient.

And I was friends with Mike Quinn, and I'd seen him go through excommunication, how painful that was.

I was friends with Maxine Hanks, who was also on the September 6th.

I knew people had been excommunicated. I didn't want to go through that.

So I thought I would love to have something to contribute to the church community that I'd always hoped with my history work to have things to contribute.

And now the things that I was seeing, I was seeing things in such a negative light that I thought if I publish these things, it's not going to be a contribution.

They won't—the church won't benefit from that.

It's like, you know, if I take a jackhammer to the foundations of a building, am I contributing to the building?

No, right?

And so I thought, I thought I—for everybody's sake, kind of, I should leave.

And so that was when I put in my letter, July 24th, 2005.

You bring that letter in, and you've come to this conclusion. You put Joseph Smith as your exemplar, as you say, and you felt betrayed by him to a degree.

You feel betrayed by the manner that he took the Book of Mormon, didn't take it seriously as seriously as you did.

Well, that was what I thought at the time, right? That's what's going through your mind.

And then you put that letter on the—you come talk to your bishop, and then he—you said before how he had a—it was challenging for him, and you kind of were comforting him in the time.

And so then you receive the letter back. You feel a little more sad about it because of the connection you felt that was there was almost a disconnection.

Where do you go from there?

So in retrospect, I call this my personal wandering in the wilderness. I was an ex-Mormon atheist living on the Wasatch Front here in Utah.

So I became involved in the local ex-Mormon community. There were a lot of ex-Mormon social events.

There was something called the ex-Mormon conference. I think it was every October. I went to that a couple times.

And I was planning to—I was continuing with my research. I was planning on doing a lot of publishing.

But my ultimate aim at the time was I was going to lay out an entirely naturalistic account of the rise of Mormonism.

And it centered on this idea of Joseph Smith as an opportunist.

I had stopped believing in God because I thought at the time that I didn't see enough evidence for God and because of the problem of evil and suffering.

So I looked at like the sufferings of young children, and I just didn't know how to square that with a loving God.

And so I still, though, I wanted there to be some larger meaning.

I'd stopped believing in anything supernatural, and I'd kind of—honestly, I'd given up.

I thought—in retrospect, this sounds really, really silly to me, okay? Really silly.

I thought that because I'd spent so long studying the history of the church, and I'd also spent a fair amount of time studying theology—not just Latter-day Saint theology, but theology more broadly, arguments about the existence of God and the nature of God—I thought I've given God every chance, kind of.

I've given God every out, and it's not working. It's like hitting my head against a wall.

And so I—in what now seems to me just like a lot of hubris, I thought I've canvassed it all. I've covered it all.

You know, I've looked into all the possibilities, and if God really probably exists, I would have figured it out by now.

And so I thought I just need to give up. This is not working. I just need to give up on religion. I just need to give up on God.

So I did.

Now something that happened in this time—like, so back when I was an ex-Mormon atheist, I got hired by Brian Hills to research Joseph Smith and polygamy.

So for those who don't know, Brian Hills is the author who has published most extensively on Joseph Smith's practice and teaching of polygamy.

He has a three-volume set titled Joseph Smith's Polygamy. It seriously stacks probably about this high.

Okay, and it has—can they see that? I can't tell where the camera is.

How many inches?

I think that's like seven inches.

Yeah, I think so. I think about seven inches.

So Brian wanted—he was coming very much from a faithful Latter-day Saint perspective.

I mean, he was literally singing with the choir. He was in the Tabernacle Choir, okay?

Brian was an anesthesiologist working at a hospital. He wanted to—but he wanted to do work on Joseph Smith's employment.

He wanted it to be serious work. He wanted to canvas all the sources. He wanted to gather every source that's ever been cited in anything that's ever been written on the subject of Joseph Smith and polygamy and then see what else could be found.

Okay, so this is a massive undertaking. In fact, I think he did—he had no idea how massive it was before he started, and I think if he had known, he might not have tried it because it ended up—it went on for years.

Wow.

So Brian knew that he didn't have the time personally to find all these sources, right? Because he's not at the hospital, right?

So he hired me. That was my job, was to collect every source that could be found on Joseph Smith and polygamy.

So I became an archive rat, right? Like I practically lived at the church archives for two years.

This is like going back to being 17, right?

Yeah, I was there all the time.

Yeah, and for two years, I canvassed all the repositories in Utah.

I went to the Utah State History Division. I went up to the library at Utah State, spent a lot of time at the BYU library, and so on.

I had friends out in California get things for me from the Huntington Library out there.

I went to the Yale Library twice to access the massive, amazing D. Michael Quinn collection.

Wow.

And other collections that they house there. Quinn had access back in the 80s. He had basically unfettered access to church archives.

They actually let him go and browse the stacks where the sources were himself. They would never do that today, okay?

But they let him do that, so he found all kinds of things nobody else had access to.

So I got to find all that stuff in his collection, transcribe it all, right?

And give all this to Brian. And then Brian had me research to find more sources that had never been cited by anyone and to research the background of a lot of these sources, right?

Like, who was this person who made this claim? Who said this thing about Joseph Smith?

Wow.

What was their—you were talking earlier about biases. He was having me investigate the biases of the people who were telling, giving these different accounts.

So at that time, Brian and I were actually coming from opposite perspectives.

So he thought that Joseph Smith, you know, was like the greatest prophet ever, basically, right?

Like, and I thought Joseph Smith was a scoundrel, you know? It was just making up these things about money, sex, and power.

So Brian saw Joseph's polygamy as being motivated by obedience to divine command, and I saw this being all about sex, right?

But nonetheless, I was doing the research for Brian.

So once early in the research, Brian started to ask me kind of where I was at with my faith or myself.

He didn't know, but I think he—I had very long hair at the time. I probably did not come across as super LDS, but he knew your ability.

He asked—he started to ask me once where I was at with everything, and then he stopped himself, and he said, "It doesn't matter."

So Brian was amazing. He was a really good boss. He was really kind, really helpful.

And yeah, I actually got to see during that time that Brian had something in my—in his life that I didn't have in mine, and that was peace.

You know?

And so even though I very much didn't believe, I could see really see the benefits of the restoration in his life.

So he had peace. You said that the way that you said that to me, it felt like there was something behind that in your perspective.

Whenever you felt that he had peace, what was that like for you?

It almost seemed like it was a contrast for you.

Oh, it was a contrast. So one time—so we used to meet every week because he lived up in Layton, north of Salt Lake, but he sang in the choir.

So we used to meet every Wednesday, I think it was, every Wednesday night after choir practice.

We would meet in the basement of the conference center, and I would hand off sources to him and explain things to him, and he would give me my check, right?

Well, one time, for some reason, I went and actually visited him at his home in Layton.

I think he was going to give me some book or something, and I just remember we got to his house.

I just thought, like, wow, there was just like an atmosphere of peace in his house.

It just seemed like—I thought he has a really good life, you know? He really has peace in his life.

And I—I don't mind, you know?

So yeah, I definitely—I saw that very much as a contrast.

And one thing—there are a lot of people who—there are a lot of ex-Mormons and sort of disaffected Latter-day Saints maybe who are critical of Brian Hills because Brian presents a view of Joseph Smith where, you know, Joseph was—he was doing things for the right reasons.

He's basically—he was a good guy.

And Brian interprets on certain controversial issues surrounding Joseph Smith and polygamy.

Brian interprets them in a way that's sort of more conservative or faithful, whereas obviously people from a more disaffected or critical perspective are going to interpret them more like I was interpreting them at the time.

So one of the things I noticed, though, was that I thought I could see Brian's biases from my perspective, right?

Yeah.

And so I thought Brian would—if there was a source that seemed to say something about Joseph Smith that was really negative or that Brian disliked, he would have me research that source extra to kind of see what the person's angle was.

Was there some reason they might be making this up or exaggerating or whatever?

And I remember thinking to myself—I didn't say this, but I remember thinking, "Oh, come on, Brian! Like, you just have to accept that this source is right. This is what happened."

And then I would actually research, and I would often find out, you know what? That person really did have an angle.

They had an axe to grind. Here was what they had to benefit from saying that.

And I'm not saying that—like we talked about earlier, I'm not saying that means you totally dismiss the source, right?

Because like I was saying, you know, we look at things each from a different angle, and that gives us our—that gives us a fuller picture, right?

So we don't just dismiss those sources, but at the same time, we do have to contextualize those.

That's right.

And recognize they had their biases too.

So I've been seeing Brian's biases. Whose biases was I blind to?

This guy's, yeah, right?

And so over the course of two years plus—because he had me do some extended research beyond that—I helped Brian gather some 1500 sources on Joseph Smith and polygamy that he cites in his books.

Fifteen hundred?

Fifteen hundred.

And that is just a lot.

I mean, if you were to compare Brian's books with the number of sources cited in anything else that had ever been written on the subject, any other one book on Joseph Smith's polygamy or something would probably have cited a fifth or sixth of that or something.

I mean, he just blew it out of the water.

Wow.

With your help, right?

So by the end of that project, I think it's fair to say that Brian and I had become the two biggest experts on the sources on Joseph Smith and polygamy.

Plus, I had done research on Joseph Smith's polygamy before that, and I did further research after that work for Brian.

I've published on Joseph Smith's relationship with Fanny Elder.

I have a couple more papers that have been submitted for publication on that subject and related, you know, doing work on related subjects.

And so I did all that research while I was out of the church, and then I came back.

So when I went up to—so people think that if someone knows the details of the history of the church, that's like a one-way ticket out of the church, right?

It's like a one-way door that only goes out; you can't come back, right?

Well, I mean, I could make a pretty good argument that I know the sources on Joseph Smith and polygamy more than anybody, as well as anybody, right?

And I did come back.

Okay, so how'd that happen?

And so I started reading just like anti-religious literature thinking, "I got to—I just need to totally give up on religion and sort of strip away whatever last messages of religious belief I have inside myself."

Interesting.

And so I was very actively reading—so this is like the mirror story of my family home evening story when I was 17.

So my—how I came to doubt in the first place was weird, right?

Like you wouldn't expect you go to Deseret Book for family home evening, and you like—that's the beginning of your faith crisis, right?

The beginning of my return to belief in God was similarly strange.

Interesting.

So I was reading in something called Skeptic Magazine, which is just what it sounds like.

It's Michael Shermer, who—for whoever's heard of him, he's like a leader in the skeptic movement.

The skeptic movement says there's no supernatural, paranormal; there's no religious dimension of life.

And so I was actively reading Skeptic Magazine, edited by this Michael Shermer, to sort of, you know, remove again the last messages of religious belief from my mind.

And there was an ad in the book for a book called Biocasm that was about the origins of the universe.

And the book purported to give an explanation for how the universe could have an ultimate meaning even without anything supernatural.

Now, even though I didn't believe in the supernatural anymore, like I said, when I was a teen, ever since I was a teenager, I really was hungry for life to have a meaning, a larger meaning.

And so one of the terribly sad things for me about becoming an atheist was that life had no ultimate meaning anymore.

I mean, everything that I cared about would one day be destroyed. Everyone that I cared about would one day be destroyed.

I thought this is how it was. It was depressing, but I thought that that was reality.

And so, but I wanted a larger meaning.

So this—because this book was advertised in Skeptic Magazine and endorsed by the editor Michael Shermer, I thought it can't be some supernatural mumbo jumbo stuff.

This has got to be something serious.

So I checked it out from the University of Utah library and started reading.

And in the first half of the book, he lays out in detail what's called the fine-tuning of the universe for the existence of life.

So I haven't heard him that familiar with that one.

Okay, this is a fascinating problem in cosmology, and it's one of the interesting reasons to believe in God.

But do you think that that was—that was his intent?

That wasn't his intent.

No, no, no.

They don't realize that you look at those gaps like that's the gift that you have.

Well, so he makes—he lays out the fine-tuning, which, like I said, is a problem.

It's a problem in physics and cosmology.

So basically, in cosmology, they've recognized that if the fundamental constant of gravity were just slightly smaller—meaning like one part in billions or trillions—the all the matter in the early universe would have collapsed in a black hole.

So you wouldn't have galaxies; you wouldn't have stars. If you didn't have stars, you wouldn't have planets where you'd have life.

If the gravitational force had been that much weaker, the gravity that the matter would not have clustered together into galaxies; it would have dispersed evenly throughout the universe.

Again, no life, no stars equals no life.

And how much of a difference in gravity? It was like one in billions or trillions.

But then it turns out that's just the beginning because there are several fundamental laws of nature.

There's like the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force also, right?

And if you—with several forces of nature, if you vary those fundamental constants very, very slightly, you have no life; you have no stars; you have no life.

And so what this guy showed—he quoted a great astronomer, Britain's astronomer royal, appointed by the queen, right?

Sir Martin Rees said, "The laws of the universe being set in such a way that life could exist is one in 10 to the 200th power."

What a billion is 10 to the ninth.

Like we're talking like a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion.

But Billy—oh my gosh!

Actually, a little bit more than that, but yeah.

So basic chances—the number of particles in the universe is estimated to be one in 10 to the 80th.

So if we were playing cosmic lottery, and it's like you have to pick—in order for life to exist in some new universe, you have to pick the exact particle in the universe, the exact right particle.

Then within that particle, there's another universe in the same size. You have to pick the exact right particle in that universe too.

And then you have to still—and then it's still like a one in like a trillion trillion trillion chance, which is basically—it's almost the same as saying we're not here, right?

Like, and yet it seems strangely like we are, you know?

So like, yeah, yeah.

It's interesting, though.

So then the author actually lays out some of the attempts that have been made to explain the fine-tuning, and he shows why they don't work.

So what was his point?

Well, so his point—okay, so this is what I was wondering.

So I got through the first half of the book, and he has shown that the problem of fine-tuning is this immense problem and that it doesn't have a good explanation that's been offered yet.

And so then I'm so primed for the second half of this book. I'm like, "Okay, what's the answer? Why do we exist? Why is there any of this here?"

And then his answer is that the universe—our universe was fine-tuned for the existence of life by our distant, distant descendants out in the future.

The time is a closed loop, okay?

So when the universe ends, it starts over. Our descendants are going to make it so that it is the way that it is now.

So it's the future will cause the past.

But there's still a gap. There's still the gap of where it even started. Is that what you're saying?

Well, no, because he's ahead of the future.

Get there from the future, so it's just—it's a circular logic, right?

So I thought, wait a minute. He thinks this is more likely than God?

Like, I hadn't thought that there was a God, but I didn't think God was this unlikely.

This seemed crazy to me.

I mean, and so suddenly this blew everything open for me.

If this was like—if the family home evening experience was doubting my faith in the restoration, this was doubting my atheism, right?

Because suddenly I'm like, wait, something doesn't compute here.

This doesn't fit.

And so then I started thinking, you know, for the last three years or whatever it had been, I've been just looking at anti-religious literature.

I've just been looking at the case against God, and now I've stumbled onto something that indicates maybe there is a God.

And so if I really want to find truth, I need to start looking at both sides again.

And so I started thinking about a lot more—a lot of things that I had been ignoring.

And one of those things is back when I had been a teenager, when I was 18 years old, when I was doing the research at the church archives.

I told you I'd take the bus down to the church archives.

I'd take the bus home, and there was on State Street at that time, there was a crosswalk.

Now there's like a median in the middle, so there's no crosswalk.

But it wasn't like one of those crosswalks with the light. It was a crosswalk where there were just lines on the road.

You just walk out in front of the cars, and then they're supposed to stop.

They're just supposed to not kill you, right?

And because I did so much research downtown, I had been over this crosswalk like 200 times before, right?

So I was very comfortable walking out there.

And I thought habitually you just walked.

Yeah, I thought, yeah, they don't—nobody wants to run over some kid in the street.

They're going to watch what they're doing.

I, at that time, didn't drive, so I didn't realize how distracted drivers are.

Okay, so I walked out, and I started—well, I started stepping off the curb, and I had a voice in my mind say, "Don't go out in front of that car."

And there was a car that was rounding through the intersection, turning right off of South Temple onto State Street.

As I took—well, the voice said very literally.

I actually did walk into the street. I just didn't walk out into this car's lane.

I didn't walk out in front of this car. I walked down the street.

I stopped right before its lane. The car didn't stop.

And there's a teenager in the crosswalk. The car didn't stop.

So I'm looking—as the car passes in front of me, I'm looking through the passenger side window, and there's a passenger, front seat passenger and the driver, and they were both bent forward like this.

They were like looking for something on the floor. Somebody had spilled this Big Gulp or something, right?

Oh my God!

You know, they weren't looking at the road. Just after they would have hit me, the driver popped his head up over the steering wheel, looked up, and then looked back down.

I realized I just almost died.

I walked the rest of the way across the street thinking, like, if that voice hadn't warned me, I would have died right now.

I held on to this for a long time as a reason to believe in God, right?

But then when I had become like hyper-skeptical about God, I thought, oh, I want six million Jews died in the Holocaust.

What makes me think I'm special?

You know, like God shouldn't have saved me.

And then I thought, well, the six million Jews died in the Holocaust, then I thought God must not have saved me.

Like somehow this had not been miraculous.

Somehow I must have known what was going to happen or something.

So once my mind had been open to the idea of God again, it—by this author James Carter inadvertently convincing me maybe there's a mind behind the universe after all.

I started—I was actually working in downtown Salt Lake.

I would pass—walk past that spot where that had happened, like every day.

And so I started going to the spot where that crosswalk had been, and I would like look.

I can't be like, okay, I was facing forward this way. The car would have been coming from over here.

How much can I see the cars over there in my peripheral vision?

Could I have somehow known what was going to happen?

And so after doing this kind of experiment over and over, I started to realize there is no way that I could have known this, right?

There's no way.

And the more I thought about it, the less sense it made that somehow I would have known this.

I thought this came from outside of me.

This is like somebody, you know, like if somebody had been standing there on the curb, what was going to happen, telling me, "Be careful, right? This is going to happen here."

And so I started thinking, well, not only is there a mind behind the universe apparently, but this might actually care about me.

God is involved in my life.

And so that kind of got me searching more.

I believed that there was a God, but I didn't know, well, if there's a God, what does God want of us?

What does God want me to do with my life, you know?

And so I was kind of experimenting with different religious understandings.

And then one of the most tragic things in my life happened.

I had a younger brother, my youngest brother, Charles. He was 25.

And I saw him one night. We didn't usually get to see each other. I saw him one night.

We had a good conversation, and the next day he was gone. He was dead.

And officially, to this day, there's no cause of death.

They did an autopsy; they did a toxicology.

And my other younger brother and I, we think from various things that Charles had actually combined different medications that don't go together.

Their side effects compound, so even like Heath Ledger, yeah, he died from—he didn't actually take an overdose of anything.

He just took things that don't go together. They interacted; they slowed his breathing.

His breathing stopped. That's what happened with Charles.

They said he'd just stopped breathing.

And so we think it's because he took medications that don't go together.

So like public service announcement, right?

Like look up what your medications and their interactions are.

Actually, interactions checkers online, right?

But like Charles—Charles hadn't known that.

He wasn't intentional, yeah, at all.

It wasn't intense.

Interesting.

So he—Charles was just like the best guy in the world, right?

So like people—when someone dies, usually people will speak well of that person, but everybody spoke well of Charles while he was alive.

I've never met someone who did not like Charles.

In the last day of his life, he spent time teaching his nephews how to—he'd had a cleaning job before.

He was teaching his nephews good techniques for cleaning.

He took his pregnant cousin to like the store and different places to help her.

He visited our elderly parents to help them out.

This is just the kind of person he was, right?

He just—he loved to make other people happy.

And then he was suddenly gone, you know?

And at his viewing, there was no one there who was not just ripped to shreds.

It was the saddest thing that I've ever seen.

And I looked at my brother's body laying out there, and I thought, I am never going to see him again.

And I thought there might be some sort of afterlife, but I thought it was like a vague, just purely mental afterlife.

I didn't think there was a resurrection or anything, and I wasn't even sure that there was something.

And so that sent me reeling.

It really got me searching. I wanted to know, was there a resurrection, right?

Like, has God actually revealed something to us about what this is all about, this life that we're in?

And so I started really studying Christianity again more intensively.

And I—a really good Christian friend, a non-LDS Christian friend, in fact, he's actually critical of the church, but really, but he's a really humble, good man.

He actually—I was visiting with him because I was speaking at a conference, and he showed me this Christian bookstore near there, where he—because he lived out there.

And he offered to buy me a book, and so I chose this book by the Anglican scholar N.T. Wright.

Yeah, big time.

Yeah, New Testament.

Yeah, his magisterial tome, The Resurrection of the Son of God.

So this is really—it's this thick.

That's great.

And I—so I started reading that, and he makes—he analyzes all the information about the resurrection that's in the scriptures, that's in the early sources about Christian historical sources outside the Bible about Christianity.

And he makes—at the end, he makes a couple key arguments about what must have happened in order to start the story that Jesus had risen from the dead.

He shows that given the beliefs of the time, that people believed at the time in spirits, they believed in apparitions, that a dead person could appear to you and you could interact with that dead person.

You could see them, interact with them, but that didn't mean they were resurrected; they were just a ghost, a spirit, right?

So he argued that in order for the early Christians to believe that Jesus was resurrected, that this was actually his body, not just like a ghost, yeah?

That not only would they have had to have seen him after his death, which could have just been a ghost, right?

The tomb would have had to have been empty because if the tomb wasn't empty, if his body's still there, they would have thought this is a ghost, right?

Because the body's there; the body's not alive again.

And so if Jesus' tomb was empty and all these people are seeing him, then that makes an argument that he actually rose from the dead.

At least if you already have a belief in God, which I did again at this time, then certain things become plausible that otherwise wouldn't become plausible.

Like someone being resurrected probably doesn't make any sense if you don't believe that there's a God or something like a god.

But once you do believe that there's a God, right?

Yeah.

Then evidence could potentially show that something like this probably happened.

And so I came to believe that there—that the resurrection had occurred.

And then I thought, okay, well, that means—what does that mean?

That means God has revealed himself to me in Christ.

God has reached out to me through Christ to have a relationship with me.

And so I became a Christian, right?

So I actually was working out of the—I was doing estate research out of the Family History Library.

And I—I'm so—I should mention I'm a professional researcher, right?

So I do my own—I do research as an independent historian, and I

This doesn't make any sense at all. I shouldn't be doing this.

So, I actually went back for some graduate work at Utah State. At this point, how long was that time that you were reading? Oh, maybe a couple of months. A couple of months, okay. And then before you said, like, no, no, okay, yeah.

And then I thought, look, I'm going back to grad school. I don't really have time to sort all this out right now. I'm just gonna, if you will, put it on the shelf.

So, after I had decided to kind of put everything on the shelf when I went to grad school, I was studying with Philip Barlow in history at Utah State. American religious history was my emphasis, particularly really Mormon history, of course.

I took a class from Philip Barlow on Joseph Smith's biography and autobiography. In that class, I had decided for my course paper to do a paper on the First Vision as Joseph Smith's calling as a Seer.

Remember, I didn't think there was a First Vision. I thought I made it up. But I recognized the First Vision. I didn't think it existed as an experience, but I thought it existed for sure as a narrative. There's a First Vision narrative, and we need to explain what's the historical context in which this narrative emerged and what were its implications.

What was the meaning of this narrative when it emerged? I had thought the First Vision, it's literally his First Vision. So, this is supposed to explain how he got the gift to be a Seer, the gift of seeing, his gift of Second Sight, right?

I found an account—there's a little-known account on the First Vision by John Alger, Fanny Alger's brother. Okay, yeah. Where he says that in Kirtland, Joseph at the Joseph Smith Senior home recounts the First Vision. He says that at the beginning of the vision, God touched his eyes, really, and then he was able to see the vision.

He actually remembers Joseph pointing to his eyes as he said those. Huh. What was interesting about this account is this is the only account of the First Vision we have where Joseph told the First Vision just to a private group of saints. It wasn't written for publication, and it wasn't told to non-Mormons.

All the other accounts that we have—actually, no, there's one exception, the Alexander Neibaur account. I forgot. This is one of just two accounts, okay, where we know Joseph was telling the vision not for publication but just in an intimate setting.

It's the only account that we have of him telling the vision in a family setting. John Alger was apparently living with Fannie Alger, living with Joseph Junior's family, helping as a servant, like a housemaid. John Alger, her younger brother, was living with Joseph Smith Senior's family, helping them out.

So, they're like part of the family, kind of, right? And Fannie actually becomes part of the family, right? So, this is a family setting, and he's telling about the First Vision.

He's going to disclose more about the First Vision in an intimate family, faithful LDS setting than he is to the public. I was realizing that if you look at that detail—the touching of the eyes—in the New Testament, in Matthew and Luke, there are two blind men at Jericho. They call out to Jesus, "Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me."

He says, "What would you that I should do for you?" The man says, "Lord, my eyes, that I may see." Jesus touches his eyes one by one, and the man is healed from blindness.

So, what I realized was, wait, the First Vision—the idea is it's like a healing from spiritual blindness. The touching of the eyes, it's a spiritual thing that heals the eye so he can see spiritual things.

Then I looked in the Book of Abraham, Abraham 3. It says God put his hand on Abraham's eyes, and Abraham could see everything God had made with his hands. In the Book of Moses, it says God told Enoch to touch his own eyes with clay.

But that's parallel to Jesus in the Gospel of John, who heals a blind man's eyes by anointing them with clay. The difference in the Book of Moses is the Lord is doing it by proxy. He's having Enoch anoint his own eyes in place of the Lord doing it.

The Brother of Jared, he doesn't touch his eyes; he touches the stones. He asks the Brother of Jared, "What is it that I should do for you?" It's the same exact question asked by the blind man in the Gospels. Interesting.

And the Brother of Jared wants him to touch the stones. Why? So the stones will glow in their barges so they can see. Then he gives them the interpreters, which are two stones that he wears in front of his eyes so he can see spiritual things.

It's like a pattern over and over in Latter-day Saint scripture. There are some parallel things in a couple of places in the Bible, like Isaiah's mouth being touched and purified so he can speak.

In one of the accounts, he says, "Thy sins are forgiven thee." That's another piece I don't want to get into. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, that is like when you're right. That's like when Jesus is healing people. I'm making a note of that.

I'll tell you what I mean too after because I think it's a little more private. Oh, okay, okay. Interesting. Meaning, like, sacred. Oh, okay, okay.

So, I was thinking, okay, if this is Joseph Smith's—this is how he becomes a Seer—is this First Vision. I was writing my paper on this. I was actually sitting in the library café at Utah State, and suddenly all kinds of things came together.

Like, a lot of history is connecting dots, right? We have the historical sources; we have the data points in those sources, but they don't become a narrative until we connect the dots to see the cause-and-effect relationships between them.

Okay, so suddenly I saw—I was thinking about the Brother of Jared. This happens up on a mountaintop. Joseph Smith says in Nauvoo that in ancient times, mountaintops served as temples where people could receive ordinances.

Brother of Jared, ancient world, mountaintop—this is a temple setting. He's conversing with the Lord. It says in Ether 3, through the veil, and the Lord puts his hand through the veil to touch the stones.

The Brother of Jared sees the Lord's hand, and the Lord asks him a series of questions to test his faith and knowledge, beginning with a question about his hand. Once the Brother of Jared has passed the test, the Lord admits him into his presence and tells him, "You've been redeemed from the fall," which evokes the whole backstory, the creation and Adam and Eve.

Then he gives him these white stones, which is Revelation 2:17, which Joseph quotes to him: "To him that overcometh, I will give unto him a white stone, in the which is written a new name, which no man knoweth, saving him that receiveth it."

Right, Jared. And then Joseph, right? And think of the Brother of Jared. Hey, why do we call him that? Because the text didn't say his name, right? That is the idea of like a secret, sacred, esoteric name, right? The withholding of a name, right? It's like the white stone, a new name that no one knows, right?

Then the Brother of Jared is given a revelation that is so high, so great, that he can't share it with others, so he just puts it in the sealed portion. Well, that, of course, is like this is the temple.

Yeah, this is the apex in the endowment. These are the things that happen in detail before—before years, before—15, no, 13 years before Joseph institutes the endowment in Nauvoo.

Now, I had studied the Nauvoo endowment. I had studied connections, parallels of it with Freemasonry. And as far as I was concerned, Joseph didn't know a thing about the Nauvoo endowment until he became a Freemason early in 1842.

Suddenly, I was seeing the structure of the endowment is in the Book of Ether that he dictates in 1829. Then I started—I've been working for years on my project on the last 116 pages of the Book of Mormon.

Again, what are the historical sources that talk about what was in it? It turns out people might be surprised at the research of what people said, the people who knew about it, right? That's the research you're referring to?

Yeah, so I've written a whole book on this, right? The last 116 pages reconstructing the Book of Mormon's missing stories.

But one of the major sources that I use there is an interview that someone did with Joseph Smith Senior, where they described how the interpreters got to the Nephites.

So, we know from the Book of Ether how the interpreters got to the Jaredites. The Lord gives them to the Brother of Jared on this mountaintop, right? We later know in the Book of Mormon—or maybe earlier in the Book of Mormon—that the Nephites had the interpreters. It never tells us how they got them.

Okay, that seems like a big oversight. The interpreters were important. So, I'm actually configuring—if you look at who in the Book of Mormon first had those interpreters, it appears to be King Mosiah the First.

Well, his story was in the lost pages. We only get the thumbnail sketch version in the Book of Omni, right? It's like 13 verses long, but his story was a long, complex story in the lost pages.

If he's the one who got the interpreters, the details of that story would have been in the lost pages. In this interview that someone did with Joseph Senior in 1830, he tells them about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon.

Then he tells them some stories from the Book of Mormon, and he tells them a story that is not in our Book of Mormon text, but it's about how the Nephites got the interpreters. What? Are you serious?

And so, yep, scholars have pointed out that this is a gap in the Mormon text that we have. Like, why doesn't it explain where they got the interpreters? And they've even posited that could have been in the lost pages.

Well, this story is somebody returning what they knew about it from stories of people. In that narrative, he says this guy, Fayette Latham, who interviewed Joseph Senior, he says they were traveling in after they got to their promised land.

Sometime later, they have another sort of Exodus, right? And they're in between temples, apparently, because they have a tabernacle—that's a portable temple, right? And they're being led by the Liahona, right?

This guy, the Liahona, leads him to an object, right? And he doesn't know what that object is, but he takes the object, he carries it into the tabernacle, and the voice of the Lord in the tabernacle—I'm assuming from behind the veil of the Holy of Holies, where the Lord's presence dwells—the voice of the Lord says, "Take that object and put it on your face and cover your face in an animal skin."

And he does, and he can see anything. It's the interpreters, right? And so, at that point, he says the Liahona stopped working because it had been replaced now with the interpreters.

So, that would account for how the Nephites got the interpreters, right? They're led to embellish what this narrative is saying. And it would also explain another question scholars have raised: why did the Nephites stop using the Liahona?

Because later on, we know in the Book of Alma they have the Liahona. It's being handed on. They're not using it because they have the interpreters. They're fighting with the Lamanites; they're traveling in the wilderness. They could sure use the Liahona to guide them. They never use it, right?

It's been replaced; it's not working. So, what I was seeing in that narrative is that story that Joseph Smith Senior tells—that's like another bookend to the story of in Ether 3 about the Jaredites getting the interpreters. This is a temple narrative, right?

So, I might have missed the part in that story. He goes in the tabernacle. I don't know if I said this. The Lord asks him, "What is that in your hand?" The man says he did not know but had come to inquire.

Now, you can't make this stuff up. That struck me. I've heard this kind of question, this kind of dialogue somewhere before. I realized that the story of the Brother of Jared and this story fit together.

So, this is now 1828 in the lost pages. Joseph is dictating the story that prefigures what he's going to introduce 14 years later in the Nauvoo endowment.

Then I started to say, hey, I won't go too much into this because it's like this—I'm already starting. First Nephi, to me, is even—you're not even talking about it anyway.

Every vision, Joseph Smith's First Vision and the subsequent finding of his white seer stone—we have an account of that, a detailed account. It turns out they have massive temple endowment parallels. Massive.

So, you're just like—and so suddenly this is exploding in my head. So, at the beginning of the 1820s, Joseph is already talking about a vision that has elements of the Nauvoo endowment.

Now, this was head-spinning for me because, like I said, I thought he didn't know anything about the endowment until '42. Suddenly, I'm finding no, there are clear signs of it in '29 and '28 and back around 1820.

All right, and with the First Vision—literally day one of the restoration, from the beginning, he's a teenage kid, and he's already got like much of the structure of the endowment.

I thought, oh my gosh, my mind is just so blown right now because even—anyway, I don't want to make any speculation of it, but even Moroni being the guide is very similar to other pieces too, right?

Anyway, yeah, and then the first appearance of what he tells him. Anyway, so, okay, here's another thing.

Hey, in this interview, Fayette Latham says—and Fayette Latham was never LDS. He never joined the church. He appears to have never read the Book of Mormon, but there are details—the guy who interviewed Joseph, he gives details in his account that we get confirmed from other members of the Smith family and other insiders only after Latham publishes his account.

Which means he had real inside information. He really did interview Joseph Senior and learn details. He says that Joseph Senior told him that on the top plate of the Golden Plates, the interpreters sat on that top plate.

But on that plate also were engravings of what he described as the implements of masonry, Freemasonry. The two main symbols of Freemasonry are the compass and the square.

On every Masonic lodge, in every Masonic lodge, on the altar of that lodge, there's a Bible, and on that Bible sits a compass and a square.

Hey, so the compass and square are already on the gold plates. So, talk about—come on, this is 18—this is when he goes to the hill before he becomes a Mason. Anything long before, like 15 years before Joseph becomes a Mason or more, right?

Fifteen years before he becomes a Mason is when he gets the plates, but he's seen them four years earlier, right? So, almost 20 years before he becomes a Freemason, he's talking about the compass and the square on the plates.

So, there's major temple endowment stuff. In my book on the lost pages, I actually have a lot more about how even what we're told about the translation process of the Book of Mormon in chapter three—that was very—it talks about temple parallels.

Like, they're all over. They're all over. So, this blew my mind. One of the things I thought to myself was, okay, however brilliant Joseph Smith was, I just don't see like a 14, 15-year-old thinking, you know, I'm gonna come up with a really complex ritual, temple ritual, and someday—not now, not anytime soon—but like 20 years from now, more than 20 years from now, when I'm like pushing 40 or something, I'm gonna create a ceremony where I'll implement this.

That's—I don't believe that. Even if Joseph Smith had had that intention early on, he would have done it in the early days of the church. He wouldn't have waited until 1842.

So, like, I just didn't believe that a young man had this sort of foresight about what he was going to do with his life. What I was finding was really powerful. I was seeing things about the First Vision that actually—it's a much more complex thing than we realized.

The First Vision is a healing from spiritual blindness. As his eyes are touched, it's an initiation into being a Seer. His eyes are touched that he might see, yeah, right?

It's all different things melded together. So, I was seeing the power of it, and this started immediately making me wonder, should I be going back to the church?

So, you remember I had deliberately barred the door to coming back to the church, right? But I started seeing these things in the history showing Joseph's sincerity and just amazing things about the—what's the endowment doing there in the 1820s?

Sorry, raising the question to myself, well, what about my own life experience? What does my experience in the church show? Is it good? Has it borne good fruit in my life? Is it of God?

I thought, of course, like that. Like, really, whether the restoration had worked in my life had never been the question. It had—the question, my questions had been historical questions, and those questions had led me to not believe.

But the fact is, my own life experience bore out the truth of it. I had just not been willing to believe my own life experience because I thought that the historical data was showing me something different.

But now that I was seeing the historical data through this larger lens, I was like, okay, well, my life experience says this is real. I need to be back in the church. Thank you.