A Conversation with Ganesh Cherian and Greg Prince

Hello and welcome to Inside Out, the program in which we talk to extraordinary people about the Mormon Church and faith. My name is Ian Wilkes, and as always, I'm joined by one of the world's greatest choir singers. And when he sings, the angels rejoice. Welcome, uh, to the Mormon equivalent of Pavarotti, Mr. Jim Bennett. Hello, Jim.

Oh boy, hello Ian. That's— I'm not quite sure how to respond to an introduction like that. So I'm—

well, you're a great singer. You've got to be really good to be in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir because they are like pros.

Yeah, well, uh, I snuck in. They don't know, so it's nice.

Well, I, I hope you continue to enjoy that. Now you've been practicing, uh, with the choir in the run-up to Christmas, I understand. Is that right?

That is correct. We're recording this the week before we do our choir Christmas concerts. So, and, and Greg, did you get your ticket for your—

thank you.

Yes.

And you're going to be there and Ganesh and Ian, it would be lovely if you came, but, uh, think you are geographically excluded from making that happen.

I'm within reach, but I think Ganesh is going to struggle maybe. I don't know. It's a bit of a journey from New Zealand.

I would love to be there, but it's not likely.

Okay.

Well, maybe we should do a Christmas one in New Zealand. We should travel there. Ganesh, if you could pay for the tickets, that would be awesome.

You're more than welcome, and I'm happy to get you here. It might be a little rough if I'm going to pay for them, but I'll make it happen.

It will go economy. Anything to get to, anything to get to New Zealand.

Um, it'll be 54, 54 hours through Kazakhstan. Uh, you know, diverting right through.

Uh, I'm sure $100 a ticket. Anyway, it, it, uh, Jim Bennett and I are really excited about today's, uh, program. In fact, uh, it's going to be amazing and it's truly international because we're coming to you from Canada where I am. Ganesh is in New Zealand and Jim Bennett and Greg Prince are in the United States. And so we have, we have this awesome lineup. We've got Ganesh from New Zealand who's been on the podcast before. And of course, we've got our wonderful Greg Prince, who has been on the program many, many times. In fact, he's been here so long, he's got his own suite. In the Inside Out film. Craig, you, it's wonderful to have you. We learned so much. And Ganesh is still delightful to have you as well. Ganesh, you are an extraordinary individual. You're the author of the Joseph Smith book, Architect of Mormonism. You've been a former bishop. Folks, if you want to learn more about Ganesh, there's a podcast we did on Ganesh and his book recently, and it's just extraordinary. It's a wonderful and a very wise individual. And of course, we've got Greg with us, who is an acclaimed historian and also a successful author in his own right, and the author of extraordinary books like The Rise of— David O. McKay, The Rise of Mormon— Modern Mormonism. That's David O. McKay, The Rise of Modern Mormonism. So again, it's delightful to have you both with us. Before we started the conversation here this evening, we wanted to have a little bit of a different format here. And we suggested that in the hour that we've got, we'd each pick a topic and introduce that topic. And then the person introducing the topic would lead us in that conversation. And we would all join in in a natural conversation and provide responses and comments and questions and thoughts. So, Jim Bennett, to give our two wonderful guests the time that they deserve. I think perhaps we should start with them if you're okay with that. I am a-okay.

Wonderful.

Okay, because we certainly want to give them the time as well. You and I can, hopefully we have time, we can bring our topics to the table as well. So without further ado, Ganesh, would you kick us off and introduce us to your topic? You've got 15 minutes, give or take a few minutes. And then lead us in that, and then we'll go to Greg, and then we'll see where we are with the time from there.

Great. Well, I'm very excited to be with you all. It's a real treat. Greg and I spent a bit of time together in Missouri recently, and it was lovely to connect with him. But especially listening to the three of you particularly talking a bit talking about Greg's Roadmap and the understanding of the future of the church. What is it, you know, what's going to be healthy as we go forward? And I think that one of the beauties of your particular podcast is that, is looking at, you know, connecting people, um, and also helping bridge that divide that happens in the church because of that, that idea of in and out, you know, the way that the church seems to value loyalty over integrity or accountability. And so what then happens is that those people who maybe leave or have a different viewpoint of things are often, you know, marginalized in the church. And so I guess one of my questions and thoughts for all of you to to chime in on is, you know, how do we preserve the uniqueness of the church while we make these transitions to being more mainstream Christian? And how does that extend to the treatment of those, you know, like all of us who are interested in the church being better, but that often means that it comes across as a bit of a critique or maybe even disloyal to you know, maybe our fellow saints, particularly leadership in the church, and maybe even the, you know, the governing church leadership. And can the church overcome its defensiveness and eliminate those hard lines so we don't have these kind of big stark ideas of us versus them that we can kind of reach out and grab all ideas and put some great ones into practice regardless of where they come from. So those are just my, my, you know, musings and thoughts, and, and I was keen to hear your, um, your ideas on some of those things.

The word loyalty has a lot of baggage. And I live in a city where right now loyalty has taken precedence over just about anything, and we're seeing democracy paying the price for that. If your loyalty is to the wrong thing or the wrong person, it can get an entire institution into trouble. Uh, if loyalty is to an idea to something above ourselves, then that's great. So the same word can mean good things and bad things depending on how it's applied. For leaders of any organization in the short term, loyalty is a convenient thing. It's a lot easy to govern if everybody falls in line. But that also means that it's a lot easier to go off track because nobody's raising a voice saying, just a minute.

Yeah, man. Nice.

Jim Bennett.

Uh, well, it's interesting as you can ask, as you're talking about the idea as we move towards more mainstream Christianity, uh, is that where you see us going?

I see that the church definitely wants a sense of credibility and legitimacy, you know, a seat at the table, and I think that that also means that it's going to soften, at least at a public level, and we've already seen this, the idea of, you know, the church being unique or or apart from Christianity, or even the most true Christianity. You know, the idea that yes, we're going to participate in some of the traditions of the wider Christian belief system, like, you know, Palm Sunday and things like that we've adopted recently. So yes, I think we're moving in that direction. I'm not sure whether that direction is on the basis of wanting to be good Christian citizens, or whether it's just the ability to go, well, we want to now be involved enough with the wider society that we, you know, we don't suffer maybe pushback as our uniqueness becomes problematic.

Well, I only ask that because I see that I mean, I think the Michigan shooting particularly highlighted the reality that no matter how much we want to be accepted by the larger Christian world, um, we haven't made any significant inroads in that regard. I mean, they're happy when, uh, American Mormons, uh, function as a voting bloc that backs up the evangelical agenda. They're happy to take our money. They're happy to take our votes. But when we say, okay, we're Christians too, that is a line too far. And I see that as a fool's errand to some degree. I just don't see that we're— the idea, okay, now we're going to do Palm Sunday. I remember Bruce R. McConkie talking about apostate Christianity has all these holidays. We reject all these holidays, and now all of a sudden we embrace these holidays. But that's cosmetic. I mean, our missionary, our missionary program isn't going out and saying we're part of the larger Christian community. We're still going out and doing what, as Greg describes it in his roadmap, we go out and we say our truth claims are better than yours. And if that's our message, I don't see any way that we sort of are integrated into the larger Christian community. Greg, can you weigh in on that? I mean, do you agree with that?

It depends on which part of the larger Christian community. For the mainstream Protestants, I don't see as much of a problem. Those are the people I sit around the table with at Wesley.

Right.

And they've been very accepting. For the evangelicals, you're absolutely right, Jim. This is a fool's errand. Um, but I think that there's something that Latter-day Saints really don't understand. If you were to ask them why do they not think we are Christians, I don't think you'd get a very good answer from our people, because I don't think we understand why they think we are not Christians.

That is an excellent point. So I went to USC, uh, in the theater program, which is not a hotbed of religiosity, uh, but one of my best friends in the program was an evangelical Christian. He's since converted to Catholicism, uh, but, uh, when we were having our wild theological arguments, I gave him a copy of Stephen Robinson's book, Are Mormons Christians? I don't know if either— if anybody here has read that book.

Yeah, I've read that.

Yeah. And he wrote, and he made notes in the margins, extensive notes in the margins, and it was fascinating. I was probably 22, 23 when this happened, but I had not Greg, to your point, I had not ever really considered the legitimate arguments that Mormons aren't Christians. And he was thoughtful enough and intelligent enough and educated enough to present the arguments, I think, at least in a very coherent— I think they were a good representation. Of what the arguments are out there and the way he describes it. I mean, if you're using the word Christian to describe the Christian tradition from, you know, from the apostolic era down, you're talking about a tradition that went through— essentially went through Rome, Roman Catholicism, the Reformation, all of that. We are not part of that tradition. And so it's entirely appropriate to say, no, we are not Christian, if that's the way— it's all definitions, of course. But I think very few people— Greg, I think you're right that most Latter-day Saints wouldn't be able to articulate that. But on the flip side, I think there are very few people who make that accusation against the church. That really understand those arguments either. Am I wrong on that?

No, I think you're right. If you look back over the past maybe 30 years, two changes the church made really strike me as suggesting they don't know what the issue is, because in an attempt to make us be more accepted as Christians, We changed the size of the font on our letterhead.

I remember that.

And then we put a subtitle on the front cover of the Book of Mormon. Game over, right? Right. It shows how far off the mark we are on both sides of this chasm. I don't even know if we're to the point of being able to say with a straight face we're talking past each other. We're certainly not talking to each other.

We're not even in the same conversation.

No, no. It, it's fascinating we start off with this topic cuz this was my topic. Interesting. I think I, I shared that with Jim Bennett, uh, and Greg, uh, on our earlier group. I spent the last 2 weeks on a 17,000-size Facebook group titled, uh, Christians versus Mormons. And, and I've, I'm out the church and I've spent time trying to defend the church on its Christianity. The conversations have been absolutely extraordinary, and I've been unafraid to speak up and speak out and speak boldly to the group. I've even surveyed them. I didn't get the permission to survey them. I just surveyed them, right? I'm reached the point in my life where I'm like, you know, you gotta be, you'll die eventually, and you've got to be able to, you know, speak up and stand up and just do the right thing. And when the church is good and doing great things, and I've seen the great Christianity and the great good that the church has done, how can I not defend it? You know, there's a lot of, as you know, a lot of criticism against the church. A lot of things I don't agree with the church. A lot of things I would love to change and take it in the direction that Ganesh wants to go. And in fact, the roadmap, Greg's roadmap for improving Mormonism is, in my opinion, one of the most significant documents that the brethren really needs to read and understand because it's got strategies and solutions in there, which are quite extraordinary, frankly. And we've been spending time with Greg over a number of different podcasts getting into the detail. But I've, I've, I thought I knew quite a bit about Mormonism, right? Been in it for 37 years. I've learned something in the last 2 weeks that I never knew. The anger and the opposition from many evangelical Christians in that group and highlighting to Jim Bennett specific reasons why marmas are not Christian. I'd never seen that before. So I saw some things I missed that I hadn't understood, but other things that they miss that are, in my opinion, very Christian about the church, which they don't get and they don't understand. And I've surveyed them and I've, you know, I won't take over the conversation here, but I'm fascinated that we're even, we've even started off with this conversation because that's where I've spent the last, uh, say the last 2 weeks. But Ganesh, to your point, to your topic there, uh, to kind of understand what you interpret it, what you're saying then. You're saying then there's a, you know, in the current situation in the world, you know, politically, religiously, there's a, if I'm hearing you correctly, there's an opportunity for the great and the good in the church to really improve and change and address these issues of the world and in the church religiously, et cetera, and to become that more inclusive, more embracing organization that's less prescriptive in terms of loyalty, to Greg's point, regardless of what the narrative is and blind loyalty, which is totally dangerous. And if I understand it correctly, it's become more inclusive, more universal, and simply just to do the right thing. Did I summarize that appropriately? Did I? I mean, you said some interesting things after that. Okay.

Yes. And I, and I, yeah, that's the, and that, I guess that's the essence is how do we draw that circle, you know, wide enough so that we encapsulate as many people in this love as, as possible.

Right.

And the other thing is that if we, what do we do with that circle? Um, if, if we draw it widely, do we lose our uniqueness? Do we lose the things that make us us? You know, what's—

we—

how do we strike that balance? Um, because, and that extends to the idea of, you know, who's a Mormon? You know, we're talking about who's a Christian, right? Who's a Mormon? Are Mormons people who go to a ward on Sunday? Are Mormons those who identify themselves as some form of, of, uh, group that values the Book of Mormon, is a Mormon somebody who has an affinity to this heritage that comes out of, you know, Joseph Smith and Nauvoo and through maybe even through to Utah, you know. So, you know, as we kind of draw and then defend these lines or circles of, you know, who's included and who's excluded, you know, in those battlegrounds really about who gets validity, you know, how do we do it so that, well, hopefully we are better Christians or better disciples of Christ, maybe even a better narrative, right? Because Christianity, as Greg is rightly pointing out, has so much baggage attached to it, you know. Do we need new words? Do we need new new circles? Do we need new belongings? Do we need new loyalties? And I like the idea of what Greg was saying about loyalties to principles rather than loyalties to particular people or ideologies.

Yeah. Yes. This is something private.

A major problem we have is that we do not have either a mature theology or even a coherent theology. In part because our theology has evolved so drastically, and we've talked about this before, that I've not seen a single doctrinal point that has gone unchanged since 1830. So if an outsider is looking at that timeline, they can with good conscience say, this is a mess. Because it has evolved so drastically and not necessarily in a linear fashion. And even along the way, you have had people at high levels in the church who state authoritatively very different doctrines at the same time. So it's very easy for an outsider to pick at our history and say, come on guys, what do you really believe? I don't think that the argument is going to be very persuasive if we try to argue theology with others. I think our best foot forward is to say, watch us, and then go out and walk the walk, because that's a pretty good walk when we do it.

Yeah, I think you've nailed it. I've tried to argue theology, a whole kind of different approaches, in this Facebook group, which, um, there's been a bit of uproar in the group about this new, uh, me, this new entrant in the group. Um, there's been a lot of pushback, a lot of personal insults fired in as well, which I'm not really too bothered about. But, um, what one of the questions I asked in the group was, what is a Christian? Because I wanted them to define a Christian, and I got answers, every conceivable answer under the sun. They couldn't even agree on what is a Christian. So I want to ask you fine gentlemen, If you can briefly, succinctly, I've got a question for you. What is a Mormon? Ganesh, Greg, and Jim Bennett. Ganesh, what is a Mormon?

To me, a Mormon is somebody who values a heritage that starts with the Book of Mormon. So somebody who's, who comes out of a Joseph Smith tradition.

Excellent. Greg?

I, I think that's good. I would add the, the word tribe to it, that you're signing up to an entire culture, not just to a belief system.

Am I repeating? Well, it's really fascinating to me because this is a question actually that I've been wrestling with here. Online because there is a contingent in the church that very much wants to— I mean, they'd be very angry that we're saying, what is a Mormon? Because, uh, we're not allowed to say the word Mormon anymore. Although I think that's fading. I don't know, Ganesh, Greg, are you getting the sense that that's now the only guy on earth that really cares about that is no longer with us?

If you talk to journalists, they'll just laugh.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think slowly but surely that it's the, whatever artificial stigma has been created was probably going to disappear. Uh, that's a tangent. Um, but, uh, so this may be a guy, Greg, that you're familiar with. Do you know a man named Dennis Lang?

Yes. I saw him 3 nights ago.

Okay, so there is a podcaster by the name of Jacob Hanson that I have scrapped with a number of different times, and he went on Twitter and he said, why is BYU hiring professors who do not support the proclamation on the family? And he took all of these snippets from Dennis Lang, uh, that apparently he considers heretical.

Now, this may be a different Dennis Lang because the one I know lives in DC now and is a retired physician.

It is exactly the same Dennis Lang.

Okay.

Dennis Lang is a senior fellow for an ancillary organization. I don't even know the title of it. That's affiliated with the BYU Law School. And, and so I, I looked at this and I went, wait a minute, this doesn't compute. This guy lives in Maryland and he is not paid by the church. He is not a professor at BYU. He is a senior fellow, which is a volunteer position, an advisory position for a non-ecclesiastical ancillary organization. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. Well, this post was picked up by another guy. It's got over 50,000 views, and everybody in the comments is screaming, BYU needs to fire this guy, and this is terrible, the church is in apostasy because they're— and I went in there and I said, guys, he's not a professor, he's not getting your tithing dollars, he's— I mean, take this down, you are lying. About this guy, and you're attacking the church. I mean, this is the thing that drives me crazy, is that there is this huge contingent of people who think that they are defending the church as they attack it whenever it does something they don't like. We went through—

you neglected to mention, and maybe the most salient issue, is he's also an alumnus of UCLA. So everybody back off.

Well, in his conversation with Jacob Hanson, he said, look, I'm a volunteer and I'm a donor. I mean, I think he was made a senior fellow because he's donated quite a bit of money to BYU. And they are absolutely furious that this guy has any seat at any table. And so if the question is, what does it mean to be a Mormon? Uh, if we're trying to define that for the rest of the world, we have to define it internally if we're going to go present it externally, because internally there is this huge divide as to, is it acceptable, uh, to be someone who supports LGBTQ rights? And these guys would say, absolutely not. And I push back and I say, well, then why do we endorse the Respect for Marriage Act? I mean, you're going to tell me that supporting legal gay marriage is grounds for apostasy, then you're going to have to excommunicate President Oaks, who championed a piece of legislation that made gay marriage legal in all 50 states. I mean, we have so many of these internal divisions that we have not resolved and we don't even want to acknowledge exist. Because we sort of want to pretend that this veneer of unity is universal, and it just isn't the case. So if we're ever going to answer that question for the rest of the world, Ian, we got to answer it for ourselves. And I don't think we're anywhere close.

I totally agree.

I concur.

If you ask me, oh boy, I don't know. I just don't know. I have some answers. I think they're all of your answers. Maybe I have a few more myself. Any final thoughts, comments on that last, on Ganesh's topic before we hand some time over to Greg to introduce and lead us on his topic? Ganesh, any comments, thoughts? Did we address your—

Well, I think that you rightly showed that it's a complex issue, which is You know, it's tough. It's, you know, trying to figure out what, yeah, who we are and what we stand for. I mean, that's a really, you know, gosh, I hadn't realized how fraught it is. And I think, you know, these, you know, the great minds in this, in this session, you know, suggest that it's a tricky one. It requires real leadership, I guess, and there has been a lot of— as Greg said earlier, you know, lots of conflicting viewpoints that have been thrown out in by senior leadership. So that then makes it really difficult to know exactly what it is that we're standing for. And maybe perhaps some of that conflict that you're talking about, Jim, with Jacob Handsome, you know, he's got a definite idea of what he thinks the church is, where the lines are, and where he's mounted his guns to defend you know, the position. And yet that can be completely different from another person, and maybe in another city, maybe in another place in the world, or another viewpoint, who also calls themselves Mormon, who also wants to defend this institution. So that's very, yeah, telling, I think.

Real quick before we speak with Greg here, when I was younger, you know, investigate the church, join the church, mission, et cetera. For a big part of my life, I didn't know myself. You know that quote, know thyself? I didn't know who Ian Wilkes was. I was trying to figure who I was and I was so lost in so many ways, right? And then the church, I thought, well, the church knows who it is. It knows what it is and who it is. I joined and I had that identity and it felt right. You know, it just felt so right. And I felt so certain on I knew so many things. I had all the answers, right? And now, as I've matured and grown older, I know who I am, right? I know who Ian is finally. You know, the last 10 years, I actually know myself now. It's taken a lifelong journey. And I look at the church and I think it doesn't know itself. It doesn't know what it is or who it is. It's kind of, from my perspective, it's completely kind of flipped, which I didn't expect. Greg, your topic, and then would you lead us on? Go ahead.

Subtract 1 minute from my 15 because I want to make reference to an interview I did about 12 years ago with Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He made a comment that's apropos of what we've been talking about, and that is, he said, look, last Saturday at synagogue, there were maybe 180 people there. And I suspect if I were to have polled them, I would've gotten 180 different answers about what they believe. He said, that's not what makes us a congregation. What makes us a congregation is a common faith. And we can leave for another discussion another day, uh, what's the difference between faith and belief, but there's a huge difference. So, that said, Ganesh gave me the segue into what I want to say because he referenced the meeting in Missouri that we both attended a couple of months ago. It was of the John Whitmer Historical Association, which was started by what was at the time the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, subsequently renamed the Community of Christ. The Sunday morning devotional was in their lovely temple in Independence. And as I sat in there, I recalled a conversation I had had decades earlier with Paul Edwards. Paul was a second great-grandson of Joseph Smith and was a General Authority in the Community of Christ. After they had built their temple, I just casually remarked to him one day, "Looks like a seashell." And Paul, who was both witty and irreverent, said, "Yeah, the shell's what's left when the animal dies." And I wondered about that analogy with our crowd because I think for all four of us, If we look back and ask the question, what defined my religious life that I have carried forward? It's not gonna be 3-hour meetings on Sundays. It's going to be what happened out of worship services. It's going to be mutual. It will be road shows. It will be speech festivals. It will be basketball or softball or whatever, those were really what not only defined our religious life, I think those were the glue that held us into it. My concern is that nearly all those things are gone now. And so the question is, have we become more a seashell than a living animal?

Yeah. Wow.

Yeah.

My goodness.

I can relate to that, you know, growing up, 16, going on, you know, before the mission, YSA mission, coming back, etc., dances. In the UK, there was just a fantastic culture of dances and activities and roadshows and all kinds of events. And there was the YSA activities up and down the country and across Europe. And I spoke to a lot of friends who are, you know, still very, very active and went through that same period as I did. And we loved it. We just, we couldn't wait till the weekend because there's something happening in the church. We did our stuff through the week. We did seminary or institute. We kind of hung out and then the weekend came and we're like, whoa, you know, is it Hyde Park in London? Is it Wales or Scotland at Aberfoyle, et cetera? Or is it Germany or wherever?

Right.

And we were off and we had all these different activities. All that's gone. It's just, it's just heartbreaking. They haven't, those kids today haven't got the same kind of experience. I don't know, someone seemed to rip the heart out of the fun. There's just no fun anymore. And again, the folks that are in the church who, in my family, who are still, you know, bishops and still active in the church, they also have noticed a big difference as well. Ganesh, what are your thoughts? And then yours, Jim Bennett. Do you think it's changed? The church has changed in some ways?

Yeah, definitely. We Yeah, the church provided a huge amount of social support for me growing up. I think it did for all of us. A number of opportunities to meet with other young people, incredible amount of dances. I went to a church high school as well, so that was a major part of my time in the church. And those things have changed. The, you know, the church college, the high school I went to, it was owned and operated by the church, has since been, you know, mothballed. And, um, you know, those road shows that we did, um, the dances, all of those things seem to be very, very, um, sparse. And, uh, you know, we've, we've just in our stake. We've just dissolved a whole stake, so 2 stakes into 1, just the last few months because of the dwindling numbers. And it's really interesting to see that actually as part of that integration, the stake leaders in the individual wards have really tried to ramp up the amount of activity just in order to provide the cohesion of people coming together who haven't, you know, been together before, or it's been a long time. And so to provide that mechanism that Greg was talking about of, you know, fun, right? Because fun is sustainable. Fun is something that you can do again and again. Fun is something that you can have with your friends, that you make friendships over, and that you can feel, you know, comfortable enough to even maybe talk about some hard stuff. So, you know, yeah, that's, I think that anybody building community and the church, especially if it's trying to provide some longevity, has to figure out what it does for fun. And that has changed dramatically. We've, gosh, even the reduction of the church from 3 hours to 2 hours has meant that the amount of time that you might be engaged with each other has gone down, which has some benefits, but also means that it's really easy to kind of not engage or the, you know, the time it takes to engage. Yeah, it's tricky. So yeah, gosh, the shell is there and sometimes we're very loyal to the shell. Um, but the, but the, the action, the, yeah, that, yeah, that's, that's, that seems to be disintegrating and it's, and it, and it leaves a cavity, which is, which is unfulfilling for a lot of people, humans.

Yeah. There is a difference between a taught religion and a lived religion. And I think the vitality of Mormonism. Always has been when it is a lived religion.

No, I agree with that 150%. I, you know, I think back to my childhood and I think back to the most powerful, impactful times I had in the church, and none of them have anything to do with doctrine or with theology or with, you know, They're all social community-building sorts of things. I've talked about on this podcast our ward doing a production of The Music Man. Another thing, my father was called to be the teachers quorum president when I was a teacher. And part of it was because we were sort of an unruly bunch and we didn't kind of, uh, match up to a lot of the sort of conventional kinds of things. And so my father said, okay, as a teachers quorum, uh, Jim is a big theater guy, I'm gonna have him direct a production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and we're going to cast all the members of the teachers quorum, and we're going to grab a couple of the young women to come into the cast. It's a 6-person cast, and so it fit We had a small— we had 4 guys in the quorum, so it was— it fit just perfectly. And, uh, and I got to direct a show that we ended up putting on for the whole stake, and everybody came, and it was a big deal. And it was one of the formative experiences of my life. And I was doing it with my fellow Latter-day Saints, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the Book of Mormon. Or the sacrament or the temple or anything. I mean, it was, it was purely about building social relationships and building a community. And my sense of community with the church was just rock solid. I mean, it was— these were my people. I mean, I would go into battle for these people, and I just knew that the Mormons— I felt like I belonged to something and not just to an organization. I belong to a community. I was a vibrant, vital part of a community. And, and that to me was really the most valuable thing that came out of my childhood and my adolescence in the church. It's invaluable. It's, it's, it's given me so much confidence and so many skills. And, you know, all of that I attribute to, uh, growing up in that community. And so I look at this and the thing that, that just frustrates me to no end is my children did not experience that. And I was in Southern California. We raised our children in the heart of the Mormon corridor in Sandy, Utah. And they did not have the same sort of sense of the church is their world, the church is their community. And I guess there's some downsides to that because you can, you know, sort of be insulated from, from the rest of the world and that sort of thing. But, um, I, I see nothing but positive in that. And, and it breaks my heart to see how much of that we have not lost, but we've actively jettisoned. We've said that isn't important anymore. We don't think that matters anymore. We're going to focus only on the things that are central to the theological message, which, Greg, you point out, is to some degree incoherent, you know. And so, so that sense of community And Ian, you know, I look back on our mission and, and the thing that you remember from your mission, or at least I do, and I'm pretty sure you do, is the camaraderie, is the other missionaries, is the, the members that you got to know. I mean, the relationships, the community that was built. And, you know, I don't understand I just don't understand the hostility to it because it's not just that it's sort of been allowed to decay. We have actively dismantled it. We got rid of the scouting program and I was a terrible Boy Scout and I hated the Boy Scouts. And when we got rid of the scouting program, I went, oh, great, great. Well, what's the new program? Well, the new program is nothing. We jettisoned the scouting program and we don't have anything to replace it. And, and, you know, I mean, it's like, well, then I, I just think it becomes harder and harder, uh, to, to sort of, uh, bind people together as a church, uh, with that same kind of fierce loyalty. Getting back, Ganesh, I think to one of the things you said at the beginning, or maybe that was you, Greg, this whole idea of loyalty, uh, but You build loyalty to the church, you build loyalty to an organization through the power of community. And when you lose that, I don't know what other method works in its place.

Well, the problem too, uh, if our church experience is mostly in our Sunday services which it is now.

It is now, yeah.

It reminds me of another thing Paul Edwards told me. I wish I had been clever enough to coin the term he used. He was referring to his own tribe, and he said, we practice Christ-centered boredom.

Very good.

Exactly right. That is exactly right.

Because of where I sit at Wesley, I go to a lot of lot of services, primarily Methodist and Presbyterians. I have yet to emerge from one of those services without feeling optimistic and uplifted. How many times do you walk out of a sacrament meeting feeling that way? And how many times do the kids walk out of a sacrament meeting feeling that way? So it's not just that we have stripped the periphery which was the spice in the stew anyway. It's that the stew itself has become insipid because we're locked into an order of worship that so often is terminally boring. Yeah.

Wow.

Who the heck is in charge of the church? Can they not see this? You know, look at what it was. Look at what it did for us. I listened to you all intently. We were so connected on such a personal community level, so invested, and it's been stripped away. Who's not seeing this in the church? If we can see this clearly, we're not alone. Who in the leadership can see this and can they do anything about it? I think you look at the world, it's incredibly divided politically, right? It's in an absolute mess. You look at, you know, just the, a lot of public institutions and organizations, etc., they're in a mess. Public confidence in politics is probably at an all-time low. People have questions about their life, purpose of life. They're looking for answers to all kinds of dilemmas, etc. The church, at one time seemed to be a safe place to, uh, bet on, if you like, you know, it seemed to have the answers and had it together and was united and had all these wonderful programs, this wonderful, uh, community spirit that was real. It was real. It wasn't false. It was real. And all that talent and intelligence in the church. And then this bold claim that it was the only true church upon the face of the earth and one that you could The only organization you could really trust with everything, your life, right? And thank goodness we had that on the earth. And now with all of it, not all of it, but a lot of it seems to be crumbling or cracking at the sides and at parts of the center and losing the priceless ingredients that you speak to, Craig, in regards to what made it so rich. Why Can the leadership not see this? And why can't they see an opportunity in a world so divided to come together and to restore the basic fundamentals of the culture, the community, more inclusion, and reinvent itself and become that great organization that it used to be and even better, frankly, than it used to be, to more inclusive? Why can't the leadership see what we see. I, I just, I don't get it.

Let me ask a simple question. Have any of you heard the term home missionary?

I have not. No.

Service missionary, but not necessarily home missionary.

Look at the last half of the 19th century in the church. You'll find that the home missionary was the spice in the stew of sacrament meetings. These were, well, at that time, the stake high council was strictly a judicial body. It sat on church courts, period. The leadership would take the most effective preachers, primarily returned missionaries who had shown their stuff, They were the home missionaries. They did the circuit riding sermonizing that later was assigned to the High Council, so that sacrament meetings in those years tended to be a lot livelier because you were harnessing the power of the best preachers. Then we fused those two functions in the High Council and we got the worst of both. Having been on three High Councils, I can—

yeah, yeah.

Um, in respect to a way of doing it that we're not doing it now, where we used to do it better, I, I think this also goes to your, to your discussions about and the roadmap about the gerio— yeah, say that word for me, Greg.

Gerontocracy.

Gerontocracy.

Thank you.

It's different in New Zealand than I think in the UK. That's what threw me. Go ahead, Ganesh.

Well, that idea that, you know, we've got a lot of very senior people, you know, and older and older senior leadership. Rather than dynamic young leadership. And so therefore, there's just such a big gap. I guess when people think about their future, they think about the idea of retiring to the temple, sitting in white and hiding away from the world with constant either air conditioning or heating. So that they can talk about how terrible the world is and save their children and grandchildren by doing vicarious work for the dead and hoping that those, that that sacrifice is going to change the world and their families and that they'll have these relationships, key relationships in the future, in the hereafter, when all of these people who are so thankful for their work will will greet them once they die, but also that they can look down from heaven and solve their family issues from the other side. So that, and that may go back to what you were saying earlier, Greg, about a living church. You know, we have focused, or we are focusing a lot on the dead. Rather than the living. And that's a real challenge, I think. I concur.

Greg, any concluding thoughts, comments from your topic? And then Jim, we have time for one more topic. And so I want to give some time there to Jim to introduce it and lead us on his topic. Any thoughts, Greg, before we move to Jim?

Go for it, Jim.

Well, did we do your topic, Greg? Or do we just segue through Ganesh's topic a little bit more?

We'll let our listeners wrestle with that.

So, uh, well, I mean, we're coming up close to the hour. And so I don't, I don't know. My topic might be too much of a ball of worms or too much of a ball of worms. Uh, can of worms. Uh, um, but, uh, the one thing that I wanted to ask, particularly, I mean, Greg, with your historical background, and Ganesh, with your research on Joseph Smith, um, one of the things that I've all— the one of the questions I've always been fascinated with, uh, is, was Was Joseph Smith a believer? It sounds like a silly kind of question, and it's not a question that is troubling to other believers. It's not a question that's troubling to me. I believe Joseph Smith was a believer. But it's interesting, you know, Dan Vogel, who is very active in terms of trying to sort of define who Joseph Smith was. I think he's the one who coined the term pious fraud, the idea that at some point Joseph Smith, um, I mean, he started out as a con man and then at some point sort of morphs into someone who believes his own BS, to be indelicate about it. Uh, and, and I always, you know, talking to people who are so critical of the church or critical of Joseph Smith, I see no evidence in the historical record that Joseph Smith was not a believer. No evidence that Joseph Smith, uh, is ever sort of giving signs that he's pulling a fast one on everybody. And so, so my topic, I was just, I would love Ganesh and Greg, for both of you to weigh in on that question, uh, from a historical standpoint, not necessarily from a testimony faith-building perspective.

I mean, as far as the historical record goes, the data that, that historians look at, Um, I think believer sets us off on the wrong track, Jim, because it conjures up the notion, show me the list of propositions and I will say yes or no. That's what a believer is. I think that in Joseph Smith, as I think in common with founders of other religious traditions, you've got 2 tasks. One is to have a vision writ large. And that's where I think Joseph's strongest suit was, that he was in contact with the infinite in a way that the people around him were not. But the second and probably more difficult thing for a religious founder is to make that accessible to the community. And you can only do that through symbolism. The symbolism may be visual, it may be verbal, but it's the ability to bridge the finite and the infinite to at least give your adherents a taste of the infinite that makes a religious tradition survive and thrive. It's not the propositions that we, um, we equate with belief. So did he believe? Well, I think it's the wrong question. The right question to me is, did he have the vision? And that's not a falsifiable statement. You buy into that as a statement of your own faith based on whatever evidence, tangible and intangible, you want to bring to the table. Does that make any sense?

It does. I, I think that is probably a stronger way of framing it. Uh, do you think that Joseph Smith had confidence or faith in his own vision?

Yes. Now, I've been looking Golly, this goes back 50 years. Been looking at the concept— call it doctrine if you will— of endowment, which began almost as soon as the church was founded, but it morphed dramatically over the decades and continues even to this day. What Joseph and his successors were trying to do was through some type of ceremony to close that gap. And they never got it to the point where it got fixed and everybody's satisfied with it. We still tinker with it. So I think what Joseph realized And what others subsequently have realized is this is a never-ending journey. And even though he had experienced that vision, he wasn't even able to reduce that to a set of symbols, formulas that would consistently work. It's always a work in process.

Ganesh, can you weigh in on that?

Yeah.

Well, I, I, um, there's a couple of things I think I could add to what Greg said, which I totally agree with. Um, one is that I think all of us are the heroes of our own story. Um, and part of being a human is to buy other people into the idea that you're a hero, um, because that means resource and that means Being able to build something for the future that means sustainability and it means thriving. So, um, and Joseph was absolutely the hero of his story. Um, and he, he used archetypes that also displayed that. So, you know, when you look at Nephi, when you look at Moroni, when you look at, um, Prophet Mormon, they, these, these are archetypes of Joseph where he's the hero and he gets to almost imagine himself succeeding. And then other people are buying into those archetypes and they're, um, plying Joseph with resource that then he builds his vision on, which is, um, what Greg, um, is talking about. And I think part of that makeup of Joseph is that he's conjuring. He's— endowment is a great word that, that Greg used, you know, that he's trying to bring forth this power from the unseen esoteric world and, um, and make it manifest in the physical world. And this is, this is magic. This is spells. This is, you know, Like, I, I think, well, that's religion really. Um, if, if I had to pick for Joseph, I think he was a magician first and a Christian second. Um, we, we talk about him being a Christian because, you know, the, the, you know, the Book of Mormon talks about Jesus a lot. Um, but actually we're talking about these kind of mechanisms to bring forth knowledge, to bring forth acquisition. And, and if I can give you a really simple one, um, and it, and it transverses Joseph's early life as a treasure seeker, his time at the, the stories in the Book of Mormon, and then what happens in the early church. And that is, um, the ways that he brings acquisition. So if you're a treasure digger, you are— and Joseph was this, he's a seer, he, he's the main person, he's got the vision, as Greg rightly puts it, he's got the vision, but he's got a team. The, these team are the, the people that, that draw the sword, the people that, um, that carry the, the book, and the person who has the the light, and there's one other. So there's 1 plus 5, like a hand. One thumb, 5, 4 fingers, and it's a hand. And this allows you to acquire something, grab it. Um, and so we see this in treasure digging, but we also see it in the Book of Mormon, right? We see Lehi sending the 4 sons to go get the plates. We see, um, we see this numerous times. This is Amon going, um, you know, the four— the King Mosiah and the four sons of, of Mosiah going to acquire the, the, um, the Lamanites for righteousness. This is, um, Joseph sending, um, the, the, you know, this even before the Book of Mormon's published. This is Joseph sending Josiah Knight, Joseph Knight, Josiah Stoll, Hiram Page, and Oliver Cowdery to sell the the copyright of the Book of Mormon. This is Joseph sending Oliver Cowdery, Parley P. Pratt, Ziba Peterson, and John Whitmer to the Lamanites to acquire the New Jerusalem, but also to Indian Territory to acquire the Lamanites to join the church. This is the mechanism that Joseph is acquiring And we see this again and again, you know, right through from before the Book of Mormon with the treasure digging, in the Book of Mormon with these stories of acquisition, and then we see Joseph, you know, enacting these kinds of treasure seeking. You know, this is Joseph Smith Senior, and then Joseph Smith Jr., Hyrum, Sydney Rigdon, and Oliver Cowdery going to Massachusetts in 1836 to, to acquire the, the, the, um, treasure that's, that's there for them. This is— this happens throughout the church. This happens throughout Joseph's life. This happens incredibly in the treasure-seeking space. So he's a believer because this is his absolute culture. This is the way that you acquire knowledge. This is the way that you acquire converts. This is the way that you acquire treasure. This is the way that you acquire God's divine favor. And he absolutely believes in that. And we interpret it as a church and this thing that we belong to called Mormonism, um, but it's actually a spell. It's the way that, you know, yeah, religion allows you to acquire, to gain resources. And that's, um, something I see in Joseph Smith's life which is really consistent throughout and also explains why he's so passionate, why he has that vision, why he can see, he's the seer, and what and how he can buy this team of people and then this wider group that support that team into acquiring these particular resources. And it's always out of his reach, of course. And, you know, this is the history of the church. But, um, and sometimes it fails spectacularly. The treasure dig goes completely wrong. They lose Missouri. They lose, you know, Ohio. You know, then they lose Nauvoo, but this is the, the, the, but endowment is part of that. You're trying to get the endowment of God by satisfying these particular criteria, this, uh, this method of acquisition, which is magic and also religion and also Christianity.

Yeah, I, going along with that, I consider one of the most powerful forms of revelation to be failed expectations.

Elaborate on that. What does that mean?

It means you thought you had it right and then reality smacks you in the face and you had to go back to the drawing board. That's what Ganesh is talking about. Didn't work in New York.

Didn't work in Ohio.

Didn't work in Illinois. Didn't work in Missouri.

You double down, you increase your performance, you magnify your sacrifice, and you, yeah, and sometimes you break through and you acquire something and it's magical.

Jim, can I have a go at responding? Please do. I'm not an acclaimed, like these two fine gentlemen, acclaimed scholar or historian, by any means. You know, I'm, I'm, um, very much out of my depth here with these two fine gentlemen, but I have a theory which kind of works for me. I do believe Joseph was a believer. I honestly believe he was a sincere young man. He attended these different congregations. A lot of the stuff he heard sank into his soul. You know, I've read some books like, uh, Rust Unrolling and a whole bunch of other books, and this is what I've gleaned from some of those, uh, materials, including, you know, Investigating the Church and those different versions of the First Vision. I believe he was a very sincere young man. I think he was, he had pretty good family dynamics. He went to these different meetings. He listened. There's a lot of conflicting doctrine. He had questions about his own soul. He felt connected through the Spirit with these different meetings that he had. He had questions. He felt he needed to repent. And he wanted to, I think he genuinely believed that he really wanted to know which church to join. I really believe that's what he felt, what he went through. That's my view. He went to a grove of trees. He genuinely, sincerely, in a very heartfelt way, prayed. He had a profound spiritual experience, but not described, not presented as it's described in the official version. I believe he did have a vision in his mind. And he had an impression in his heart. And I've had those personal experiences. I've seen things in my own mind or envisioned things, and I felt, I've had some profound spiritual experiences. I've certainly felt more things than I've seen. He came away from that grove of trees. He had this profound experience. It had a big, you know, it changed him. It was a significant experience. And he then tried to interpret that and translate that. And I think the problem came when a lot of people at that particular time were having similar experiences. And to differentiate his experience, and I don't think, I don't know if this idea came from him, it probably didn't. Someone said to him, look, why don't you say that the story, the vision actually happened in your mind, but in reality, i.e., God and Christ appeared to you physically instead of in your mind. And we know there's material Ganesh where I think Joseph Smith had the brethren, you know, the School of the Prophets, he had the brethren try to imagine things in their mind as they were praying. You know, we do this all the time. We do the, I learned this on the mission, you know, try to imagine the thing that you're praying for, you know, try to see God and, you know, called the mind's eye, I think it was, right? There's the church teaches about the mind's eye. But so I think the story changed radically when they started presenting the story as a real vision, which I don't think happened. And then as he presented it as a real vision that differentiated his story, and of course, along came the Book of Mormon and people came along and they were kind of, kind of bought into his belief system, into his ideas. He started to have some success and he thought, whoa, this is beginning to work. You know, this, my experience is quite different. I'm going to present it that he started to have success and then he started to develop a little bit further, maybe add some pieces on. So I think the core of it is, you know, that spiritual experience in a, in a very non-visual way physically happened. And then as he added that on and developed the idea and had more success, and people came along with questions, and he kind of added that bit on to address those questions. Of course, Book of Mormon came along, which is a, I think is a collection of extraordinary other material and ideas and thoughts from different people, different experiences. I think Ines can speak more about that and Greg can than I can, and you as well, Jim. But I think to your question, it's a long answer, forgive me, but I think yes, he was a believer, but I think at some point he must have known that some of it was made up. It just wasn't all 100% correct. And I think it got so carried away, it became this, uh, to Dan Vogel's point, this pious believer. He just believed in his own I'm going to be blunt, in his own bullshit. So yeah, the basis was kind of right, uh, and then it kind of morphed into something that, um, you know, was frankly man-made. That's, uh, that's the wisdom according to Ian Wilkes, which is not very, not very much, I admit.

Yeah, and we talked a little bit about that, Ian, you know, that idea that he just did get emboldened and entitled as he, as he, as people believed in him too, and, you know, and invested in his vision, then he, I think he took liberties, you know. Um, and some of those liberties were at the beginning very survival-based, you know. I, I need certain things to live, you know. I need food, I need shelter, I need, uh, you know, companionship. But then they became but he became more self-serving as time went on because he saw that he had influence.

Yeah.

And he made mistakes. He screwed up. And to Greg's point, right? I think a lot of it went really well for a while and then started making some big mistakes because he just didn't have his, didn't cover his bases. Right. So anyway, I should write a book, shouldn't I? I should, on what I know is probably on one page, but But, um, Jim, any final thoughts, comments on your topic?

I am, uh, really grateful for those responses. I got quite a bit to chew on and think about. I think those are very insightful things that I want to consider a bit more.

And remember, gentlemen, you can find it. You can only find the answers on everything on Inside Out. We know everything here, don't we? Um, we're having, we're having some fun. Jim Bennett, thank you so much. Ganesh, and then finally Greg. Ganesh, over to you. Any final thoughts, comments on your topic or any other thing we've talked about? Any concluding thoughts from your end?

It's just brilliant to be with you. Great minds with lovely perspectives and incredible generosity and kindness and desire for things to be great. Um, so I am privileged to be here and thank you for having me.

Ganesh, thank you so much. Greg, any final thoughts, comments from, from your, your end?

Merry Christmas.

Wonderful.

Wonderful.

Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas.

Um, God bless us everyone.

Maybe we twist that a little bit and say God help us everyone.

That's great. That's awesome. I can't think of something better than to be in the presence of you fine gentlemen, albeit by video. It's extraordinary technology, isn't it? We've got Ganesh from New Zealand, we have the United States, Canada, we're all talking. I have nothing but the utmost respect and love for each of you. I'm so grateful and honored to spend this time with you. I learned so much from you. I feel very amateur, very novice, but I'm okay with that. I just, love to learn and love to grow. There's been a wonderful spirit here, gentlemen. Thank you so much. And again, I hope we can meet again and explore other topics and other items as we go forward. We want to thank you on behalf of all the listeners, Inside Out. If you've listened to this podcast, please make a comment, give us some ideas of what you want to discuss. And I hope, I'm hopeful that we can reconvene as a group and maybe cover some other topics So thank you, Jim Bennett, as always, you're just awesome, learn so much from you. Ganesh, thank you again, just wonderful individual, and of course, wonderful Greg Bennett. And we look forward to continuing our conversation with you, Greg Bennett, on your very important roadmap for improving Mormonism, because we haven't finished that yet, we still got to complete that conversation. So God bless you all, and love to all your family, and Merry Christmas. Thank you.

Great.