A Roadmap for Improving Mormonism (Part 1) – with Greg Prince

Hello and welcome to another episode of Inside Out. My name is Jim Bennett. I am here as always with Ian Wilkes. Ian, how are you, sir?

I'm doing really well, Jim, and super excited about this podcast conversation.

As am I, because we can't get enough of Greg Prince. Greg Prince is back with us. How are you, sir?

I'm well. Thanks for inviting me back in.

Thank you. And we're very grateful to have you and very excited to discuss this document that you sent to us after our last episode. So after we've had two conversations with you, you honored us by sharing with us a document titled A Roadmap for Reforming Mormonism, and it's a 20,000-word, 20,800 or so word document that gets into different ways to reform the church. And as both Ian and I have looked at it extensively, we've read, I've read the whole thing from beginning to end. I absolutely love it. I love all of your ideas. And I very much want to get into it with you. You frame this as a sort of Vatican II for the church. You're talking about a Salt Lake I. Can you talk, talk about the comparison between what Vatican II was and what your Salt Lake I would be?

Well, the— in the 19th century, there was Vatican I, which brought the whole Catholic Church hierarchy together to try to modernize the Church. Vatican II was in our lifetimes in the early 1960s. And again, it was an attempt to bring the Church into the modern era. And it needed it. We've never done that on a churchwide basis within Mormonism. And so the idea of such a convocation that would bring together the hierarchy and the grassroots, in other words, it would bring all the stakeholders together to say, how can we improve this thing moving forward? To me has a lot of appeal.

Has a great deal of appeal. As I read through it, though, you talk about different circumstances. One, a conversation that you had with a reporter during the Romney campaign in 2012, a Jewish reporter who says that argumentation is really part of the lifeblood of being Jewish. And where do Latter-day Saints go to have that, those kinds of discussions? And your response was, there isn't a place for them to go, and if there were, the Brethren would probably shut it down. And you also talk about a conversation with Bonnie Cordon, who's the former General Young Women's President, now the president of Southern Utah University, and you suggested to her that there should be a place where students could come and complain or vent their frustrations with the church, and she just sort of stared at you blankly, if I understand it correctly. So, I mean, just in looking at that, um, I see a church that very much likes being top-down and that doesn't even like to be perceived as bottom-up. You talk an awful lot about this idea of trickle-up revelation. That so much of the revelation in the church has come from the grassroots and has transformed the church that way. But I found that the church, not only do they not— I mean, the church does these extensive surveys, the church does everything they can to figure out where the grassroots are, but then they try to frame it as if this was always our idea all along. And the example I always use for that is the Manti Temple, which was going to be gutted with all of its historic Minerva Teichert murals. And there was a huge outcry and the church changed its mind. The church said, okay, we're not going to gut this temple. We're going to build another temple down the street and keep this. But I think it was Elder Renlund, it's either Elder Renlund or Elder Rasband, who said, and by the way, we're doing this because we've received revelation to do this. We're not doing this because of all the protests. The protests had nothing to do with it. Which is just nonsense. Of course the protests had something to do with it. I was always taught growing up, for instance, that revelation comes when you ask for it. I was taught in primary that the Word of Wisdom came because Emma was tired of cleaning tobacco stains out of the wood floors of the School of the Prophets. And when you ask a question, it's because you have a need for an answer, and that's what prompts the question. But the brethren try to act like, okay, they live in this sort of bubble where revelation just comes magically and has nothing to do with the grassroots. And I find that to be a very frustrating circumstance. So I guess my question with this, with this idea of a grassroots bottom-up approach, is do you think that's practical given the current makeup of church leadership?

It would be difficult to bring that together physically, but the reality is that that voice from the bottom has always been there. In terms of defining the doctrine of the church, that's arguably been a top-down phenomenon. I don't think any of us would argue with that. But in terms of the embodiment of the church, what made the church live for the members For our generation, for example, it wasn't the doctrine, it was the programs. That's what really made it resonate for us, including things like the missionary program. But the auxilia— auxiliary organizations all began with grassroots initiatives, most of them in the 19th century, where individuals or small groups of people recognized a need and created a solution to address that need. And then those initiatives were embraced by the central church and they became institutionalized. That's always been there, at least that creative force. But beginning in the 1970s, when the correlation movement shifted from coordinating the curricula of the church to regulating the direction of the church. That bottom-up phenomenon largely got shut down. It's— the creativity is still there, and I think on a good day, some of the leaders are listening to that. I know that they consult with professionals on a frequent basis because I've talked to some of those ambassadors, other people who can give them expert input But that's a level removed from where I think the real creativity comes, and that's still at the grassroots. How would you embody that? How would you make that happen? Um, I haven't given that much thought, and I think that would be very tricky to do, but I think it needs to be done if we are to revitalize a church that has been seeing the attrition of its youth in numbers that to me are appalling.

Well, you talk about that in your Roadmap. You talk about the biggest issue for the youth is relevance, that the church is completely irrelevant to their lives, that in the past, um, the whole idea— I mean, you talk about the programs or what mattered to us, and I— that resonates with me tremendously because The church was the center of the universe when I was growing up, and that hasn't been the case for a very long time. That hasn't been the case for my own children. I was very kind of frustrated, actually very happy, when the church got rid of Boy Scouts because I kind of hated Boy Scouts. And I went, oh, okay, I'm really excited by what's going to replace it. And what replaced it was nothing. They just sort of ditched Boy Scouts, and now there's this amorphous nothing And that whole sense of community has been lost to a large degree. And as a result, the church just doesn't have any kind of relevance in the lives of young people. Uh, we continually try to answer questions that nobody is asking. And so as I look at your roadmap, you have this whole section where you talk about relevance and you talk about the idea of the essential question is, why should I engage in organized religion? If the answer even hints of a truth claim, the discussion is over and the church has lost another potential congregant. I mean, you talked about that with us, I think, on our first conversation, where you have truth claims, you have community, and you have moral authority. And right now, the church isn't really ringing anybody's bell, particularly with regard to young people. On any, all, any three of those, any one of those three. Um, do you want to comment on that?

Well, the, the community is still really important and quite variable from one ward to another within a given stake. You can see a difference if your congregation is inclusive, if it is loving. It may be the only one of the three cards to offer, but it may be sufficient. But that's gonna be variable because it's driven by individuals, and those will vary from congregation to congregation. I think the one that the youth really are looking for, and I would put youth of any religious persuasion, is the moral authority. And, and there are at least two dimensions of that for them. One is, how can a church help me navigate the this really hazardous world that I was born into? But the other is, is my church affiliation going to be with an organization that is trying to make a difference in the world where so much is hurting and needs to be healed? And, and that's where I think we've got a lot of work to do because The church in which the three of us were raised presented it more as a proposition of duty, that we did it because you're going to do it, or your parents would say you're going to do it, and less one of, okay, why, right? And if anything, the answer to the why was, well, you'll be rewarded in the next life. I don't think that's very attractive to current youth. I think you've got to give them something that helps them individually now and that conveys to them the idea that this organization is trying to make a difference in the world. We've got all the pieces of that sitting on the table. We haven't assembled them into a coherent structure.

No, that's absolutely true. And as you go through the roadmap, you also point out that we also have pieces on the table that are getting in the way. The racism remains a huge problem in the church, uh, even more so to some degree than it was prior to the 1978 revelation. Uh, you also have, uh, the LGBTQ issue which is huge, particularly for the rising generation. And when you talk about the duty of our generations, the thing that goes with duty is this fear of what will happen if you don't do your duty. I always used to say that missions, at least my mission, are almost entirely fueled by guilt. You know, you just— I feel I just got to get out there. I've got to do this because if I don't, I'm letting everybody down and I'm going to be condemned. And there's this whole huge element of fear, this big black cloud that looms over you. And it's that sort of threat of hellfire, even though the church doesn't really believe in a traditional Christian hell, but that threat of condemnation. You better do this or, or else. And the youth are looking at the or else and saying, yeah, well, what's your or else? What do you got? And, you know, I look at the LGBTQ issue particularly, and one of the things when the Prop 8 campaign was going on was this whole idea that if gay marriage becomes the law of the land, then that's going to undermine traditional marriage and destroy the family. And if you read the Family Proclamation, the last paragraph talks about, we warn of all of these cataclysms that will come if we are so much more permissive and if we allow these things to take root. Well, my children are growing up in a world where gay marriage has been legal for most of their lives, and the sky hasn't fallen. Traditional marriage continues unabated. Heterosexuality has not disappeared. And so all of those sticks all of those fear sticks versus the carrots, none of that fear, none of those sticks work anymore. We're not— it's— we're a paper tiger as far as the youth are concerned, and we don't have enough carrots to offer them. You talk in your roadmap about boredom and just how intense a problem that is in the church. And I— it's just so funny to me because my children just do not tolerate boredom in a way we used to tolerate boredom.

No, a lethal combination is boredom in church and iPhones.

Right, right. I remember going to the stake center in Los— in the Canoga Park Stake in the San Fernando Valley and sitting in the stake center and listening, not watching, because we didn't have a satellite feed back then, listening to the priesthood session of General Conference, just sitting in a pew with nothing to look at. And I'd never been more bored in my entire life. And the idea that my children would tolerate that now is ludicrous. Is, has the cell phone, uh, is the cell phone the end of the church as we know it?

Well, it's certainly omnipresent in the church. Just look out on the congregation during any meeting and see how many people are looking at their phones instead of listening to the speaker.

Absolutely. Ian, what jumps out at you from this roadmap?

Yeah, I have had the opportunity over 35, 37 years when I was in the church of working with, learning from, listening, uh, receiving instruction and training from some extraordinary senior-level church leaders as a bishop serving on a stake presidency. Elder Oaks, who set me apart, Elder Cook, Elder Holland, Elder Baxter, and many general authorities that came to the stake and provided training to the brethren and certainly to the leaders. And I've never seen them produce or talk about a vision that is captured very clearly in a very defined way in Greg Prince's Strategic Roadmap for Improving Mormonism. I've never seen a document like this ever. In all of that time. I've heard soundbites, great talks, extraordinary talks, you know, by these well-versed General Authorities, but I've never seen a vision like this. And it's, uh, an extraordinary document that I feel honored and privileged to be able to have read. It resonates with me very strongly from my experience being in the church. And it connects very deeply to me now being outside of the church on the, you know, on the other side. Uh, it talks about the most important key issues in the church about insulated leadership, resistance to change, faith crisis that people have where they have very important questions that are very important to them, very personal questions that are really important to them on a very personal level. Where the church is not addressing those questions in a meaningful way. And if it doesn't have the answers, it seems to be afraid to say so. You know, the church is, going back to how it's organized, its structure, you know, in terms of being top-down, it's patterned after the early church structure, you know, Jesus Christ and the apostles. It's patterned after the, how the church is organized,, during the Restoration, you know, we have a prophet, we have First Presidency, we have General Authorities, et cetera. They go to God, God speaks to them, God instructs them what to do. And then the prophet and the, um, uh, uh, Pres— First Presidency, uh, communicate a prescribed, um, and dictate a prescribed, uh, directive to the members of the church. In terms of this is how you're supposed to live. This is the direction we've got in this subject. And basically when the prophet speaks, and as Marion G. Romney has said in the past, I think he coined the phrase originally that when the president of the church speaks, that settles the question so far as the members of the church are concerned. No true Latter-day Saints, he said, he said, will question the counsel of the First Presidency. So this top-down, how it's organized and structured affects every aspect of how the church behaves. Notwithstanding the teaching and the doctrine that we have, that we receive, that individuals can receive personal revelation, uh, fathers and mothers can receive revelation for the families, an elders quorum president can receive revelation for his quorum, Relief Society for the Relief Society, We can get revelation for our quorums and auxiliaries, and we can really do amazing work. And the church does extraordinary work at the grassroots level, and that the value of that experience at the grassroots level, being able to listen and understand to what's going on at the rank and file level of the church, is in my opinion equal to, easily equal to the value of the revelation that comes from the Lord. The Lord speaks to us on a personal level. He listens to us. We pray. We pray as families. We pray as quorums and auxiliaries. He provides that revelation within that, within that area of our responsibility. And of course, he's going to pass that information on to the First Presidency. But there seem to be some disconnects. There seemed to be a disconnect with the First Presidency where we do get some revelation from time to time, but someone at that level, uh, the First Presidency is not listening or understanding to what's going on at the grassroots level. This document, Jim Bennett, comprehensively speaks to and addresses or attempts to address the issues in a way that the church should have done years ago. We, we are living in an extraordinary time of unprecedented change, global challenges, global conflict, geopolitics, division within societies and community. People just, a significant erosion of trust in, in the public elected officials. There is dissension and division everywhere. Is a vacuum where we need good, strong, honest, moral leadership for leaders, especially the church leaders who claim to be the head of the only true church upon the face of the earth. I mean, that's quite a claim. And the only organization, religious organization with priesthood and moral authority to speak on behalf of God to the world. Not just to the rank-and-file members of the church, but to the world, the voice to the world. And so I ask, you know, what is the voice of God through his prophet to the world on global issues, but as well as issues impacting members of the church who are hurting, who are struggling, who are trying to find meaning and relevance in their lives, trying to see how the church is relevant to them, and looking for direction and leadership on really important issues like race and LGBTQ, faith crisis, etc., and a sense of a community that is helping them on a very personal level, which used to exist. Both of you can speak from personal experience of where the church has gone in regards to that community. But, but my family, my wife, my friends and family, we speak about times in the '80s growing up in the church and in the '90s when all the programs in the UK of the church were working extremely well. YSA, we used to live for dances. There was a roadshow, stake, uh, athletics. There was endless activities that we could engage. We longed for the weekend. We were working through the week or at college. We longed to go to church and we're excited. It meant something. We had that community. In the UK, that's gone. You can speak to the US. I can speak to Canada. It's certainly, you know, we're living in Canada now, but that sense of community and relevance in the UK, and I know this because I'm in regular contact with family, friends, Even people on, um, family side who were bishops and stake presidents who were active today, they talk about those times in the past where the church had it together and that the leaders were bold. And just one other thought before we hand the time back here, there is endless examples in the scriptures, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, early church leaders, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith, other leaders who were seemingly unafraid to stand up and speak up and address issues of the day, whether they're right or wrong. You can, we can have a conversation about whether they were right or wrong on different things. They were wrong on some things. They were right on some things. And by the way, we learn best when we make mistakes, right? We look at our lives, look at your life, look at my life. We make mistakes. We learn from the mistakes. We get stronger. I've learned more from my mistakes than I have my successes. And the church has made lots of mistakes. It's got a lot of things right, but it's made some mistakes. And that's okay. You know, they're not perfect. But the church leaders today seem to lack intestinal fortitude. They seem to be fearful, not fearless, seem to be reticent to stand up and speak about the issues of the day. And to be that voice, to be that moral authority, no matter what the, um, opinion, the men's opinion. You know, we talk about being unafraid of the opinions of men. He's talked about in the temple. I think, uh, I think it's in the temple. I've certainly heard it and read it before, but the leaders seem to be afraid to stand up and speak up and address the issues on a local level in the church and seem to be afraid to address the issues of, of, uh, you know, geo, uh, politics. And now is the time more than ever, do we need good, strong, honest leadership with integrity. And you know what, I know the president have got these qualities, I know it. But they just seem to be reluctant to be able to speak up and address these issues. And I wish they had a copy of this document. It's an amazing document. I'm looking at it right now. And I hope it goes into the hand, gets in the hands of the First Presidency. They need to read Greg Prince's strategic roadmap for addressing the issues with Mormonism. They've got the answers. We know the answers. They just have to have the courage and be bold, but not overbearing, and implement and include people like Greg in their conversations so they can understand it and make the right decisions to improve the church and be that leader organization that is so desperately needed in the world of division and pain that so many people are going through.

That's a lot more in to unpack than we'll have time for on this episode. But let me give you two stories that don't give the answers, but I think help to frame the questions. And both of them deal with the idea of information flow from bottom up. The first is a story of a course in physical diagnosis where the professor took a group of medical students and said, one by one, you'll go into the adjacent room. There is a patient there. You'll do an examination and you'll come back and you'll give a diagnosis. So one by one they went in and then when everybody had reassembled, he went through the room and everyone except the last medical student got the wrong answer. The— that student said the patient has tertiary syphilis. The instructor said, that's right, it's a very difficult diagnosis because tertiary syphilis is often called the great imitator, meaning that the symptoms of it are exactly like the symptoms of other non-related maladies.. And so the professor said, I suppose you noticed this and this and this about the patient. And the student said, no. Whereupon the professor said, then how did you make the diagnosis? He said, I asked the patient what he had. Right. And as simple as that sounds, we don't do that very often. Now that's a story. The second is A real event, because I was there. This was in Kirtland, Ohio. It was 20 or so years ago, the meeting of the Mormon History Association. For the very first time ever, an LDS General Authority attended that. That was Todd Christofferson, who at that point was in the Seventy and had as part of his portfolio the Historical Department. He and my wife had worked together in student government way back at BYU. So we were sitting at the same table at lunch, and I said to him, do you ever do focus groups just to take the pulse? And he said, yeah, we do focus groups occasionally. I said, who do you invite to them? He said, generally it's bishops from the Salt Lake Valley. And I about came out of my chair. I said, Todd, you need to be talking to the people who are angry at you, because if you don't, you'll never understand what's going on with them and how to fix it. Yeah, I think that's where we still are.

I think you're absolutely right. And as I'm looking at this document, I actually kind of want to take a bit of a left turn here. Because I'm looking at all of your prescriptions, and as I read this document for the first time, I kept nodding and I kept saying, yes, yes, that's right, yes, we absolutely need to do that. And then I got to your section on the Book of Mormon, and it's not necessarily that I disagreed with you. Well, I do disagree to some degree, but you talk about the Book of Abraham And I think everybody recognizes, and the church has all but conceded, that the Book of Abraham bears no resemblance to whatever papyrus Joseph Smith had. We have lingering pieces of it, and there has been some attempt by apologists to say, well, there's a whole big section missing, and that was burned in the Chicago fire. That had the Book of Abraham on it. And on, and now the Joseph Smith Papers published a volume that essentially said that's nonsense. We do have the pertinent documents. We do know these were the documents Joseph Smith thought he was translating, and we also know that these documents bear no resemblance to the text of the Book of Abraham. And the Church, in its Gospel Topics Essay, has, has sort of formally endorsed the idea of what's now called the catalyst theory, that this was These documents were a catalyst for Joseph Smith to receive this revelation, and but they don't— but we acknowledge that the documents themselves, uh, are not really the Book of Abraham. They don't have the Book of Abraham in the text. So I, I mean, I think we're there as a church. There are still sort of lingering people that try to make some kind of half-hearted defense for the book of Abraham's antiquity, and it just doesn't work. But you, you then sort of segue into the Book of Mormon and apply the same sort of logic to the Book of Mormon. And I'm just, I'm just looking at this. I mean, you talk about how the Book of Mormon has serious racism in it, which is absolutely true, um, but, uh, You go on and you say, the consensus among scholars, both those outside the church and those within who are willing to follow the data, is that the Book of Mormon is a product of the 19th century written by Joseph Smith. Those who are clear-eyed do not see that statement as incompatible with the book being divinely inspired. Indeed, one need only look at the effect of the book in the nearly two centuries since its publication to see that there is something that sets it apart as sacred writ. And, you know, in the documentary that I was working on with you years ago, I've quoted you many times where you talk about the 3 questions you ask to people about the Book of Mormon. And you say, well, did you read all the way through? Well, no, I didn't. Okay, well, did— what did you remember about what you read? Well, there were a lot of wars. Okay, well, what was the experience like? When you read it. And that's when they light up, and that's when they talk about all this stuff. And the line that you said in that documentary was, something happened to them as a result of that book that was not in that book. And that has always stuck with me as a really great summary of how the Book of Mormon works. But the difficulty I have, because then you suggest we just change the paradigm We accept that it's a 19th-century creation, that it is not ancient, that Joseph Smith wrote it, and we go from there and we'll be fine. And that to me is a— the problem with that, and Cheryl Givens talks about this all the time, is if that's the case, the Book of Mormon is nothing more than inspired fiction written in the 19th century by a brilliant Joseph Smith. That means there were no gold plates. That means there was no Moroni. That means that essentially every foundational claim that Joseph Smith made about the origins of the church was fabricated. I mean, that we're built on a lie. And I can't get there from here. I can't just say, set that aside and say 'Okay, well, okay, yeah, this was all a lie. Joseph Smith made it all up. But look at all the good it's done, and can't we just go from there?' Uh, I, I think it would be absolutely devastating to— for church leaders to, to change the paradigm in that way. Tell me why I'm wrong.

All right, the problem in what you've just said is that much of what you say is arguing from silence. And that's not a good road to go down. Silence, meaning we don't have contact with Moroni, we don't have gold plates. And so where you go with those things becomes a matter of conjecture, not a verifiable fact. If you look first at the Book of Abraham, even though it postdated the Book of Mormon by roughly 6 years. You've got the model that I think fits hand in glove for the Book of Mormon, if you're willing to take it in that direction. If you look at the claims Joseph Smith made, and he made them in print, about the Book of Abraham, they are no less audacious than the claims of the Book of Mormon, meaning that he said, oh, here we have the story of Father Abraham. And he says to a reporter, see, there is Abraham's signature. Well, turns out that was not quite the way it happened. And the church, to its credit, in the Gospel Topics essay went all the way with that and said, yeah, we have to use a different paradigm here. The technical word for it has been around for a long time. It's a Jewish word, and it's called midrash. It refers to the interaction of the scholar with a text that produces a new text that is not just a retranslation of the old one. It may even be in the same language, but it, it is an inspired process by which that interaction leads to something new that is valuable to that group of believers. I had a professor of Hebrew Bible at 'Westley Seminary in DC, come and teach our study group.' This goes back, ooh, probably 25 years. She came out one Sunday night a month for a year and had us all on the edge of our seats, making the Old Testament come alive to us in a way we had never imagined. But as part of the process, She elected to read the Book of Mormon, and after she had finished, she said, I respect the Book of Mormon as authentic American scripture. But she said, I see it as a book-length midrash on the King James Bible. Now, if you start to think about all the quotes from Isaiah that are in the Book of Mormon, all the other links to the King James Bible, you can start to see that, yeah, that makes sense. If you also think of what Alexander Campbell said in his first published critique of the Book of Mormon, which was only about a year after it was published, he said, you know, it, it addresses all the burning issues in Western New York religion. It holds together, but we have not been willing to take that leap that we already have made with the Book of Abraham, even though I think there is a one-to-one correlation in the process of the Book of Mormon versus the process of the Book of Abraham. That correlation is you have a prophetic figure, the same person in both cases. You have some type of artifact. In the case of the Book of Abraham, it was papyri. In the case of the Book of Mormon, uh, maybe it was gold plates, but we don't have those plates. And furthermore, all the firsthand accounts of the translation process fail to mention that Joseph ever looked at the plates while he was translating. In fact, it was just the opposite. They said if the plates were in the room at all, they were covered with cloth, and he was looking at a hat with a stone in the base of the hat. Nonetheless, whether it's plates or stone, you have an artifact with which the prophet is interacting thereby producing a new text that has value to the community of believers, and they accepted that as canon. Now, I, I know, Jim, all the layers of complexity for the church if they were to make that leap, not the least difficult being, uh, what do you say to all of the people in Latin America who feel that they are chosen people because of what we have told them about that book? I don't have an answer to that one.

Well, yeah, I, I, I hear you. I hear, I think a lot of what you're saying makes sense. I don't think it's a one-to-one correlation. And, and here's why. Because, uh, you— I think it is plausible to say, okay, Joseph Smith got the Egyptian papyri through natural means in front of everybody, and everybody saw that he had the papyri. And the fact that he pointed to it and said, look, there's Abraham's signature— it's a lot easier for me looking back on that to say, oh, he thought that was Abraham's signature, but he made a mistake, he was wrong. Uh, it's a lot easier for me to excuse that than to excuse the idea of Joseph Smith told everyone he had gold plates he didn't have and was visited by an angel who doesn't exist. And that is the basis for where this comes from.

But Jim, I'm not saying that either of those things didn't happen.

So, so you, you're, you're threading a needle where I'm, I'm a— and there could have been a Moroni, there could have been gold plates.

Yeah, but I'm a scientist who says show me the data, right? With the Book of Abraham, we have the data, we have the papyrus. With the Book of Mormon, we don't. And so that opens it to a variety of explanations, none of which is really susceptible to disproof. So you pay your money and you take your choice. I'm not denying that, but I'm saying we don't have the physical evidence that allows us to make that link that we can make with the Book of Abraham. And yet, I think that the two processes were the same. It's the interaction of artifact with prophet to produce text.

Well, so, so in that paradigm, the gold plates still exist.

Perhaps they do.

Or perhaps— but again, the problem of apologetics is you can't argue from lack of data. Right. I mean, when— so are you familiar with Dan McClelland? Is that name anything to you?

Not greatly familiar, but at least with the name.

I'm a regular listener to his podcast. His podcast partner grew up with my— with— anyway, I know his podcast partner better than I know him. But his podcast is called Data Over Dogma. And he talked about where the data goes, and he's talked— he's still an active member of the church, but he's talked about the data do not support support the idea of a historical Book of Mormon. And I've met a number of people, a number of fine, faithful, wonderful people who have managed to hold on to their faith and say, yes, I, I'm a believer, and the Book of Mormon is the word of God, and it's inspired fiction. And they figured out a way to do that, and it doesn't seem to be troubling them. And I I can't get there from here. You know, my father, at the end of his life, devoted his life to, um, talking about the origins of the Book of Mormon. He wrote a book called Leap of Faith: Confronting the Origins of the Book of Mormon.

He sent me the manuscript to critique. I know about that book.

Yeah, yeah. And so when Dad— Dad was suffering from pancreatic cancer. And, uh, thought he'd beaten it and then went back for another checkup and it had come back and metastasized. And he knew he didn't have very long. And so, uh, he was given an assignment by Aaron Sherinian, who was his bishop at the time, to give a fireside about the origins of the Book of Mormon. And that was on April 10th, 2016. And he kept telling himself, I have to stay alive for the fireside. I mean, this whole mantra— he was dying, he knew he was dying, but I have to stay alive for the fireside. And he gave the fireside, and the fireside was all about the origins of the Book of Mormon. And he goes through a lot of the standard apologetic arguments. He talks about Nahom and some of the sort of archaeological tidbits he recounts Hugh Nibley's greatest hits, essentially. And I know you've had a conversation with Hugh Nibley about his conversation with David O. McKay. And I don't know if that's too much of a tangent to go off on yet, but, but anyway, at the end of it, though, he essentially embraced the paradigm you're talking about. He says, yeah, all that's great. And isn't this wonderful that here's all this evidence that Hugh Nibley and I have figured out is in support of a historical Book of Mormon. But then he tells the story of meeting somebody on his mission in Scotland and having the Spirit there and converting them to the Book of Mormon. And that's really the power of the Book of Mormon. And really, when it boils down to it, whenever anybody talks about the Book of Mormon having an impact on their life, they don't cite historical evidence one way or the other.

No, and that gets back to the 3 questions that I asked that you remember, right?

Something happens to them as a result of that encounter.

Yes. So now you have people who would have in the past had a similar 'I know with every fiber of my being' testimony that the Book of Abraham was an ancient document. That one went away, right? So I would just say leave your options open where we have a void in data. And where we have that void is we don't have gold plates. It's not to say they didn't exist or that they don't exist. It's to say we don't have 'em. And so we have to allow I think broad leeway for people to deal with that however they deal with it. As a scientist, I have never gone wrong by following my mantra, which is follow the data.

I'm a scientist, and I'm also an engineer. I look at empirical data, what I was trained to do, et cetera. When I was in the church active, I immersed myself in the scriptures to the point where I felt at times when, you know, reading about Moroni and Alma and Amulek and the sons of Mosiah, there were times, Greg, Jim Bennett, I felt I was there. I felt it. And I will not deny even now those feelings. They were very personal to me and I felt revelation that even though I know, rather I believe now that the, and know that the Book of Mormon is not, I repeat, not an historical document. Notwithstanding, we don't have the plates, et cetera, nothing to compare it to, no physical tangible evidence to compare it to, unlike the Pearl of Great Price, which I also read and immersed myself in, and the Doctrine Covenants. My feelings about those principles in those books have not really left me. Those memories, you know, Moses 7, 3 Nephi 17, Alma 32, those scriptures are replete with extraordinary stories and accounts of things that I now accept didn't happen. Not probably, I just don't accept that they happened. I don't accept the Book of Mormon is historical. And certainly don't accept that the, you know, the Pearl of Great Price is what it claims to be. However, I still believe, even though I'm out of the church and resigned, those are inspired scriptures. And that might surprise you both, and it might surprise some of our listeners. And I will never deny the feelings I got of spirituality and the revelation and the, the emotions I felt when I read the scriptures, even though it was like, and I get the same when I'm reading Lord of the Rings. When I'm watching Lord of the Rings movie or reading a story with Aesop's Fables, which are fictional, but the truths and the morals and the principles in those scriptures have not left me. I still, I could pick up the Book of Mormon now and I would feel the same spirit, even though I don't accept it to be an historical text. And so they're inspired scripture. Scripture, and scripture is inspiration, revelation from God. What I'm not okay with is the church not being, coming clean about, you know, how it all came about. Plates, no plates, you know, stone in the hat that we denied for years. And now there's a stone in the ensign that the prophet used, and there's a hat and reference from President Nelson from the hat. What I want is honesty and integrity about the whole process, because that's important. And if it's not historical, I'm okay with that. Just tell me, be honest with me. But I still get the feelings of that spirituality in the scriptures. And just one other quick point here, Jim, I don't know if I told you this, but I met Hugh Nibley once.

Did I ever tell you that? Yeah.

So I met Hugh Nibley in '89 in Provo. It was a bit of a prank. I was told by, I think it was Elder Clark, to go to this house. And if the door opens, that's Hugh Nibley. I didn't believe it. I thought the whole thing was a prank. After I came back home from the mission, I stayed, spent some time in Provo. And lo and behold, Hugh Nibley came to the door, and we spent about 15 minutes on the door talking about Scotland and its history and climbing Ben Nevis. And we talked about our testimony of the Book of Mormon. And I shared my testimony with him that I felt these scriptures were incredibly inspiring. And, you know, he was an extraordinary scholar on the Book of Mormon. And Uh, you know, he had a position on that. So anyway, I just think it's important to be honest about the process, the revelation process, otherwise it causes so many confusions and that's why people have all these questions. You know, so if we're honest about what we know and what we don't know, it deals with a lot of concerns and issues. So let's be upfront about the, the Book of Mormon and how it all came about, the origins, et cetera. Let's look at the facts. People like me that question, you know, scientists that want data. And if it didn't happen that way, just tell us. But it doesn't, in my experience, it doesn't take away from how I felt, you know, when I read those scriptures. And after I read them, I felt a better person having read them, even though I don't believe that Moroni exists or Nephi exists. I think they're fictional characters, but they meant something to me and I got value, and I got truth from them.

Let, let me talk about a couple of words that my coreligionists, I fear, misunderstand. The opposite of truth is not fiction, it's falsehood. If we could get over that misunderstanding, we'd be a lot better off. Some of the most important truth in the world, if you look at world literature, for instance, is carried through the genre of fiction. If you think of the greatest novels in the world, they're all fiction by very nature. We gotta get over that idea that if something doesn't talk about a factual event, It's wrong. We also don't understand the Bible. Latter-day Saints are horrible in their appreciation of the Bible. They don't even have a first-grade education about what it is and what it says. If you look at the Bible, a great deal of it demonstrably is fiction. It doesn't reflect things that happened. I won't go into details because that would unhinge some of your listeners, and, and I don't think this is the time and place to do it. But if you hold the Book of Mormon up to the Bible, particularly the non-historical portions of the Bible—

Book of Job, for instance—

it's okay. Yeah, Book of Job, the Book of Jonah. Uh, I think the Book of Job, in my mind, is one of the most profound books of world literature because it captures a reality with which all the world still struggles, and it doesn't purport to give the answer because at this stage of our understanding, there is no answer. But it frames the questions in such a way as to reassure the reader, you're not alone. We're all struggling with this.

Don't give up.

And I think the most profound part of it is something I've never heard in a Latter-day Saint sermon. And that's where towards the end, Job, having lost everything, uh, finally loses it. And shakes his fist at God and says, I demand to talk to you face to face. The response is a voice from the whirlwind that essentially says, fine, when you get a face, we'll talk. I think that captures something that we have lost within Mormonism, and that is to appreciate the mystery, the distance of God. We have shrunk that gap too much. I think we need to have more humility, back off, and realize that indeed his ways are higher than our ways, and not fret that we don't have all the answers yet. What we do have is the ability to interact with scripture no matter what its origins and be the better off for it, which Ian is what you've been telling us.

Absolutely. I concur with all that. I think that's a great summary of what I was trying to say. Thank you.

Well, so just looking at all this, I, we've gotten about halfway through your roadmap. So I think I would love to be able to bring you back. We're coming up on the hour and I would love to be able to bring you back to go through the other half if you'll, if we haven't tried your patience too much up to this point.

As much as you want to deal with me, I'm available.

Well, I can't tell you how much we appreciate that because I really think you've pinned down so much here that is so helpful. I want to end with maybe a bit of a tangent, a bit of a departure. But I want to go back to Hugh Nibley, and I want to go back to the Book of Mormon and ask you a question based on that, because you talked in several settings about the fact that Hugh Nibley had a conversation with David O. McKay, and Hugh Nibley was trying to convince David O. McKay of all of these reasons why the Book of Mormon is historical. And David O. McKay's response was, well, we know Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon. And I've talked to my mother about that quote, and she says absolutely he did not say that. That could not have happened. And my mother has a very, not a particularly nuanced view of of the restored gospel. And I don't necessarily want to get into that quote so much as I want to get into— the question I have for you now is, um, what do the brethren genuinely believe about some of these things? Because these are bright men, they can follow the data, uh, many of them are scientists or they're lawyers. I mean there, I don't think there is a smarter man on earth than Dallin H. Oaks. They can see where the data lead. Do they believe in a historical Book of Mormon, by and large? Do they, uh, have, I mean, John Dehlin goes all the way of saying that all of them, uh, know the church is a fraud and just don't say it. And I, I just can't imagine that that's the case. I, I don't get the sense that these are men who think they are perpetuating a fraud. I get the sense that these are men who are true believers in something, but I, I want to pin down what that is. I mean, is there sort of— are there members of the Quorum of the Twelve that don't believe in a historical Book of Mormon? Uh, are there members of the Quorum of the Twelve, uh, that have doubts about any other sort of foundational truth claim in the church? Uh, do they think it's a fraud and yet they feel they're just too wrapped up in it to be able to expose it? I'm very interested in— and I mean, I, I don't— I doubt you have a definitive answer. If you do, that's wonderful, but I'm very interested to hear your speculation.

At least I, I have no answer on that. I have not had a substantive conversation with any member of the Quorum of the Twelve.

Ever.

I know one of them on a personal level, Elder Holland, because of the St. George connection. He grew up in St. George. My father was the first of 5 generations of Princes to leave St. George. Church after they came here in the 1860s. Elder Holland once referred to my grandparents as Uncle Anton and Aunt Vilate. That was the closeness of the families in St. George at that time. But I've never had a substantive conversation with him, and I've never asked for one. So I don't have any idea where they are, and I'm not about to speculate on that. I I don't think it adds much value for others to speculate if they haven't had those definitive conversations, but I suspect that there are not many people who have. I am not one of them, though.

All right, fair enough. That is— well, so to the specific Hugh Nibley story then. Was David O. McKay convinced that the Book of Mormon was not historical?

I don't know, because Nibley's comment to me, which I found later he had said to other people the same thing, um, there's no comment on it in any of the McKay papers. But that doesn't surprise me because President McKay rarely spoke to doctrinal or historical issues.

Rarely.

He would leave that to Joseph Fielding Smith. He was much more concerned about being a pastor than a preacher. Right.

Well, these are the questions for the ages, and we don't have the answers, but I think, Greg, you have some great questions, and I think that's a great place to start. So if we— I think this is part 1. I don't know if we'll have part 2, part 3, or how many parts, but as long as you're willing to continue to help us go through these questions, I'd love to be able to have you back here. Ian, I'm sure you feel the same way.

I do. Yes.

Let's do it.

All right. Wonderful. Well, with that, let's wrap up this, this segment and leave everybody wanting more. But we will revisit the rest of this roadmap in future installments. Very much appreciate both of your contributions here to this discussion. I think these are discussions that we need to be having. The church needs to be having. And so I— if not us, then who? So I think this is a great place to start. So thank you all for listening. And we look forward to talking to you next time in our next episode of Inside Out. Out. So thank you, Greg, and thank you, Ian.

Thank you to you both. Thank you, Greg. Appreciate you coming on. Thank you.

Thank you.