A Conversation with Greg Prince

Hello and welcome to another episode of Inside Out. My name is Jim Bennett and I am here as always with the— give me an adjective, Ian.

Illustrious. I'm feeling illustrious.

Ian Wilkes. That one works.

Yes. Hi, Jim. I've had a very productive day at work, but I'm really excited about this podcast conversation for sure.

Oh, you and me both. I have been looking forward to this ever since you set it up. We're going to interview one of my favorite people. And one of my absolute favorite scholars in Mormon studies. He is— I looked up his background, and I'm stunned. He has two doctorates. He has a DDS and a PhD in pathology from UCLA, and he's made significant contributions in pediatric infectious disease research. But, uh, here now he sort of turned his focus toward Mormon studies. He's the author of 5 books: Power from on High: The Development of Mormon Priesthood, Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History, Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences, Uh, but my absolute favorite of his is a book called David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, which, uh, I was just transformative for me when I read it. Uh, I discovered that many members of my family were sources for it and have talked to them about it. But I had a chance to meet him a couple of years ago working on a documentary that still hasn't come out yet. But hopefully will soon. Maybe it'll come out by the time this podcast does. But, uh, I know of no one who is more informed and more insightful about the state of the church, past and present, than our guest today. And I am just so thrilled that we get to have a conversation with them. So I'd like to welcome to the Inside Out Podcast Greg Prince. Greg, how are you, sir?

I'm overwhelmed with your introduction. If I stop now, I'll be ahead.

I don't know. Well, no, I, I, I just remember I, I was in awe when I got a chance to meet you for that documentary, but I have always wanted to talk to you particularly about David O. McKay and the rise of modern Mormonism. Uh, my— I, I think you talked to Uh, do you, did you speak to my, my, both of my parents, to my father and my mother on that book? I think you talked to Howard Anderson, my uncle.

Yeah. And I talked to Madeen, his wife.

Yep.

And I talked to, oh, is, was it Catherine? Was that the other sister? Catherine?

Yep. Yep. So yeah, my, my grandparents had 4 daughters. And one of them I think had passed away by the time you wrote your book, but the other three I think spoke to you. My mother is very impressed with the book. She's very frustrated that you continually refer to David O. McKay as McKay. You know, McKay would do this. She said it just doesn't feel formal enough.

I know it was an editorial decision, though.

It was fine. Well, it was an academic work. It's not like a So, so it was entirely appropriate to do that. Just here at the outset, maybe this is a little too deep into the weeds, but I, I've been dying to ask you about this. I've read— have you read Matthew Harris's new book, Second Class Saints?

Yes. Yes. He used quite a bit of material from me.

I— yeah. Well, he tells a story that my mother absolutely insists could not and did not happen, could not have happened and did not happen. Um, talking about— so he chronicles an instance where my grandfather, David Lawrence McKay, who went by Lawrence, not David. So Lawrence and his brother Edward McKay, apparently according to Matthew Harris, uh, wanted David O. McKay near the end of his life to ordain a man a Black man who worked at the Hotel Utah, give him the priesthood. And then Alvin R. Dyer got hold of that and figured— and, and put a stop to it somehow and intervened. And I talked to my mother about that, and she said there is no way that her father would have done that. Uh, and I, I was like, well, I kind of hope he did, because it certainly— it makes him look like a bit of a hero in my eyes anyway. But she said, no, no, no, there was no way he would have ever ever done that. And in fact, I was raised with family stories of the church isn't racist because God wanted the priesthood ban in place. And the way we know that is that David O. McKay kept trying to lift it and kept getting told no. So that is proof that it was of God and not of man. And I sort of believed— oh, I fully believe that until I read David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, and I got a sense of who David O. McKay was, uh, and, and of his attitude in terms of race. And you point out that he had sympathies with segregationists and, uh, you know, was not the kind of, uh, civil rights proponent that at least my family was sort of trying to persuade me that he was. And I came to the conclusion that whatever it was that David O. McKay wanted to do in the priesthood ban, it wasn't something that would have allowed for, say, interracial marriage in the temple or really complete equality. So it doesn't surprise me that whatever answer he got was no, that's not something that's acceptable. That's not, uh, that's not the kind of equality that we're looking for. So I get that, that's probably too in the weeds. Are you familiar with that story?

And I'm not familiar with the story of Lawrence. And, uh, in fact, I've never heard anything about that at all. So I can't contradict Matt on that. Um, I think it's important to try to peek behind the curtain on President McKay. Very early, meaning in the 1920s, when he took his tour of the world, he wrote to President Grant and asked if this ban could be lifted. And President Grant's response was that he would like to see that as well, but it would take a revelation. Um, and I think that the important thing to realize is that despite President McKay trying on at least 5 occasions that I documented to get that answer, he couldn't get it., but it was not a, a question of no, this will never happen. In fact, in 1954, when he met with Sterling McMurrin, he said it will change at some point. It just wasn't in his time. And you can speculate why that didn't happen. My hunch is that he couldn't have received a consensus among his own colleagues. At that point. It was difficult for President Kimball years later, and he had to do a little bit of maneuvering to make it happen. But if you back up the clock by a decade, when President McKay was trying to get the answer that he never got, the desegregationists, the racists within the Q15 were even more deeply entrenched. And I think that's why you could argue that, well, maybe the body of the church wasn't ready for it, but for sure there were some of the senior leaders who weren't ready for it. And I don't know that he could have achieved that consensus, nor do I think he could have pushed it through without that consensus on some issues. Rarely he did that. He plowed around the 12th, but not on this one.

Well, when you talk about the consensus, I've read, is it Edward Kimball, who's Spencer W. Kimball's, his account of the priesthood revelation?

Yes.

And talked about the fact that Delbert Stapley was in the hospital at the time it was received. And Delbert Stapley is the guy who wrote that awful letter to George Romney. Have you read that?

Yes, I have.

Ian, are you familiar with that letter?

Uh, just give me a quick overview. I may be.

Oh, it's, it's, it's horrific. Uh, in that George Romney was the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968. He was a, he, he was the governor of Michigan. And very popular. He sort of torpedoes his campaign when he talked about being brainwashed about Vietnam, but that's kind of neither here nor there. He was also a very dedicated civil rights activist, and he, I think, marched with Martin Luther King, or at least supported Martin Luther King. And Delbert Stapley wrote him a letter saying, and he made it very clear, I'm not speaking to you in my official capacity, this is my per— but he said, There have been 3 presidents that have been very active in the Negro cause, and when I learn about— I am troubled by their demise. This was right after JFK had been assassinated. Uh, he, he was referring to William McKinley and referring to Abraham Lincoln, and over the course of the letter, he essentially says these presidents were killed by God because they kept trying to give rights to Black people. And he talks about a friend of his in Arizona who was very active in the Negro cause, quote unquote, and he drowned. And so he's— that's a sign that God drowned him. I mean, it's just— I read it and I thought, is he really arguing that God killed Abraham Lincoln for freeing the slaves? And that's exactly what he was arguing. And so when you see, you had these kind of racist attitudes in the 12, in the Q15, and that, yeah, the navigation of trying to give equal rights, uh, and civil rights to everybody was, was very difficult. Hubie Brown had a terrible time trying to do it, and And so, but, but Ian, you've talked about the fact that that essay about the race and the priesthood, the Gospel Topics essay, was really formative in your decision to leave the church. And Greg, you were instrumental in crafting that essay, were you not?

No, but I had some insights into it. Uh, let me back you up a few years. In 2000 '08, I went to the Mormon History Association meeting, and Marlon Jensen, who then was the church historian as well as a General Authority, was there, and he and I had a private chat. He said, I'm quite troubled by frequent calls that I receive from parents who say my child went on the internet and now they've left the church. And his response to that was to become proactive, and he took to the Q15 a proposal that the church prepare essays that would tackle these thorny historical and doctrinal issues head-on and received approval to do that. That was 2008. It took 5 years, 2013, to finally get them launched. And there were some roadblocks high up along the way. Uh, in December of 2013, I got a call from Darius Gray. I think it was on a Tuesday night. And he said, um, I received a phone call from Church headquarters. They want me to go up there tomorrow, and I think I know what it's about. Well, after he went up there, he called me again and he said it was what I thought. They had prepared the essay on blacks and priesthood. Now, it began with Paul Reeve being commissioned to write a full-length research paper footnoted on it. By the time it went through correlation and whatever other hoops it had to go through, uh, it, it bore very little resemblance to what Paul had written. I never saw Paul's manuscript, but I've talked to him about it. Somebody decided that they better have Darius put his eyes on it before they launched the thing. And he said, when I looked at it, I was just shocked at how bad it was. He worked all day saying, you cannot do this, you cannot say that, this is what you have to say. I asked him, so, How many of your suggested changes did they make? And you said, well, if you assume I had made 10 suggestions, they accepted 7 of them, and the 3 that they did not accept were not consequential. Hmm.

And Darius Gray, just, just for anybody who doesn't know who Darius Gray is, he was the head of the Genesis Group, which was arguably the most important Black Latter-day Saint in the history of the church.

Yeah, I, I defend that statement quite easily. But that was on a Wednesday, and they said, we need to have this done quickly because tomorrow, Thursday, the Twelve will consider this to be posted. And I think it was posted on Friday. So Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, things were happening in rapid succession on that. So I had no input into it. But we were close enough friends that he had called me a couple of times along the way saying, guess what? This is what's happened. So he saved the church an enormous amount of trouble and embarrassment by seeing what middle management, I presume, had done to Paul Reeves' excellent scholarship and just turned it inside out. What was posted on the church's website was pretty good, but it wasn't all the way good. And Ian, you can probably respond to that. Uh, let me just say about those essays in general. In September of 2013, I gave the Leonard Arrington lecture in Logan. And Steve Snow, who was the Church historian at that time, having succeeded Marlon Jensen, went to Logan for the lecture. They had a small banquet prior to the lecture, and he came over and sat next to me at the banquet. We'd known each other for several years. He said, um, I think you'll be pleased to know that next week We are submitting the first essays to the Twelve for final approval to go on the Church website. Blacks in Priesthood was not one of those. They intentionally did not put that out first. They wanted to test the waters. And I said, congratulations, now how you gonna deploy them? And he said, yeah, tell me. Because he understood implicitly that there— this was kind of a lose-lose situation. There was no way that they could craft essays addressing these issues, not just blacks and priesthood, in a way that would satisfy the questioners without tipping over the orthodox. And so what they tried to do was figure out the class average that would be least disruptive. Which in the end was not real satisfying to a lot of people. Either the glass was too empty or was too full. Ian, does that square with your experience in being a consumer of that?

It does. It does.

I, you know, I joined the church 4 years after the so-called revelation on, uh, blacks in the priesthood. Which happened in 1978. Still quite fresh. When I became aware of the historical context, quotes from Brigham Young that if you mix with this, mix the chosen seed, mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty under the law of God is death on the spot. And many, many quotes from Brigham Young and I think Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce L. McConkie was another. So when I became aware of those quotes, I found the church's actions, historical behavior, deeply disturbing. I remember, I don't know if I shared this with you before, Jim Bennett, but I dated a girl when I was 18. I'd been in the church 2 years. I joined when I was 16. Dated a girl who was a Latter-day Saint. She was Black. Wonderful young lady. Just an awesome individual. And I was told by one of the leaders to stop dating this Black girl. And this was 1984. So these quotes, this history, the advice that I received at the time. And by the way, I was obedient to the leader and stopped dating this individual. And she asked me why. And I said, well, I've been asked by the, uh, you know, the leader, I won't mention his name. And she was very, very hurt and upset that, uh, you know, it was because of the color of her skin. Just imagine that for a moment, you know, just, I, I just, I don't know how to articulate that or what she went through. And I, I, I look back and I'm ashamed, frankly, of, of my, um, decision to, it, it was a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. It wasn't serious. I was just a young kid at 18, but that was the advice I received back then. And it wasn't unique. A friend of mine also had similar advice to his from one of his leaders. And so I read this material. It always sat wrong with me. It just felt wrong that Black people couldn't have the same access to the same blessings that I could, you know, before 1978. Temple blessings, priesthood blessing. And so when the essay came out, when President Uchtdorf, I think, spoke in the General Conference in October, I think 2013, and spoke, mentioned that past leaders made mistakes. I thought he was talking about some rogue bishop or stake president. Clearly was talking about past apostles and leaders who'd said and done things that were wrong. This is, I think, just before the first essay came out. I think the first essay was Race in the Priesthood, if I'm not mistaken.

Well, no, it was, I think, the third. The first was Are Mormons Christian? And they lobbed a softball out there intentionally.

Oh, shit. Right. Thank you for correcting me. I couldn't get my dates. I couldn't remember the dates, but when that came out, I read it. I thought it was great. I was serving on a stake presidency. I thought, finally, we've come out on a major issue, a topic. You know, if you look at the big topics, look, polygamy, you know, race in the priesthood, et cetera, restoration, priesthood authority. These are some of the big, big issues that people, non-members included, associate the church, right? Polygamy probably number one, and blacks in the priesthood. So when the essay came out with race in the priesthood, I thought it was amazing. I read it. And I remember talking about it in priesthood. I was in a ward, in my stake. I was a presiding authority being on the stake presidency. And I said, brethren, look at this. This essay has come out. It's wonderful. Read it. And I thought everybody would be as excited as I was that the church had acknowledged this issue and had changed. And was actually saying basically, look, we made a mistake. He says here, and I read this in front of the brethren there in that meeting, today the church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in the pre-mortal life, that mixed-race marriages are a sin, or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior mean any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form. I thought that was just— the essay was great, long overdue. It confirmed that the church had made a mistake in the past. I then communicated that to the brethren at this meeting, and the reaction I got, Greg, Jim, was quite negative, that this document wasn't official, It was difficult to find on the church website. It wasn't sanctioned by the First Presidency. It was a scholarly document. I even had somebody saying, I mean, this is quite extraordinary. Somebody had uploaded, uploaded rather, an anti-Mormon document onto the church website. And so the reaction response from people was, if they'd heard about it, it was, they didn't accept it. Or that it was some document by historian or scholar and wasn't really important. And further, we've had people on our podcast, Greg, who still today, 2025, will not let go of this idea that blacks are allowed to have the priesthood. Even today, amongst our rank and file members, albeit probably a small number, still hold on to the this idea that Blacks are unworthy to hold the priesthood, that they've committed, they've not been valiant in the past life. And so, so I struggle with this. And this was the essay that really unraveled things for me. It's the reaction from it. I didn't get support from the leaders. I was told not to talk about the essays in the lessons or openly, you know, in the priesthood meetings. So a document that was sanctioned by the First Presidency, I was not allowed to talk about. And so it really caused me a lot of questions. I then started researching the other essays. Long story short, I found myself leaving the church because I felt the church even now wasn't— was putting this material out, wasn't saying anything at the pulpit. They weren't talking about it at General Conference. They were quietly putting it onto the website, leaving people with virtually no support or discussion or a safe place at church to talk about these things openly, to say, hey, these essays exist, let's talk about them, that I wanted to talk about them constructively, not negatively. And there was no place, Greg, in the church to talk about them. And so I had no support from the presidency, no support from a bishop. There were people that were confused, even people saying that I shouldn't be talking about these things. Anyway, that led me to where I am now, which I don't regret. But I just wish that the church would, at the pulpit, at the top level, on something so important, to say, look, we got it wrong. Our past leaders made mistakes. We're fallible. We're not perfect. And I just want to close this part of my comments by saying something that I think I heard you said earlier, Greg. Which I find very refreshing, but quite extraordinary. It sounds like David O. McKay, who was a visionary and a progressive and an extraordinary man with great insight, wrestled with this, with God, was probably ready. He was probably ready to receive the revelation, that the revelation existed. God was just waiting to communicate the revelation. David O. McKay was ready. He'd wrestled over this and prayed over it. Yet, the thinking is, from what I'm understanding, what you're saying is that the brethren, the rest of the apostles, were not ready.

So God was ready.

There's some, some of them. Okay. So we had God who was ready with this revelation. Okay. Assuming it was a correct revelation. That's another conversation. David O. McKay was ready, clearly. There were some apostles that were ready and some were not, but because those that were not ready, it didn't get passed until long after David O. McKay, only until we got to Spencer W. Kimball. I find that frustrating, problematic, in that God and the prophet was ready, and yet those individuals, those apostles who were not ready, constrained or restricted or held back that revelation until 1978. It sounds like if they had been in tune with the Spirit, and again, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, had they been in tune with David O. McKay and the other apostles, that the Blacks could have received the priesthood earlier and received the temple blessings earlier, but they weren't ready until 1978. So, you know, they're my opening comments and thoughts. It always felt wrong to me. It felt uncomfortable. It just was, it was just wrong. And I know it's wrong. And I just wish the church would own up and say, hey, we made a mistake, we got it wrong, apologize. And look, we learned from it. And we're going to get better and stronger. And it only could do that through the essays.

Let me unpack a couple of things there. You've given me a lot.

Okay.

15 years ago, I had Darius come back to Maryland and spend a few days with us, talk to our study group. We talked about racism in the church. Now, Darius was baptized in 1964. He sometimes half-jokingly referred to himself as a preemie. But he said then, this is 15 years ago, racism in the church today is worse than it was before 1978. Now, I talk to him frequently. I had, um, breakfast with him not long ago in Salt Lake, and that still holds. He said racism is a major problem in the church, and we have made very little headway in it. That's despite now more than 40 years after the revelation. Uh, I think it's one of the most serious issues facing the church. Now, Ian, you had made a point that I want to elaborate on about safe space, which primarily does not exist within the church. In 2012, during Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, I got a call from Michelle Borstein, who is a religion writer for the Washington Post. Since I live in the D.C. suburbs, she somehow knew that I was there. She said, I need to talk to you to get up to speed on Mormonism because I'll be doing stories on Mitt Romney's campaign. So we met several times, and one time she said, "I'm Jewish, and the lifeblood of Judaism is to be able to meet and discuss and argue the things that are important to us." And both of you, I'm sure, have enough Jewish friends to understand that. One of the old sayings is, if you have two Jews in the room, you have three opinions. But she said, what is the venue within Mormonism that allows that? And I said, Michelle, not only is there not such a venue, but if you try to create one, it's likely that church leaders will try to shut it down. She was speechless.

Yeah.

And that's still a major problem that we have. It's why you and Jim Bennett are doing this podcast and other people are doing similar podcasts to try to create a theological virtual safe house so that people can discuss the questions that are of greatest concern to them. I think that a major reason We are losing so many of our members, particularly the young ones are, they don't have that safe house. Nobody will talk to them. And if they try to raise an issue, then as was the case with you, Ian, they'll be slapped down.

Yeah. Well, we've, we've bumped into a little bit of that. Uh, but this goes back to, it reminds me of my Uncle Howard, Howard Anderson. Who was married to David O. McKay's granddaughter, Madine McKay, and he was my stake president. So yeah, so, so you lived in, in the Los Angeles stake?

Well, I grew up in Westwood Ward. Um, Howard came down, it was in the early 1960s, as mission president of the California Mission and then stayed, right? His kids later were my students in seminary.

Oh, you taught seminary in Westwood? Yes, I did too. And I used to drive your— I think it was your nephew— through the streets of Bel Air, uh, to seminary. He was one of my seminary students. So, so I taught early morning seminary in Westwood for 3 years. I lived with Howard and Madeen while I went to the University of Southern California. I consider Howard and Madeen my second parents. Just adore them. And while I was going to USC, Howard was the stake president, and he had created a— I don't know what the exact term for it was. I think it was a Third Friday group.

Does that sound right?

Third Friday group, right. This is for gay and lesbian Latter-day Saints.

Yes.

In the Los Angeles stake. I mean, the LGBTQ acronym didn't exist back then, and I don't think transgenderism entered into the discussion, but he created the Third Friday group for gay members of the church, and it became wildly popular.

I think they did it in the Westwood Chapel.

They did it in the Westwood Chapel., and I had friends that went to it. And, uh, my— I, I think my sister-in-law, who lived out of state at one point, uh, asked about it and wanted to come to it. But, uh, Elder Ballard, who was fairly close to my Uncle Howard and would stay at Howard and Madeen's house when he would come to the Los Angeles stake to speak to the stake. He called Howard up and said, you need to shut this down. You can't do this anymore, mainly because it's attracting so much attention that people even from out of state are wanting to come and participate in this group. And Howard said to him, all right, Elder Ballard, I will shut it down on one condition. I will shut this down if you can promise me that when I stand before the Savior and give an accounting of my time and my stewardship as stake president, that he will not hold me responsible for ignoring all of these members of my stake that I had stewardship over. And if you can promise me that, I will, I will shut this down. And Elder Ballard backed down and didn't force him to shut it down and instead released him. He was released within a month of that confrontation, and his successor shut it down. But Howard was absolutely committed to this kind of safe space that you're talking about. And, and yeah, there, there just isn't— there just aren't those kinds of resources. I've talked on this podcast several times about my own sort of faith crisis. I bumped into, uh, The Godmakers, the book, while I was— I checked it out of the USC library while I was living with Howard and Madine. And Howard was able to sort of talk me off the ledge, and my own father was able to talk me off the ledge. And, and it was a safe space. I was able to say, I've encountered all of these troubling issues, what do we do with them? And I had at least two very knowledgeable men who were able to sit down with me and be patient with And that resource doesn't exist as far as I know.

No, you were very lucky to be related to resources. Most church members don't have that access.

So what— I mean, how do we create that, or is it possible to create that?

Well, the desire, the need to create that is unending. And so this is going to be a journey without a destination. There will continually be, uh, pop-up stores, for want of a better analogy. Uh, some of them will endure, some of them will be shut down. Lester Bush, who became and remained my closest friend for the last 40 years of his life, uh, started a group here and we took it over. Um, after more than 40 years, the stake president tried to shut it down, and I could see what was happening on it. It wasn't a direct order, shut it down, but when you send two emeritus Area Seventies to somebody's house, uh, you get the idea. What I did was to send an email to all the members of the study group saying, I've just had this meeting with two former Area Seventies, both of whom I'd known for decades. And I said, I'm not going to play games on this. So I'm sorry, but we're going to shut down the study group. Within 48 hours, I think I had 60 unsolicited emails from them. Many of them saying, this has been my lifeline. This is what's kept me in the church. So I bundled those and sent them to the stake president, said, here, it's your problem now. And within 24 hours, there was some severe backpedaling and an email, oh no, no, no, we don't, we welcome you to do this. But, um, yeah, we've seen this. Happened before.

So does this group still exist?

Uh, kind of. COVID knocked the socks off of so many things.

Yeah.

And that happened to the study group. But another thing that I have observed, at least back here, is there doesn't seem to be as much desire anymore. It's not that the people have answers to the questions that they have, a lot of them just quit asking the questions and walked away. I don't know if that's a more general phenomenon. Ian, you're nodding a bit.

Yeah, this conversation is so valuable to me, resonates with me so strong. And I know many people, even now, who keep in touch with me, people who are still in a state, can award, who reached out to me since I've left, who are struggling with all kinds of issues, asking me, the guy that's left, I've resigned, right? And they've no one to go to in the church. So they come, some of them come to me and we talk, and I think I'm helping them stay in the church. I think it's, for me personally, it's not a case of having answers to questions, because I'm okay with the church not having all the answers. I really am. We don't know everything. And we know some things, we don't know this, we don't know that. For me, it was just having a safe space, a place I can have, get it off my chest and feel better personally. And even if there's no answers to questions, I can come away saying, thinking, we don't know the answer to that, but I've been able to talk about it. I feel so much better. You know, the church is an extraordinary, wealthy organization with, for phenomenal resources. Much of that, those resources are organized and structured around bringing people into the church. We're very good at that. I mean, we have an established, successful program, notwithstanding reasons why people don't join the church, but a really organized structure, a way of bringing into the church, you know, the mission program. Jim Bennett and I were part of that. I'm sure you have, Greg, as well. It's been around for a long time. Proselyting, the church proselytes like no other. Incredible support coming into the church. But when you have a question or a doubt, or you're leaving the church, there's no support for you whatsoever. It's like a wedge, all this support here, and then, and then if you're not following this, the lane that you should be in, and not asking, you know, asking the wrong questions and going into areas that you shouldn't be thinking about or asking questions that you shouldn't be asking about, there's virtually no support. And the further in the rabbit hole you go, the less support that you get. And the other thing that comes to mind as well, it seems to me that the church is walking this very thin tightrope and it's got at least, at least 3 options available to it. One is to acknowledge past problems, which is doing to an extent in a very limited, constrained way. Another one is if it goes, I think you made this point right at the very beginning, a really important point that set the tone for this conversation. If it goes too far, Well, it's going to isolate people and create division and confusion for people. And so its option seems to be, its best option or strategy seems to be, put material out. We won't talk about it or approve it officially. We'll use some other organization to talk about it. We'll keep it at arm's length. And then we'll let people kind of figure it out themselves. It's the best option for the church to protect the institution. Don't, you know, talk about it a little bit. Don't go too far. You know, don't admit that we're wrong. I think Elder Oaks says we don't make apologies to anyone. You know, we, we made a few minor errors. Let other people talk about it and then we'll leave the rest to people's interpretation. Give them very little support or resources. Hopefully it'll go away. They'll put it on the shelf and they'll be, these members who have got these questions will, will be reminded by the leaders, look, forget that, you'll have an answer at some point in the eternities. Don't worry about it now. All will be revealed at some point. Elder Ballard talked about that. Just focus on the basics. That to me seems like it's the, uh, the strategy that, or the best strategy that the church is opting for considering the, the extremities on, you know, on, on either side. Am I, am I wrong? Am I close or?

I have not followed what I'm gonna tell you closely, but what I have been told is they are taking a long view on this and are going down the age scale, starting at the bottom. I think implicitly acknowledging that they're not gonna change the older folks in the church. They are what they are. If they can start to reorient the kids and give them the right information, then maybe they'll have a better outcome in the long run. Now, what they're up against is these kids are going to fact-check everything they tell them. Very often it's in real time. They're sitting there with their iPhones fact-checking what the teacher is saying in that moment.

Right, right.

Absolutely. So there's going to be a self-corrective to this that they're not going to be able to get away with anything as they did in the past. Even up until, gee, my formative years, the church controlled the message because they controlled the data. That changed with the internet. Yeah. But it took them a long time to start to figure out not only what was happening, but what would be the consequences of what was happening and how would they respond. They were late to the table, really late. By the time they started to be proactive, uh, there were numerous fairly sophisticated websites out there up and running with large audiences that were putting out a message that was not friendly to the church, but that was well documented. And I, I still think we have not caught up with that.

No, that's the thing that I keep coming back to, is that the church still keeps acting like it has a choice, like it, like, like it can still control the data. And it can choose whether or not to address it. And I, I, I just don't think we have that choice anymore. I don't know that we really ever did, but we could sort of maintain the illusion of it when the only way you could find out that, say, Joseph Smith married teenage girls was from weird little pamphlets that your pastor would give to you if he found out you were meeting with the missionaries. Now you find it. And first Google search.

Yeah. Think about the intuitive relationship of a preteenager with the internet versus the equivalent relationship of a nonagenarian with the internet.

Right. There's your problem. Yeah. Uh, no, that's absolutely right. I think this is kind of in line with some of that, but I want to pick your brain on some of the things that you talked about a couple of years ago when I met you. You talked about it. One of the things that you said that has stuck with me is that you said, and I think this is a quote, hold hopefully, that the Brethren are more divided on LGBTQ issues than on any other issue within our lifetimes. Is that an accurate statement? Am I quoting you correctly?

Yeah, you're quoting me correctly, and I think that was accurate information that I was given.

All right.

I don't think that's changed. I think this is a deeply divisive issue, uh, and one of the ways that you can monitor how much unity there is on it is when the message waffles. And it has. We've, we've, we've done zigzagging on it several times. That does not reflect unity.

Well, you also pointed out the whole— people missed this. A lot of people missed this when in 2010, when Elder Packer gave his talk with the infamous words, "Why would your Heavenly Father do that to anyone?" Some suppose that they were preset and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure.

Or in the unnatural. Not so. Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone?

He tried very hard to say, no, no, everything we taught in the '70s about gayness being a choice and that it's a perversion and it's voluntary, essentially, uh, he tried very hard to lay down that marker before he died and was reversed publicly and humiliatingly in my estimation. But the other thing that was so interesting about that, and you pointed this out, is that the other thing that was taken out of that talk was Elder Packer's attempt on the fly. I mean, you, you had said, because it looks like, because he, when he's, he's talking and he's talking about the family proclamation and he launches into a grammatically incoherent sentence. I can't even remember what it was, but he says, and he stumbles, and it qualifies as a, as a revelation and of to read and follow or something, something incoherent. When you pointed that out to me, I went back and watched the talk and it was very clear that you said that he essentially was making that up on the fly, that he was trying to get the church to canonize the Family Proclamation, couldn't get permission to do it, and so just tried to do it single-handedly, and then that part was taken out of the printed version. That part— can you comment on that a little bit?

He was very precise in his public speaking. He would pre-record his General Conference talks, uh, because he wanted to get everything right. And that's why it was such a stark contrast when he got to that point. It was clear that he was ad-libbing it because he would never have used that kind of erroneous grammar in the General Conference talk that he had prepared. So he'd prepared the whole talk, but that part, it was just clear that he was winging it. And then to have it, um, to have him called on the carpet the next day and to have that excised from the official record, even though you— I think you can still go on the church website and either watch the video or listen to the audio and it's still there. The Family: A Proclamation to the World. It qualifies according to definition as a revelation, and it would do well that the members of the Church to read and follow. Once you're primed to know what to look for, uh, it jumps out at you.

So who is it that corrects the President of the Quorum of the Twelve? I mean, I, I'd be very interested. I mean, we don't know. Obviously it's the First Presidency, which at the time was President Monson, who I think by then was sort of incapacitated. Uh, but it's President Monson, President Eyring, and President— then President Uchtdorf. Um, can you speculate a little bit as to what that conversation might have been like? And is that Well, does that tell us, does it give us any insight into where maybe, uh, Eyring and Uchtdorf are on this issue?

I don't know where they are. I, I think that in general, Dieter Uchtdorf is cut out of way different cloth than the other 14 members of that circle.

Uh, I would think certain other members, uh, could, because Patrick Kiran was in my ward here in Utah.

Ah, okay.

And I think they're cut from the same cloth.

All right. Well, cause we're all European.

Yeah.

Citizens of the world. Yeah. I had a chance to see kind of up close the interaction between Dieter Uchtdorf and Barack Obama. Because my daughter had been a White House intern and had introduced me to one of the officials in the Office of Public Engagement. Uh, and when I met with him, I said, who's your back channel to the church? Now, whenever there's a Democratic United States president, the church is essentially frozen out. You know that because your father was a US Senator and your grandfather was a US Senator. I'm not telling you anything new.

No, my father was also very close to Barack Obama and very close to Joe Biden. But, but yeah, the leadership of the, the Q15 were not.

Yeah.

Yeah. But, uh, when Paul, the, uh, the officer in the Office of Public Engagement responded to my question natively. I said, you know, who's your back channel? He said, we don't have one. Can you make a suggestion? I said, yes, Dieter Uchtdorf. Well, ironically, and not to my knowledge, just a few weeks later, the BYU Management Society had its annual dinner in D.C. Jim, I don't know if you ever went to one of those.

Uh, I think I'm a member because I have an MBA from BYU, but I don't ever remember going to a dinner.

Well, the one that's done in DC for years would have a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles as a speaker, and they'd get like 1,000 people out for this banquet. Well, Paul said, I got an invitation from Church Public Affairs to go to this BYU management dinner and thought Well, might as well, because religious outreach was his portfolio within the White House. And he said, I got there and thought, I'll just sit in the back. And the Area 70 said, oh, Paul, we've got a place for you up here. Took him up, seated him between Dieter Uchtdorf on the one side and Sharon Smith on the other. Sharon. It's the wife of Gordon Smith, who at the time was the U.S. Senator from Oregon.

Right.

And Paul said in the course of the dinner, Buchdorf was talking over him to Smith, laying out essentially what were the administration's talking points on immigration. And he thought, we can deal with this guy. So subsequent to that, he was invited back for two White House meetings. You may remember, Jim, since you're in Utah, the first one at the conclusion of the meeting in the West Wing, they went out and Uchtdorf made a beeline to the reporter from the Salt Lake Tribune. And Paul said, I was freaking out because we didn't like this. We wanted to make sure everybody stayed on message. And he said, I was rushing up to him and he turned and says, Paul, it's okay. He says, when I'm in Salt Lake, they won't let me do this. I want to make sure he gets it straight from me. And the message he got was that the Obama administration and the church were on the same page on immigration. You will probably remember when that happened.

Well, I do.

The base out there was furious. Uh, but he spoke the truth. And I think that was— it was great for the relationship between the church and the Obama administration on one level, but I think it worked against Duke Dorf later on because he wasn't part of the consensus on that. I agreed with him. That give you enlightenment?

Well, well, I, I, so around that time I was interviewing with Bill Evans. Did you know Bill Evans? Oh, very well. Yeah. So Bill Evans was the church, um, government relations director, and I was interviewing for his job, and he decided not to retire because I went through several stages and I thought I'd gotten the job, and then he said, I'm going to stick around for a couple more years. But, uh, in the last interview he said, look, this is a job. We have a big stick. We have the biggest stick in the state of Utah. And so we choose not to use it. We don't go up to Capitol Hill in Salt Lake City during the legislative session like all the other lobbyists, because we know anything we say to the legislature they'll do. And we don't want this to look like a theocracy. And look like we're dictating policy to the Utah State Legislature. He said, but the flip side to that is that when we do use the stick, we do so very deliberately, and it has been run up all the way to the top, and it has gone through all kinds of vetting before we make a public statement. And this was right after the church endorsed the Utah Compact, which was an immigration statement that was right in line with the Obama administration policy, a very essentially Democratic liberal sort of approach to immigration. And Bill Evans said, we issued the policy in the middle of the week. I don't remember what the day of the week was. I think he told me and I can't remember what it was, but he said that Saturday was the state Republican convention. And the state Republican— Utah Republican Party issued a, um, they voted on a resolution condemning the Utah Compact. And when he says, and then you talk to them about that and say, doesn't the church support this? And they would say, oh well, it wasn't really the church, it was just the government relations department, and the church, the Brethren didn't know that, the Brethren don't agree with that. I mean, they were just able to sort of Just like Ian's buddy thought somebody had hacked the church website with the race and the priesthood issue. They thought the church had gone rogue. I used to write editorials for the Deseret News, the unsigned editorials, and the goal of an unsigned editorial, the Deseret News, was to be as inoffensive as humanly possible because everybody was concerned that whatever was written in the Deseret News would be taken as the position of the church and So most of the editorials were just as pablum and anodyne as they could possibly be. But on issues like immigration, where the church had led out, we were able to sort of follow and lead out on that. But so I've also had conversations, and tell me your insight on this, because one of the things that has been a huge crisis for my faith in recent years is the church's, at least the general membership's, embrace, not just acceptance or tolerance, but embrace of Donald Trump. That it's what, 70% of American Mormons voted for Trump, and I think the percentage increased with each election where he ran. And I have had a number of conversations that tell me that the brethren are horrified by this, that even the ones you would think would be Trumpers are not Trumpers, that they don't like or support or they didn't vote for Donald Trump. I was told that one member of the Q15 sent a family letter to all of his children and grandchildren saying, please don't vote for Donald Trump. And, and yet here we are, you know, how can we say that we have some kind of unique spirit of discernment when we have fallen in with the worst possible human being ever to be elected to, to high office in the United States? And, and one of the things that I'm told is that the church Um, that COVID scared the church in that the minute they started saying wear your mask, get vaccinated, all of a sudden all of the hardcore Republicans said Russell Nelson is a fallen prophet. And all of these people who consider themselves the most stalwart members of the church were on the verge of leaving, and some of them left. And so the Brethren now look at that and recognize that anything that contradicts sort of conservative Republican politics is likely to be ignored by a large swath of church members. And so the Brethren steer clear of any of that. Does any of that— do you see any truth in any of that, or do you have any other insight into that, or what do you hear from your back channels.

For 4 years during COVID and thereafter, I was spending half my time in St. George. Uh, the founder of a biotech company had died suddenly, and I had to try to nurture it along. One of the times when I went out there, In the early stages of the pandemic, two physicians contacted me, one LDS, one Jewish, and they said, we are appalled by the low rate of vaccination in Washington County, uh, and they wanted to write to the First Presidency So I gave them a little bit of coaching on maybe how they should write it. I don't think that they were the only ones who wrote letters, but within a week of when they sent their letters in, the First Presidency letter advocating strongly for vaccination was released. The blowback particularly in Davis, Utah, and Washington counties, was astounding and frightening. It was basically that the members were giving the middle finger to the First Presidents, and it caught them off guard. I think it may have been as much of a shock to them as the blowback post-Prop 8, which was severe and immediate and durable. Now, having said that, let me tell you a story that I think relates to this. Do either of you know the name Grant McMurray?

I do, yeah. Community of Christ.

Grant was the president of the Community of Christ. He was the president when they made the change in their name. They had been the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

He gave the priesthood to women in the Community of Christ.

No, he didn't. He don't. And that's key here. Uh, after he became emeritus, which is a major difference between the Community of Christ and the LDS Church, we invited him to come out and stay with us for a few days and talk to our study group. Which he did. Lovely gentleman. I really, really like Grant. But as I was driving him to our home from the airport, he started to talk about their decision to ordain women. He said, I was not in the First Presidency at the time they made that decision, but I was the executive secretary. So I was in on all the meetings. He said they later calculated that they lost perhaps a third of their membership when they decided to ordain women. And ironically, a lot of them were women that left.

Stassi Cram estimated it was half.

Yeah, I've seen that more recently. But then Grant paused and he smiled a little bit and he said, if we'd known which third, we would have done it sooner.

Rubbish. Well, do you think that's the attitude, is, is that if we knew which third we would lose with pushing, well, vaccination?

When you see huge moral issues where you would expect organized religion to take the lead, to be the prophetic voice, and that prophetic voice is not spoken, then you have to start to ask the question, what's going on here? Is it possible that the tail's wagging the dog?

Do you think the tail's wagging the dog?

Yes.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Say more.

Well, I think, I think they were stung by the response to the vaccination letter, and I don't, I don't know how they have responded in their private councils. I think that there was the assumption— now again, this is just, this is my read on it, I'm not speaking from data, you're speaking as a man— I, I think their assumption was the church is with us, we're the leaders, they're their followers. When we speak, they will follow. And gee, there were, there were not many exceptions to that in our lifetime. You know, you, you heard the statement, when the brethren speak, uh, the debate is over. Yep. Fall in line. I think a dramatic example of that was the 1978 revelation. There were some naysayers, but they were drowned out, uh, by the overwhelming acceptance of that revelation. The side—

we didn't see a mass exodus in 19—

not at all, not at all. So I think that's why they were so caught off guard when the vaccination letter was issued, because they weren't used to that. Here now, it, it, in Prop 8, it wasn't a reaction from within the church that stunned them. It was the public reaction. But now with the vaccination letter, it was the base, and the base were saying, no, we're not going to do that. And I really think it set them back on their heels. And I don't know yet if that has had a long-term effect on the way they view things. Um, shifting gears slightly but not completely, I've been on the Board of Governors of Wesley Theological Seminary in DC for, gee, I think it's 7 or 8 years now. It's the largest Methodist seminary in the country, and it's the most politically savvy, I think, of any religious seminary because of where it sits. One of the things we talk about a lot at the seminary is the lack of moral authority in the country. That when I was in my young years, we could look, uh, across the country and identify figures, not just in religion, but certainly in religion, who were towering moral leaders. In education, you had people like Theodore Hesburgh, who was the president of Notre Dame University, and Nathan Pusey, who was the president of Harvard University. That was at a time before the university president, uh, had as his job description fundraiser-in-chief. These were the intellectual leaders, uh, of the country in industry, in entertainment, in sports. You had towering figures who had enormous clout because they represented moral authority. In religion, you had figures like Norman Vincent Peale and Fulton Sheen. In 1968, there was a Gallup survey and David O. McKay was one of the 5 most admired religious figures in the country. You wouldn't have an LDS leader now who would even be recognized by most of the country. You had the voice of moral authority. You had the prophetic voice coming from the pulpit, but you also had the voice of secular prophets who were giving a corrective when necessary to the country. That's mostly gone now. And I, I keep wondering, why isn't it coming from our tradition? Now, that being said, it's not coming from the other religious traditions either. All of them seem to be on the sidelines looking at each other, wondering what to say. We talk about this a lot at Wesley. I had a conversation today with the president of Wesley, and this is an ongoing concern, and we don't know how to fix it. But if that voice of moral authority disappears completely, uh, look out. There's an Old Testament scripture where says, uh, where there's no vision, the people perish. That's not being hyperbolic. I think it's being accurate that people are drifting. Our society is drifting. They want that voice, but they're not hearing it. If they were to hear it, I think people in and out of the church would respond instinctively and immediately to it because they want it, but they're not hearing it. Does that make any sense to you?

It does.

It does. Go ahead, Ian.

Yeah, no, it does. I've learned, I'm learning so much from this conversation. I have a theory. Um, I think there's an inflection point here. Historically, pre-internet, including the revelation in 1978 with blacks in the priesthood, the church, and if you look at the quotes in the past, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and previous prophets and apostles, they seemed, uh, fearless in standing up and saying and doing things that they thought was right, even if it was wrong, they were seemingly unafraid to speak up, just like the prophets in the Book of Mormon and the Bible that would be unafraid to stand in large groups on walls, in the fields, in the streets, and speak up and speak the mind and be bold and courageous, even though some of the stuff may have been, you know, incorrect. Um, fast forward, uh, as people have got more educated, more knowledge, more skill, emergence of the internet. People are now much more savvy. And then the rise of what I would describe as, uh, this is my theory, over-democratization, where everyone has a voice on everything. And the difficulty now is how do you please most of the voices, which is impossible. Everybody has an opinion on all kinds of issues, you know, LGBTQ, uh, politics. Look at what's happening in the world today. For example, we're seeing right now, we are living through extraordinary events in history this very second. I think Trump's announced some kind of temporary ceasefire in Iran, um, between Israel and Iran, just happening in the last, uh, few minutes. Uh, we're seeing upheaval in the Middle East. We've seen uncertainty with China and Taiwan. We've seen destruction in Ukraine. We've seen division politically, economically across the world. We're living in an extraordinary time. And we've talked about this on the podcast. What is the role of the church in the modern geopolitical environment? Is it afraid? And this is my theory. If it speaks up too much, too strongly on certain things, which it shouldn't be afraid, like on COVID, it was, it was right to take a vaccine. It was right to wear masks. If you look at the studies, and it was right to speak up, notwithstanding the strong reaction that they had. And so, and so I think the, the, what I'm trying to say is that if the church is bold and courageous, does its research, gets its facts, gets the data right, has a discussion in a, in a very, uh, uh, robust way as it does with the apostles, reaches a position, creates a policy, has a statement, something that really thought through, and accepting that it won't bring everybody along. That's what I think people are looking for, that moral leadership. And courage on important issues of the day. But what's happening, I think, is on such important topics, especially right now in the current geopolitical climate, it seems to be afraid to stand up and speak up on certain things. Where is its voice on Ukraine? Where is its voice in regards to Israel and Iran and the Middle East? What's its voice on Donald Trump? Does it agree with Trump? Does it disagree? Does it agree with this policy, or not this policy, I know it talks about being apolitical, but there are times where it is political. There are times when it's probably perhaps when it favors itself on certain moral topics. And I'm okay with that. I'm okay with the church being political and standing up and speaking something that it believes in politically. I have no problem with that. But it seems now from these reactions, this, reaction from the base that you've talked about, the reaction from the public, you know, with the Prop 8. It's now reticent, nervous, even afraid to say and do certain things because it will have an impact on the church integrity, on its base, on its membership, etc., and on its public image. And you've said just then, no one knows about, no one knows the names of the apostles or the leaders of the church. Compared to when David O. McKay was one of the more prominent, more courageous religious leaders in the church. So the church is at risk of losing its moral leadership in America. It claims to be a global church. It isn't, in my opinion, but certainly moral leadership in America. And there's an opportunity here for it, especially right now in the current climate, to stand up, speak up, speak your truth, Get your facts right, be courageous, accept you're not going to convince everybody and you're not going to please everybody. Hey, that's the world that we live in. That's, you know, that's always been the case. We've got the internet now, so people are a lot easier to speak up and criticize the church. But that shouldn't matter for the only true church upon the face of the earth, whose prophet, Rick Nelson, is the prophet of God. But, you know, we talk about the opinions of men. In the temple, the opinions of men shouldn't matter. Let's speak the will and mind of God. Let's be courageous. Let's not be afraid of what's happening and let's take a position on certain things. And if people don't like it, well, you know, tough.

Well, yes, other churches have been silent as well.

Yeah, but sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, great. Sorry, but Mark, please forgive me. We claim to be the only true church upon the face of the earth.

Yeah, my point, Ian, is that their silence creates a unique opportunity, right, that we could step forward and fill that void. If you look at the Old Testament model of prophet, it's very different than what you think of in a Latter-day Saint prophet. You have a clean-shaven, well-dressed, avuncular, gentle person. Uh, the Old Testament prophets were almost the polar opposite. They came in out of the wilderness often. They were scary. They were fearless. They were feared, and in many cases they were hated because of the message that they brought, which was to call an entire civilization to repentance, to a higher way of life. That's, that's what the prophetic voice is. The prophetic voice is not the voice that predicts the future. It's the voice that calls people to God's work. And within our entire society, that voice has gone silent. And we are suffering and we're going to suffer even more if we cannot resuscitate that voice. It's a golden opportunity.

I agree.

If the reticence is, gee, are we going to offend somebody? Somebody, then, uh, I would quote Grant McMurray. Should have done this sooner.

Yeah, if we knew which third was going to leave.

Yeah. Well, you know, if people are offended by that prophetic voice, um, it reminds me of a story of Juanita Brooks, who was my next-door neighbor in my first 2 years in College in St. George. A fearless woman, but she gave a talk at a luncheon on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and during the Q&A, a self-righteous Latter-day Saint man chided her for talking about and writing about a controversial issue. She calmly responded, the church to which I belong believes in the truth and the whole truth. And if that's not good enough for you, perhaps you should find a different church.

Nice. Nice. Well, this is the thing. I, I am stunned. You know, my Republican pedigree goes back decades. My grandfather was elected in 1950 as the first Republican to win statewide office. In something like 40 years, because Utah was considered a Democratic state. People don't remember the Republican Party was founded in order to combat the twin relics of barbarism, which were slavery and polygamy.

And yes, and apostles at the turn of the century were instructed to go out and preach to the Saints and tell them it was possible to be a good Latter-day Saint and a Republican.

Right. And oh, how times have changed. But, uh, you know, I made my living for many years as essentially a Republican hack working on Republican campaigns. And I look at Donald Trump and to me, my revulsion to Donald Trump has absolutely nothing to do with politics. It really doesn't. I mean, I look at this and I go, I welcome the day when we have the luxury of being able to have policy discussions again, because right now we have a president of the United States that is utterly unhinged and utterly divorced from any guiding moral principle whatsoever, lives in an alternative reality where he He does not tell the truth in ways beyond— it's the old, um, I, I always tell the story of PJ O'Rourke who endorsed Hillary Clinton. He said, because she's going to be absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, but she's going to be wrong within normal parameters. We are outside of normal parameters. We have a president of the United States that is a moral blight on the country and on the world and frankly on the church with the amount of people who have gone along. I, I mean, I was a Republican in the Clinton days when I was told how horrific it was that we had this immoral president that was sleeping around with a 21-year-old intern. Now we have a president that was found in a court of law to have sexually assaulted someone. And there are 28 other credible— I mean, the moral cesspool that is Trump and that is Trumpism corrupts everything. And when you talk about where is the prophetic voice, and there isn't anybody. I mean, maybe we're not as bad as evangelical Christianity, which has gone completely all in with Trump. But as Ian points out, we have a unique responsibility, uh, in, in saying that we are driven, we are guided by a living prophet, and we're not speaking out against this sort of moral outrage. And I think this is driving more and more— I mean, more and more people— I think we're, we're coming up here on the end, but I want to come back to where you sort of began, where you're talking about how people are leaving the church and how young people are leaving the church.

Yeah, let, let me give you my distillation, please. And that is that our church, but probably any church, if you distill it down, has only 3 cards that it can play. Number one was the one that my generation was raised on, and I suspect both of you were still part of that, and that is truth claims. That's off the table for the current youth, and I think it will stay off the table. You start to talk to truth, to them about truth claims, and their eyes will glaze over. They don't want to hear about it. So that leaves you with only two cards. The most important card to them is moral authority. They are looking for a church that is making a difference in the world in the right direction, and one that can give them an anchor and be a navigator. I interviewed Harold Kushner, the the rabbi who wrote the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He talked about the frightening cosmos. We're all in this journey in that cosmos. They want a church that helps to navigate that cosmos for them and to help heal the world. So that's card number 2, and it's the most important one. Card number 3 is community. If you have a sufficiently caring, loving congregation, that may be enough to hold people in. I think that may be what holds most people in. If you really could get a candid answer from the people in the pews, they probably would say, the reason I'm here every week is this is my tribe. It's my family. I'm loved here. I'm accepted here. Here. It has nothing to do with doctrine. It has nothing to do with history. But that's okay. It works. If you go 0 for 3, you're in real trouble. But for the youth, uh, if you don't have that moral authority, it may not matter that you have either of the other 2 cards. I think that's the biggie for them. And so many of them are saying with their actions, I don't see it in here. It's not working for me, so I'm leaving. It's not on a doctrinal level. It's on a very pragmatic level. I think you could simplistically say it, if it works, I stay. If it doesn't work, I leave. And they're not going to give you a second or third chance. You're both nodding affirmatively. Yeah, absolutely.

I agree. I agree.

No, I think that's a great way to summarize this. People talk about faith crisis. You know, when I went through my faith crisis, it was because I found out about things like the Kinderhook plates, and I was worried about truth claims. But more and more, it's a trust crisis. It's a, I don't trust the leaders of the church to do the right thing. I don't trust their moral authority. I don't trust them to make a difference in the world. I think that's ab— and the other cliché that people use or have used, at least in my generation, Neal Maxwell, I think, is the one who coined the phrase, you can leave the church, but you can't leave it alone. That people, and I look at the rising generation and they're leaving the church and they're leaving it alone. They're shrugging it off like it's an ill fountain. It's just, they're just—

if they leave, you don't get them back, right?

No, right, right. No, I, I think that's— I, I am just so grateful, uh, that we have thinkers like you in the church, uh, because I think you distill so many of these complex issues down to their core principles and to their essence. In a way that really resonates with me, and I'm really grateful that you're willing to share that here with us. Do you have any final parting words of wisdom in Samaritan?

Well, I don't know how much wisdom there is in anything that I say, but I think it's important to, to keep in mind the value that this faith tradition has added to the world. To us individually, whether you embrace it or have walked away from it. All three of us have been irreversibly imprinted, benignly, by this church. Uh, and that makes it all the more painful to me when I see that so many of the members, particularly the youth, are abandoning it. I don't know how to fix that. We could spend several more episodes talking about ways that that might be done, but we don't have time now. I think there are things that are fixable, and I think that there are things embedded within Mormonism that make it enormously compelling, um, but there have to be some mid-course changes to get us there. That make sense?

Yes.

Yes.

It absolutely does. Ian, do you have any parting thoughts, any summation here?

I, it is difficult for me not to be emotional, um, when I listen to Greg because, and you as well, Jim, because believe it or not, I still love the church. I want the church to succeed. I want the church to be that moral leader, that courageous leader. I want the church to make a difference in the world. And this might surprise you, but I would go back to church in a heartbeat if I felt the church was demonstrating that moral leadership and making a difference in the world and standing up and doing that. Because how could you, you know, with people like us and the way we feel so strongly about important things that are right, how could you not be part of a church that is speaking up and bringing hope into people's lives. I'm reminded just finally of a scripture that's one of my favorite scriptures actually, that I used to read a lot on my mission, and I still hold the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants in great esteem. It's Ether 12:4, and it's a beautiful scripture, and it says that, wherefore, whoso believeth in God, might with surety hope for a better world, yea, even a place at the right hand of God, which hope cometh of faith, maketh an anchor to the souls of men, which would make them sure and steadfast, always abounding in good works, being led to glorify God. I hope that the church will fill that vacuum. It holds a special place for all of us. It can and be the great organization that the Lord intended. And I think we've reached that crossroads, and I think now is an opportunity, to your point, Greg, that the church can take this opportunity and demonstrate that moral leadership because of the extraordinary legacy and the foundation of which the church is built on, of really good fundamental principles. I still believe that those basic principles of decency and right and goodness and to be that, show that leadership in the world. Even though I'm out of the church, I still hope and believe that the church will fill that, you know, take up that opportunity. So I don't want to diminish what Greg said, but I, you know, they're my final comments, Jim Bennett.

All right. Well, Greg Prince, thank you so much for joining us. I hope we can persuade you to come back for a return visit. There are so many other things I would just love to pick your brain on.

Always available, Jim. You only need to ask.

Oh, absolutely wonderful. We're going to take you up on that at some point.

Craig, thank you so much for coming on. You're a wonderful man, and I hope to meet you one day in person. I felt your spirit, and I'm truly humbled by having this conversation with you. I've learned so much.

Thank you. Thank you, Ian.

And thank you all for listening. And we look forward to speaking with you again next week on our next episode of Inside Out.