Boredom, Belief, and Bold Ideas for Change - 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 rugged Ian Wilk. Ian, how are you, sir?

I am having a great day, Jim.

How are you today? You know, I'm all right. I am very grateful that this is an audio podcast and not a video podcast. I have been weeding for the last couple of hours and it looks like it, but it doesn't sound like it. So I think we're going to be okay. And I think we're going to be even more okay because one of our absolute favorite guests is making a return appearance. And hopefully will not be his last return appearance. We are thrilled to once again welcome Greg Prince back to Inside Out. Greg, how are you?

I am well. I am vacationing in North Carolina, so life is good.

Wonderful, wonderful. So yes, we are so thrilled to have you here. We've gotten such positive response from your previous appearances. One of the questions that we have gotten repeatedly, because this last time that we interviewed you, we began the process of going through your roadmap for— I, I kept calling it Reforming Mormonism, but I think the title is Improving Mormonism. Uh, and a lot of people are asking, where can I read this? They're going, oh, this is wonderful, where can I read the roadmap? And I— the roadmap is not publicly available. And I don't know how I should answer them. Do you want us to make your roadmap publicly available, or is that just something we ought to be discussing and everybody else listening can just be jealous of the fact that we've gotten the chance to see it and they haven't?

At this point, door number 2, because it, it emerged just from my jotting on a piece of paper things that I thought could be improved. So it's not a polished document. Not ready for primetime publication, but I'm willing to discuss anything about it that you wish to discuss.

All right. Well, I just want to make everybody out there jealous, I think. But, but for those of you who are asking where this roadmap is online, it is not online. It is not available for public consumption, but it will be available. Hopefully. We want to go through the entire thing. And last time I said we've only gotten about halfway through, and I think that was optimistic. I think we only got a partial way through and we're sort of jumping all over the place. And so what I want to do essentially here is really just use that roadmap as a roadmap for the podcast and go through and, Greg, allow you to comment as much or as little as you would like to on all of this. I pulled it up here, and I— so I don't want to necessarily revisit anything that we've covered so far, but is there any one part, Greg, of this roadmap that you would like to begin with or focus on?

No, I didn't write it in any particular order of priority. So just have at it any way that you wish to approach it.

Okay, well, in previous episodes we went through this whole idea of Salt Lake One as opposed to Vatican Two, that the idea of, okay, it would be really wonderful to get all of the stakeholders, uh, the leaders of the church, the members of the church, just sort of get together and hash out essentially ways that the church can be reformed or improved. And we went through some of the, uh, specific reasons why that's necessary. We talked about how increasingly, particularly with the younger generation, organized religion itself is largely irrelevant. Uh, one of the things that's interesting here that we, we just very briefly touched upon, that's early in your document, And I think might be a good place to start, uh, today's discussion is this idea. You have a section here where one of the problems that we have as Latter-day Saints is that we don't really know the Bible very well. Uh, just looking at your roll back, you said, although the Bible is one of the four standard works of LDS canon, it is poorly studied and poorly understood by Latter-day Saints. Their understanding of it largely rests on a 19th-century foundation into which the church dug more deeply in response to a major transition in biblical scholarship in the first decade of the 20th century, commonly calling it higher criticism or the modernist heresy. The translation resulted largely from the work of German Protestant scholars who for the first time applied the tools of scientific methodology to the study of the Bible. Rather than relying only on contemporary printed versions, they reached back to the oldest known biblical manuscripts and retranslated them using advanced knowledge of the ancient language— languages in which the manuscripts were written. And you go on to say the response of many religious traditions, particularly conservative ones like the Latter-day Saints, was to freak out. Is that an academic term, freak out? They're—

oh, of course.

Yeah. Uh, can you sort of expand on that and talk about why this is such a problem? Because I, I absolutely agree with you, and I think one of the problems we have— I mean, you frame this as that we're rooted in the 19th century understanding. One of the problems we have is that everything that Joseph Smith wrote as scripture, the Doctrine and Covenants but also the Book of Mormon— I mean, whether or not it's a translated document Uh, it was certainly written in, in a 19th century King James English voice. And so, so much of Latter-day Saints scripture is, is inextricably linked to the King James Version of the Bible, because the Book of Mormon, where it's, you know, the passages of Isaiah are written in the King James voice and so much of it is just tied to the King James Version that it would be very difficult for us to adopt the kind of higher criticism that has led to newer translations and translations that are more accessible to a 21st century audience. Do you think that's the problem, or does it go deeper than that?

Oh, it goes deeper than that, because one of the most difficult things for conservative religionists— and I include Latter-day Saints in that category— is to be able to distinguish verses or books within the Bible that are historical versus those that are allegorical. And it makes a big difference. One example is the Book of Job. You don't have to read very far into it to say, hmm, God and Satan are sitting there making a wager with each other. Does that sound real, or might this be allegorical? And yet I've got many friends in the church who accept the entire Bible as not only literal, historical, but inerrant, even though you can demonstrate time after time inconsistencies, contradictions within it. So to be able to get to that next level of understanding the Bible and what it really has to say is almost an insurmountable obstacle for many members of the church, in large part, I think, because this has been drilled into them their entire lives. How do you get from that to being able to approach it critically? And when I say critically, I use that in the scientific context, that you're looking at data and analyzing and drawing conclusions on the basis of data and not of preexisting dogma. Does that make sense so far?

Sure.

I, I was first made aware of how little I understood the Bible by a very bright graduate student by the name of Anthony Hutchinson. Tony had gotten bachelor's and master's degrees in classical studies at BYU and wanted to go on for a doctorate in biblical studies. One of his advisers at BYU said, if you want that I suggest that you go to Catholic University in Washington, D.C., because it has one of the best programs that there is in biblical studies. And so Tony did that. Because of his move to D.C., I got to know him, as did Lester Bush. And for one memorable year, the three of us would have a lengthy dinner conversation one night each week. And Lester and I were essentially eating the crumbs that fell off the table as Tony was talking to us about what he was learning in his biblical studies. It, it just opened our understanding enormously. I'd been totally oblivious to this, which I think speaks to the insulation within which most Latter-day Saints live. With respect to their understanding of the Bible. We want to make it all neat and tidy. We want everything to be harmonized. Uh, a good example of what we do is that there are nativity narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that we just combine into a single story. But if you keep them separate and look at them critically, they're not telling the same story. They differ in ways that are irreconcilable with each other, which just begs the question, how much of this reflects history and how much of this is a theological dissertation from which we can learn a lot if we don't fall into that trap of trying to smooth all the wrinkles? It's the wrinkles that give us the message.

I think that's a great way to frame it. Uh, you're talking about when you said data over dogma. Again, I went back to Dan McClellan. Uh, who I, I actually have a copy of his book right next to me. It's called The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues. Dan McClellan worked for the church, is still a member of the church, and was the head of the church's, uh, scriptural translation department for a while. But a word he uses, uh, that I think is interesting is he talks about univocality. That so many Latter-day Saints believe that the Bible is univocal, that it speaks in one voice, and it really doesn't. It's a collection of all kinds of ancient documents and all kinds of different experiences, and there are contradictions, there are different understandings. And it— how do you— the difficulty we have though as Latter-day Saints is that if we read the Bible informed by sort of the Book of Mormon, or informed by a lot of the things that, uh, Joseph Smith talked about— the idea that Moses and Elijah and Elias, when Elijah and Elias are essentially the same person, but Joseph Smith talks about all three of them showing up at the Kirtland Temple and that all of the kinds of things that inform modern revelation presuppose univocality in the Bible and presuppose literalism. I mean, most scholars now assume that the ancient patriarchs were all fictional, that they're mythical, that these are sort of the founding myths of the Hebrew nation. And they insist that the Exodus didn't happen. There's no archaeological evidence of the Exodus happening, and a great deal of archaeological evidence that suggests that it could not have happened, at least on that scale. And they now presuppose that Moses was a fictional character. And we talked about a little bit about this, Ian, with Stephen Pynecker. But how do we reconcile that? Or I mean, do we throw the baby out with the bathwater here? The way I sort of reconcile it is that I'm happy to believe that there was a Moses and there was sort of some kernel of a historical event upon which the mythology was built. And I think that, that gives us, gives me a way to be able to reconcile both of those things. But am I just deluding myself? I mean, is there a better way forward? To deal with those kinds of, of difficulties?

Yeah, let me give you an analogy from my high school physics class. That's a long time ago. It probably was the first day, and the physics teacher said to us, we will be studying a world that does not exist. He said, it is a world of physics in which there is not such a thing as Friction. And he said, the reason we will study this fictional world is it's within grasp of your understanding of mathematics. To understand the real physical world requires a higher level of mathematics called calculus. And, and later on when I got into engineering physics in college, That was our steady diet, was the higher math of calculus. But his point was, let's start you at a level where you can understand it. Now, for most people in the world, they don't need higher physics. That basic understanding of the physical world that they can get in this artificial construct gives them a pretty good basic understanding of how the physical world functions, and that's useful information for anybody. It's not very many people who need that higher level of understanding of physics. I think that you can apply the same type of reasoning to the Bible. Many people can go their high entire lives and never get to Bible 102. They're always at Bible 101, and it works for them, and that's fine. And I don't want to try to wrench them out of that world and insert them into another world that's just going to disrupt them completely. However, for those who want to have access to the deeper treasures within the Bible or any other scripture, You've got to go to 102 or 103 or whatever. Doing so, you've got to let go of that fictional friction-free world of high school physics and move to the next level. Is that holding together so far?

Yeah.

Ian, is that holding together for you?

It is. It makes a lot of sense. Uh, in fact, this conversation is helping connect a number of dots for me, listening to, to Greg. Uh, I, I've, I've always puzzled over the Bible. The church's position on the Bible is that it teaches that the Bible is the word of God as far as it is translated correctly. As I've read the stories in the Bible, some of them seem absurd, you know, Noah Exodus, I believed, uh, you know that story about Balaam and the donkey in the Old Testament?

Yeah.

I read that and guys—

You can say ass, Ian. It's in there in the Bible. You, you're allowed to say it. Okay.

Is it ass or donkey?

Okay.

The same thing. So I said, so Balaam was talking to his ass.

There you go.

Meaning a donkey. And I've read that and I just couldn't buy it. I just couldn't do it. There's a conversation between the donkey. And Balaam. And it's like, what shocked me wasn't just the fact that the donkey was speaking. It was the fact that when the donkey spoke, Balaam just thought it was normal and just continued like he was having a conversation with another human being, like it was no big deal. If an ass or donkey talks to any one of us, I think it would be quite a miraculous and somewhat shocking event. So I love the idea that Greg is, uh, teaching here that the Bible, if I understand it correctly, Greg, can be taken literally in, uh, in some way or another, you know, stories that really happened. And in other ways where an important truth or doctrine needs to be taught, and the Lord and the prophets back then use an allegory to teach that. And I'm okay with that. That makes sense to me. The difficulty we've got sometimes is, you know, going back to what Jim Bennett was saying earlier, are those prophets of the Old Testament, for example, are they real or fictional? The problem with that is that when we read the New Testament, Jesus quotes prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Hosea, Malachi, He talks about ancient prophets regarding fulfilling prophecy. You know, Jesus presented his life, death, resurrection as the culmination of Old Testament prophecy. He, for example, pointed to his own actions as a fulfillment of what the previous prophets had said. Jonah, for example, talks about his time in the tomb. There's quite a few references in the New Testament where Jesus makes reference to Old Old Testament prophets. The Old Testament prophets speak about the coming of Jesus. So there's a relationship, a correlation between the two. So, but I like Greg's model where some of those stories are real from real people. Other stories are not real, but come from real people or not real people, because the intent is to, you know, teach these profound truths. The other thing I just want to highlight here, which I really you know, when we're talking about one of the major points identified in Greg's, what I would describe as a strategic change document that I firmly believe the First Presidency and the apostles should get a copy of. And I repeat, I— this document is so important. It's, as I mentioned on the last podcast, it connected with me on so many levels. I feel strongly that the First Presidency and the apostles should obtain a copy. But going back to one of the key highlights in the document about the poor understanding that we have of the Bible, Greg, you make very important references to some of the biological evolution and source criticism. You know, for example, the church has embraced this fundamental theology discouraging critical thinking, study of the Bible from a scientific and engineering perspective. I'm a scientist by profession. I'm also an engineer. I deal with math all the time, you know, the whole range of technologies and mathematical devices, instrumentation. And I look at things scientifically and I look at it from an engineering perspective as well. And I think the church's position at least its relationship with the Bible, where it seems to discourage critical thinking, critical scientific thinking and engineering thinking, respect to scripture and the Bible at its own detriment. And you make, you kind of reference that in your document. Could you speak to that a little bit more, expound upon that, about the relationship with scripture, not just the Bible, Book of Mormon, perhaps other scriptures as well, and the church's reluctance to go too far down the path of the scientific thinking? Keeping in mind, if I'm right, Jim, Elder Packer identified 3 main threats to the church.

That's actually in Greg Bennett's roadmap here.

In Greg Bennett's roadmap, one of them being a threat from so-called intellectuals. Could you just discuss that a little bit, Greg? Because I think it's super important, that relationship with the Bible and the church's reluctance to take on a more proactive thinking, modern thinking in regards to, science, engineering, and critical thinking.

Yeah, let, let me take a step backwards and talk. I think we spoke before of Hans Mattson, a Swedish Latter-day Saint, former Latter-day Saint because he ultimately resigned his membership. But in the first decade of this century, he was an Area Authority Seventy in Sweden covering all of Northern Europe. It was at the time that the internet was blossoming, and he was bombarded with questions from members, from bishops, from stake presidents that came about because members were confronting inconvenient data on the internet, and he almost freaked out. Um, the story of Hans eventually was front page Sunday New York Times, and it set off a lot of alarms in Salt Lake. The week after that, Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote a very famous book called When Bad Things Happen to Good People, wrote a brief letter to the editor, which the Times published, and it was an olive branch to the Church. He said, I hope the Latter-day Saints can learn from what many modern Jews do with respect to how they view the Bible. He said, we distinguish between left-brain narratives, meaning those that reflect actual things that happened, and right-brain narratives that reflect stories that are allegorical. And he said, For instance, the 6-day creation fits into the right brain. So, and let's go back and look at Genesis. In the first 2 chapters of Genesis, you don't have one creation story, you got 2. And they don't match. Eventually, Joseph Smith, in wrestling with that, decided, ah, the answer is one describes the spiritual creation, and the other describes the physical creation. All well and good, whatever. But what you actually had was that the Bible began as oral traditions. That's what happened millennia ago. And different oral traditions arose in different parts of the Hebrew world. Eventually, when the redactors were starting to put together manuscripts that ultimately became known as the Bible, they looked at these two creation narratives that arose from different oral traditions and said, oh, creation, creation, and they just put them together. They don't really fit. And the problem for the literalist is neither one is attempting to tell the scientific story of how the earth and the things on it were created because science didn't exist then. This was their best effort at making sense of the world into which they were born. But a lot of people including a lot of Latter-day Saints, still look at those creations as the official scientific story of how the earth came into being, and they go through all kinds of gyrations to make it work, but ultimately it falls under its own weight. The Bible is not a science book. For the most part, it's not a history book. It's a theological book, and if we allow it to speak, in the theological voice, we find that it has enormous value that we've only begun to tap. That's a lot of words, Ian. Does that approach what you were saying?

It does, yes, it does. Looking at it as a theological document, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That helps me, yes.

At the beginning of the 20th century, when the modernist heresy, higher criticism, really came to the forefront, it was linked to Darwinism. And the whole idea of organic evolution was coming to the forefront scientifically, and it seriously rattled the religionists because it challenged what they thought they knew about how the earth and its contents came into being. And so the religionists rang the alarms saying, this is going to be the death of religion. We have to stop it. And you see this really embodied dramatically in the Scopes Trial in the 1920s. They felt that this was an existential threat to organized religion, that science was the bad guy that was going to come into town. And make religion extinct. Well, it didn't turn out that way. And in fact, it turns out that the deeper we go into the scientific examination of the Bible, the more value we find there is there, not less. It has strengthened the hand of the religions that allow it to speak from its database rather than from dogma. Right.

I remember, uh, that's fascinating. The first, Jim, the first experience I ever had, I was in college, uh, I think it was 17, 18 years old, was in England, and, uh, I think the first year of college doing my undergraduate science degree. And the first experience encounter I had with church and science was when I was caught in seminary that the Earth was created over 7 days and that dinosaur fossils, which I stood as a kid, by the way, I've got pictures in my old scrapbook of when I was at school. I love, I was fascinated with dinosaurs and I wrote, did homework on dinosaurs and fossils. And then when I heard in seminary, uh, Brother Turner teaching that, uh, dinosaurs never existed on the planet Earth. They come from other planets and God gathered those materials from other planets and created the Earth. And those fossils didn't originate on the Earth as we now know it. They came from other materials out there in the universe, in the solar system. And because God commanded all these, um, materials to be brought together, that those fossils come from another planet. It was absurd. I never heard anything so crazy in all my life. I didn't share it with any of my peers, you know, on the degree course, but I always struggled with the church and its relationships with science in regards to the world or archaeology. And this, I think the church, frankly, could have done a lot better job over the years in trying to understand the two and yes, build on those historical theological teachings and concepts which are reliable and make sense and logical and based on empirical data. And then we can have a conversation about the stories and what happened or what didn't happen in a healthy way. But, you know, a balanced way with science and engineering. I think, and I had that type of teaching from the leaders when I was growing up in the church from the age of 16 onwards, it would have helped me understand the role of the church in science and scripture. You know, what was allegory, what was not, what was real, what was not. And I think that is, for me, and you talk about this in your document, the church very quickly in that area of academic science and engineering when I was growing up and going to college, the church became irrelevant. Those strange, peculiar teachings and doctrines just didn't seem relevant to me. And I kind of lost respect for the church in that area, not in the other areas, but in that area. I didn't see the church could bring any value to my academic life in the areas of science and engineering, cuz it didn't respect that and it taught things or believed things that just didn't add up for me. Is that? Does that make sense? And I'm not alone. A lot of kids, youth, go through that experience when they're doing engineering and science.

It just—

how do you reconcile that with, with the church's position?

Well, to show you how effective the church has been in insulating its members, within the last decade, as I recall, there was a national survey that looked at acceptance or rejection of organic evolution. As it correlated with religious affiliation, the highest level of evolutionary denial was among the Jehovah's Witnesses. It was in the 80% range. The second highest were the Latter-day Saints, and my recollection, it was about 75% of Latter-day Saints denied the reality of of biological evolution. Yikes. Not only did that train leave the station a long time ago, I can't get into a serious discussion about the reality of organic evolution because it's a done deal, but we can cause it to happen ourselves. It's called molecular biology, and it surrounds us now. And yet in the middle of this, you still have this group of people who are willing to die on the hill of denial of evolution. But I think it all gets back to their unwillingness, or perhaps even inability, to look upon the scripture as not being a history textbook or a scientific textbook.

Right, right.

Yeah, we can get over that hump. Then you open yourself to the richness of what the Bible has to say. Yeah. And very few Latter-day Saints have even scratched the surface of that. One of the encouraging things is that we have more and more of the bright younger kids in the church who are either getting degrees in biblical studies or at least getting serious coursework in biblical studies, and they're getting it. They're figuring out, okay, now I understand why I was insulated before. Bring it on, and let's get serious about this, and let's learn something.

Well, as you're talking about this, I mean, you've actually covered more parts of your roadmap here, uh, specifically when you started talking about this whole idea, uh, I mean, Ian, you brought up Elder Packer and the three different things that he saw as threats to the church. Uh, as we go down the roadmap, we get, we get into the section, the next section is the section of boredom, which which we talked about in the previous episode. My favorite part of this, it says, I've often asked friends, when was the last time you learned something new in a church meeting? I get a blank stare every time. I mean, that's so true. And it's very interesting, Greg, that you, the prescription for boredom is gospel study. And it's really interesting because most people, a lot of people, when they hear gospel study, their eyes glaze over into the back of their head because so often gospel study, the way we do it in the church currently, is deeply and profoundly boring. You know, you go into a gospel doctrine class, you don't hear anything new. You're asked questions like, How can we better apply this to our lives and live closer to the Savior? And get these pablum answers that just don't have any depth to them. And I think people are afraid to say anything or do anything that might be remotely provocative. And Greg, you quote several General Authorities, uh, that point out that is not the case. Uh, you John A. Widtsoe, one of the leading intellectual lights in the history of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, wrote, it is a paradox that men will gladly devote time every day for many years to learn a science or an art, yet they expect to win a knowledge of the gospel which comprehends all sciences and arts through perfunctory glances at books or occasional listenings to sermons. The gospel should be studied more intensively than any school or college subject. They who pass opinion on the gospel without having given it intimate and careful study are not lovers of truth, and their opinions are worthless. I mean, we don't hear that kind of language from apostles and prophets today. And I love the story— this was in your, uh, I think this was in David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. It's the Hugh Nibley story. He says, I wrote the priesthood manual for 1957. An Approach to the Book of Mormon. Well, there was a reading committee on it, and the reading committee wiped out every lesson in that book. They said it was over people's heads, and every time President McKay overruled them. The book is exactly as I wrote it. They wanted to make hundreds of changes and get rid of the whole thing entirely, and President McKay said no. If it's beyond their reach, let them reach for it. Now there's a great man. I liked that. So can you elaborate a little more on this, this idea that the way out going forward— I mean, the way out for better biblical scholarship and understanding, but the way out of boredom, the way out of the fact that so much of what we do in the church is just so mind-numbingly boring that the escape clause is a greater study and a more rigorous study of the gospel.

Yeah, in— see, it was 2007, uh, there was a 4-hour documentary broadcast on PBS called The Mormons.

My father was in that. Yeah.

Yep, I was too. In fact, I was pulled in behind the scenes and worked with the producer Helen Whitney for 2 years before it was broadcast. That because she was given the galley proofs of the McKay biography, called me and said, let's talk, because I need to get up to speed on 20th century Mormonism. Towards the end of the pre-broadcast portion of that, she called me and she said, I have I interviewed hundreds of members of your church. You have a good church, but your members are borrowing it. They need to own it. And that has stuck with me ever since because she was spot on. She was saying in simpler words what John Widtsoe had been saying. You don't own it by just showing up and getting your ticket punched. You have to wrestle with it. You have to study it as you would, as Woodso said, any other academic course. And then you get to a point where you can say, yeah, I don't understand everything, but at least I can claim ownership because I paid the price to get there.

That makes an awful lot of sense.

That's amazing. Yep.

Now, not long ago, not very many people had access to much of the raw material of Mormon history and doctrine. Um, there hadn't been that many books published on it. They certainly weren't available in foreign languages, which was why Hans Madsen was kind of caught shorthanded when The internet reared up, but now because of the internet, most of the information, uh, and in fact much more than most people want to deal with, is sitting there on your computer screen, accessible to anybody in the world at any time. So if you want to study it in detail, there's no longer an excuse for not doing that. The question is, how do you deal with the inconvenient truths when you come upon them? And that's what Hans Madsen stumbled over. We got him back off the ledge, but ultimately he resigned his church membership because of the LGBTQ policy of 2015. There was a book, written by Thomas Kuhn, K-U-H-N, called the, as I recall, it's The Structure of Scientific Revolution. But he popularized a term called paradigm shift. In science, a paradigm is basically the framework into which you put data to make sense of the natural world. And to give you an example, the early paradigm of the cosmos was that the Earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around it. But with increasingly accurate observations, a paradigm can come up wanting. And so the initial response is you create exceptions to the rule, epicycles in this case. But eventually the epicycles bring the whole structure down. It just doesn't work anymore. But rather than panicking, you say, all right, let's construct a new paradigm, a new conceptual framework that does accommodate the data. And the next paradigm for the cosmos was a heliocentric universe where things revolved around the sun. Well, that one lasted until it didn't work. It collapsed. And gradually we moved to where we are now, that neither the Earth nor the sun is the center of much of anything. And our understanding of the cosmos keeps changing, particularly as we look at the results from these amazing telescopes that we have put into orbit that are telling us things we had no clue even existed. Well, those new data points aren't necessarily accommodated by the current paradigm, and so we continually have to refine that. The idea is not to say, ah, we have the perfect paradigm. It's to keep up with the data so that you can digest and make sense of them. The same thing happens in the religious world. If one simplistic paradigm starts not to work for you, as in biblical literalism and inerrancy, it's not a question of all being lost. It's a question of, yeah, get away from that paradigm because that's the frictionless world paradigm of physics. You're ready for the next level now. A lot of other people have already reached that level. It's safe ground. In fact, you're going to be in better shape once you shift that paradigm. Does that hold together? Yeah, it does.

It does for me. This, I want to make a comment on that. I just want to go back to something that Jim Bennett said earlier about, again, in your strategic document, change document about boredom. I can't remember the very many lessons or great talks over the years, just a handful, because of how they made me feel. They did something different. They spoke differently. They brought some stories in that kind of resonated with me. But for the most part, at the time I was in the church, I was bored. Even sat on the stand as a bishop or as a stake presidency member, I was bored. And it's because the church has just, over the years, become increasingly boring. In the past, for example, in the UK, we used to have loads of activities in the stake. YSA activities, stake swimming, stake roadshow when you're putting on a play, stake badminton. There's all these wonderful stake events which have now gone. My friends in the UK tell me this all disappeared. They don't do them anymore. The YSA activities, which they used to do fantastic activities, teamship. They used to have this program in the youth program called SPEC. It was amazing. And it's gone now. And it was around SPEEC, Spiritual, Physical, Education, and Community. And the youth events in the UK was organized around that model. So we have some spiritual workshops, which is great, and there's some props and physical activities that they would do. There was a bunch of physical things that you had to do, like teamship and competing against the team that they used to do with the youth in the YSA. There was educational, so we'd have experts come in from college, non-members would come in and teach the kids, the youth about the importance and value of education and get excited about science, excited about engineering and just get the kids, the youth excited about learning and learning how to learn and all these opportunities for work and all these professionals would come in. And again, I did this as a bishop, which which got a lot of opposition, by the way. Do you know why? Because it was against the model. It wasn't the norm. It wasn't the standard. Bishop Wilkes, we don't do it like that. We do it like this. You know, you've got to get back in line. And then, of course, the C, the letter C, which is community, where we had youth and YSA, we'd go out and do service projects. And we'd been covering the service part, humanitarian service part of the church over the last few podcasts. I think we've even discussed it with you, Greg, with great enthusiasm. So I think the church, when you go to church, last time I went to church, I could have fallen asleep. I find the talks boring.

They're not relevant.

The people are great, but they've not been taught how to do a great talk or make it interesting or make it useful. You've got all these people in the audience. You've got primary. You got to think about your audience. Primary, you got youth, you got YSA. If you haven't got a YSA branch, you've got senior folks, you've got other people. How do you kind of break that up across the sacrament and across the lessons to make it, make it more interesting? And then just to tie it to your last comment, wouldn't it be great if the church kind of brought in some of the sciences that it accepts, some of the other wonderful developments that the James Webb Telescope is discovering? When I look at those long arrange photographs of deep space, it blows my mind. I think, wow, this is— and I don't accept that it's just random chaos. I think someone, somebody has organized this incredible system, which I find absolutely fascinating. And to me, it's spiritual. It's not just— when I look at those kind of images, it's not just the science and engineering. I look at I look at through those prisms, but I get a sense of spirituality when I look at those deep space images from the James Webb or the Hubble telescope. I find it amazing and it fills me with questions, but a sense of awe that this has been put together by some power, some extraordinary event or power behind these events who've organized this. And I find that incredibly spiritual. So I'm trying to tie to be efficient here, try to tie the academic, the science, engineering that you and I both love, and Jim as well, of course, and bringing some of that stuff into church where across different programs and making it more interesting and more fun. And one of the last comments on that, I go to church, by the way, Jim, you don't know this. I go to church every week. I go to church. You didn't know that because in Dewsbury, the ward that I was born, I didn't go to this ward, but the town I was born in, my brother-in-law is a bishop and he's allowed me, I don't think the church knows this, to attend church. He counts me on his, on his, by podcast, through the podcast, sorry, through the online live program. So I watch him, he presides and I attend church and with respect to his members, and I won't name anyone, but many of the top, some of the speakers, I'm not kidding, I could fall asleep. Stand up, they're quite boring. I hope they don't listen to this. I don't think they're actually on this podcast. Some of them are quite boring. I'm falling asleep. They sound so miserable, so unhappy, so down, so sad. And I get that you can, you know, better share your emotions and you can be, there's tears. I understand, I respect that. But many of the talks, too many, frankly, are very dour. I think that's the word, subdued. And people don't seem to be excited about stuff, about life, or, oh, I discovered this, I learned this at school, or whatever, right? It just seems to be very kind of prescriptive and you've got to talk in a certain way. I think it might be down to culture as well, but Anyway, I, I, I've said a few things there. If you can kind of connect those dots and make sense of that, that would be great.

Yeah, it, if, if we say we don't know, many people in the church and many of the church leaders feel that that's a failure. To me, to be able to say we don't know is success. When I was 16 years old, a new kid showed up on the block in Salt Lake. His name was Paul Dunn. He had been the director of the Institutes of Religion in Southern California. He had come out to Westwood Ward where I grew up about 2 years prior to that and spoke to our Mutual class, had us sitting on the edge of our seats. Later on, much later, when I was doing the McKay biography, I started to interview him, and eventually I wound up doing 60 hours of recorded interviews because he wanted me to be his biographer. But one of the stories he said was that in his 13 years of being an institute instructor, he had a lot of questions from smart college kids, and he didn't know the answers. And he didn't try to bluff it. So he said, I made an appointment with President McKay, figuring I'd go to the source. And he said, I spent an hour and a half with him just unloading all these questions I'd had over the years. And he said, in about half the instances, his response was, I don't know. And he said, that gave me a lot of confidence to go out into the church and say, I don't know. And then he said, parenthetically, the irony was that the prophet of the Lord didn't know, but all my Sunday school teachers did. We've got to be a lot more willing to admit, hey, there's a lot we don't know, and so let's dig in and start to find answers. Or at least, as with the Book of Job, start to get comfortable with the idea that there are some existential-sized questions for which we do not have the answers, and so grow up. That's what the Book of Job is all about.

Jim Bennett, I think that's such an important, another important point that Graham mentioned. You know, you talk about fallibility and infallibility. Jim Bennett in regards to the church. You understand that. You've researched that till the end, right? I have so— I would have so much respect for my leaders if they just stood up and said, look, we don't know some things. We still figured it out. The Lord will reveal things as time comes. There might be some things that we might never know in this life.

Okay.

But let's not fudge it. Let's not guess. Let's not make this stuff up and then contradict ourselves at each other, you know, at some later point. Let's admit that we just don't have all the answers. We're a prophet, we're supposed to know, but God's not revealed it to us yet. You know, let's focus on being a great church, not perfect, not with the perfect knowledge. It's a work in progress church. And, you know, we're fallible.

We don't know.

We make mistakes.

Well, that goes into the next part of this roadmap, because, uh, one of the things that you outline as a problem, Greg, is this whole idea that we have an unpaid, untrained clergy. And so it's very, I think, obvious that if we have an unpaid, untrained clergy, that you're going to have a lot of people that don't really know what they're doing to some degree, that they're sort of learning on the job. And, and some do better than others. I mean, just to tie this back to the whole idea of boredom, I've been in two bishoprics. I've never been a bishop, but I've been in two bishoprics. And the second time I was in a bishopric, I had a— my youngest son was born while I was serving as a counselor in the bishopric, and I wasn't getting a lot of sleep. Uh, you know, it was a very stressful time. We had five very young children. And there was a family in the ward that had a running bet, not whether or not Jim Bennett would fall asleep on the stand, but whether I would fall asleep on the stand before the bottom of the hour or after the bottom of the hour. And I, um, I, that started a, an energy drink addiction that I had to kick after I apparently was like, I have to pound a Rockstar before every sacrament meeting so that I don't let the Darrows win their bet. But, uh, but this whole idea of an unpaid clergy and an untrained clergy, uh, I, I mean, I see tremendous value in that. And Greg, you apparently do too, as you talk about this. You see the economic value. You say that the LDS workforce would include well over 100,000 salaried employees at the local level alone. Um, do the arithmetic, the savings are enormous. Uh, but you also talk about the fact that nearly all bishops and stake presidents are family men with wives and children. Since much of what bishops do is counseling, their life experience equips them with practical wisdom often lacking in the Roman Catholic Church, which has an unmarried clergy. They also have day jobs that often equip them with special skills not seen in professional clergy. Uh, but you— Paul Dunn makes a lot of appearances here in your roadmap, which I think is interesting, uh, because I, I think you're right. I don't know that there was any sort of more compelling, uh, speaker or presenter, if you will, in the church than Paul Dunn, at least in my lifetime. But you point out the importance of training, that we have training for local leaders, You say training in biblical studies would be most helpful. Training in LDS history and theology has never been more needed. And also the importance of cross-training. And we talk about— you talk about the difficulty. We've gotten into trouble so much in recent years because our clergy, our unpaid and volunteer clergy, are not equipped to deal with abuse and sexual abuse and whether they should report sexual abuse and the difficulty there. Uh, our, our policies on that, uh, are kind of all over the map. In the UK, uh, we've created a circumstance based on some activism toward the church that the church always says it refuses to follow, but the activism worked in that case because now anybody that works with youth has to be trained and, and has to be, um, what's the word I'm looking for? Verified. I don't know if that's the right word, but certified, or has to go through training if they're going to work with youth. And, but in the United States, that isn't always the case. You know, we're kind of all over the map. Um, can you speak to this whole idea of how important training is and, and what the right approach to it would be?

Yeah, what you have just said, reading from what I had written, I think holds. It's valid that the LDS system of lay ministry has enormous strength to it. And you don't get it both ways. So whichever you choose, whether it's a volunteer lay ministry or a professional clergy, there will be strengths, but there will also be weaknesses there. One of the weaknesses is that our clergy, even at a high level, tend not to know their own religion. Now, let, let me expand on that a little bit. Uh, a, a very dear friend is Steve Snow. Who was the Church historian up until what, I think 2019 was when he went on emeritus status. And he said he would have the newly called General Authorities come to him and say, "Can you get me a reading list?" Because they were not well-versed in church history, generally not particularly well-versed in theology, certainly not in biblical theology, and so they were trying to get up to speed in a hurry because of these deficits that would not have been there in a professional clergy who, in order to be ordained, would have to have gone through this graduate-level training that we can't even approach. Now, there's, there's an interesting little asterisk here. It's not well known that the Church has a degree program in theology. It's taught at BYU, but it's only for candidates for the military chaplaincy.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, see, you didn't know about it either.

No.

Well, no, we didn't know.

My former high priest group leader in Potomac, Maryland, now deceased, was Paul Yost. Paul was the only Latter-day Saint ever to be the commandant of one of the armed services. He was a 4-star admiral and commandant of the Coast Guard. By doing that, he was on the Military Affairs Committee of the Church. And he told me that he went to the First Presidency and said, uh, do you want our Latter-day Saint chaplains to be trained at a place like Fuller Seminary, or would you rather that we train them ourselves? Because there had been this forever aversion to having any degree program in theology at BYU. Well, they decided that maybe it would be a good idea to train their own chaplains, and so that's why this exists now. It's very small and they don't advertise it, but the point is that by not having this kind of intensive training, uh, within your laity from whom you are then selecting your, um, your ministry, you're going to run a deficit, and that's going to show up in multiple levels, one of them being the inability to keep the saints interested because we're so boring. Growing up, I looked at the Old Testament as being the most boring, penetrable works of our canon, of our standard works. And then, oh, probably 20-some years ago, we had a friend by the name of Denise Hopkins, who was a professor of Hebrew Bible at Wesley Seminary, come out to our home one Sunday night a month for a year and teach our study group Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. Denise had us on the edge of our seats every month, making that what we had assumed was boring scripture come alive and be relevant and have us wanting more. That's what can happen, but you don't get that free. And so there's going to be this irresolvable conundrum if you have a lay ministry that brings a lot of assets to the forefront, but it also inherently means there are going to be some deficits.

Yeah.

What can we do to try to compensate for those deficits? Right.

When, when I was called as bishop, Greg, many years ago. I was a young bishop in Scotland. I felt ready to some extent, so I thought. In the setting-apart blessing, I was advised I was prepared by the Lord. That came through the blessing when I was set apart. However, within the first week 2 weeks, I was approached by members whose problems I didn't even understand, let alone know how to deal with. These issues were longstanding, very complex, psychological, some were, uh, sexual in nature and marital, a whole series of complex problems and challenges that I had very little knowledge or understanding of. I didn't even understand what they were talking about at the time, some of the members, let alone had any capacity or training to deal with. Within a few weeks, I thought I'd made the biggest mistake in my life, except in this calling, and I wrestled with tears at times with the Lord and the state president trying to figure out how I can help these individuals who had put their trust in me, who felt that as the bishop, I knew what to do and knew how to do it, and I had some of the answers. And frankly, I didn't. I never felt so overwhelmed, so inadequate ever in my entire time in my life. When I was younger, in my 20s and 30s, I had this very naive notion that, for example, people in government knew what they were doing. And that changed as I got into more government projects. I realized that's not the case. Equally, I had this notion that the leaders of the church, the First Presidency, the apostles, the leaders, knew what they were doing. They had the answers, they knew what they're doing, they were trained or had certainly more training than I had. You talk about Hans Mattson, and Hans has been on the podcast. Him and I are had a little bit of contact back and forth over time, and he came into the podcast and shared his story. And he felt at that time that he could go to the leaders and ask and try to get the answers that the members are asking him. When I tried to do that with our state president, who also went to the local leaders and the authorities, it was a very similar Hans Mattson type experience. There was very little support coming back. Even when we asked for training on dealing with these issues, A street person was completely out of his depth. He was younger than me and as equally overwhelmed and lacked training as much as me, actually. And so we had nowhere to go, and all we could say is pray and have faith, and the Lord will help me through the problem. I couldn't provide any professional counseling. And so I look at that experience, and I look at the church leadership right now, and I see the church leadership in a very different perspective as a result of your document. And some of it's good and some of it's not so good. So through the prism of your strategic change document, which I hope that the links will get a copy of and read and do something about, frankly, I'm confused and puzzled why the church leadership, with all those incredibly smart people at the top, why they can't address some of the fundamental issues that continue to affect the church, which are identified in your, in your, uh, uh, document. And, you know, when we put that, uh, claim on the church leadership, that on the church as well, but it's the only true church upon the face of the earth, the only church with a prophet with the authority to speak on behalf of God for the entire world, not just for the members, the church that should have maybe more of the answers, not all the answers, but maybe more of the answers because of that unique distinction and authority that the church holds. But when you look at the church leadership right now, they seem to lack logic and some common sense in dealing with some of the issues. Two quick examples, and I'll hand the time back over to you guys. In my business, there's two, amongst many things that we do really well to learn how to improve as an organization. One is an exit interview. So when employees leave the company, we have an exit interview and we ask them, what do you like about being employed with a company and what didn't you like? And they tell us, uh, there's a few discerning companies out there, progressive companies that do exit interviews. Most don't. We do. And we learn and they tell us all the feedback about what they liked and what didn't they like, what failed, what succeeded. We get that information and we use it to develop and build a better experience for our employees to retain them, develop them, reward them, help them become successful. Secondly, when we submit a multimillion dollar proposal for a big engineering project, road, bridge, transportation, aviation, marine, whatever, when we lose that proposal and, and we've had a few losses, to be honest. What do we do? We go to the client and we do ask for a debrief. And there's a criteria, there's a format that the clients, the big municipality clients follow. And you guys know this because you worked in government projects. And they tell you on this point score system what your proposal did well on and what it didn't do well on. Discerning and progressive companies and leaders in business take that information They bring it back and they utilize it to build a better proposal development system and a better team. There are two examples of what industry, rather good businesses in industry do in order to have a good business. Now, I'm, you know, the leadership has got extraordinary talents at easily these levels and more. What I can't understand, even though it can provide some level of training to local leaders in the critical areas, frankly, that the local leaders need, desperately need, and why the church also can't see the logic and the common sense for learning about people's experiences of those issues identified in your document and developing them and using them to create a better, more inclusive church. Your document talks about how to improve the church. Well, the answers are in your document. The answers in asking people who left, why do you leave? The answers in listening and learning and being humble. The church is not doing that. And for all these super intellectual people that are at the top and the average smart people, they are missing. It's like they can't see the wood for the trees. The answers are there. Hey, I'm not a prophet, far from, but I can see some of the answers, not all the answers, but I can see some of the answers. Why can't they see it? They don't get it. I just don't get it. I just, I just don't understand how they think.

Well, as you're saying this, I'm thinking about a 3-step program. Pardon me for being somewhat flippant, but there's a serious side to it. Step number 1 is buy a voice recorder. Step number 2 is put on some fireproof clothing, and step number 3 is ask the question, what are we doing wrong? If the people you are asking understand that you really want to hear what they have to say rather than they want you to say what they want to hear, they'll unload on you. That's where the fireproof clothing comes in. But if you're willing to withstand that, uh, and hear what they have to say, then you're gonna figure out a way out of this, how to resuscitate what so often is a moribund church. When the kids, if you ask them to give one word about their church experience, use the B word, boring. You're in deep trouble because they're not going to give you a second, third, and fourth chance. They're going to be checking out and you're not going to get them back. That doesn't mean that you have to cater to their every whim like the megachurches tried where they become religious country clubs. But we got to do better than we're doing now because we're taking the most important message of our existence. And making it boring. Shame on us.

Absolutely. So we are now here. We passed the 1-hour mark. We're about an hour and 10 minutes, and we have just scratched the surface here. And I'd rather than deep dive into another section, which would probably take another half hour or so, I think We want to tease your next appearance and leave the audience thirsty for more. So, Greg, if you're willing to come back and continue to explore this, we can't wait to have you back.

I'll be happy to. And we can even venture into areas the roadmap doesn't touch on.

Well, see, this is good.

I like that for sure.

So if anybody wants all the answers, this is the podcast where you're going to get them.

It is. And I want to say, I want to say, and I mean this genuinely, I'm not even flicking when I say this, I just, just learned so much from you, Greg. Personally, I get so much from this podcast personally, not just for our listeners. But if any of the Brendan listen to this, to this podcast, call this man Greg Prince to be a general authority or an advisor. Just sit down with him, listen to him. He makes sense. For goodness' sake, he's got some of the answers and it's in his document and it's just there, just kind of, you know, open your eyes and just implement some of those changes and you'll make the church so much more meaningful and such a more interesting experience.

Please do not wish that on me, Ian.

I'll be selfish then. I'll be selfish.

I'll give you one free pass.

There you go. There you go.

I'd love the church to be an organization where I can go back. I don't know if that's possible, right? I don't know if I have to get rebaptized and repent of all these things I've said wrong. But wouldn't it be great if you could become an organization inclusive where people like me would go back and just reconnect with a different organization, a different experience? Wouldn't that be great?

Right?

Isn't that what Christ would want?

And it's possible. I was here, Greg.

You, you are one of the few people that give me hope. There's not many. You're one of them.

Oh, I would agree with that. And I am really thrilled, Greg, that you, you're sharing your wisdom with us. And I'm really looking forward to future wisdom. And I am very grateful to everybody that has joined us. By listening to this, participating in this discussion. A reminder, if you want, if you have questions for Greg Prince for our next installment, please send them to us at our email address, insideoutfeedback@gmail.com. We are getting some wonderful messages and it really helps us understand what is resonating with our listeners and we want to be able to pass that on. And if you have questions for Greg, we want to be able to present them. So thank you all for listening. And we look forward to speaking with you next time on our next episode of Inside Out. Thank you very much, Gregg. And thank you as always, Ian.

My pleasure.

Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Gregg.