Problematic Scriptures

Hello, my name is Jim Bennett. Welcome to the first episode of Inside Out, and I want to give you a little bit of a little background before we begin. You may know me as the author of A Faithful Reply to the CES Letter. I've also been having many public conversations with people in and out of the Church, including John Dehlin, the Midnight Mormons, Stephen Murphy, Bill Reel, Radio Free Mormon, and I think there are others. I'm not sure who they are. But as I've made the rounds in the world of Mormon podcasts and online conversations, I've discovered there is a real need for improved connection and understanding between people who are in the church and people who have felt it necessary to leave the church. Usually people on either side tend to stay in their echo chambers and refuse to engage with anyone who disagrees, and the result has been way too much demonization and not enough willingness to listen. So at the end of last year, I was approached by Ian Wilkes. He's an old friend of mine who had— has left the church, but he feels the same way about these problems and divisions, and he asked me to do a podcast with him. I've been reluctant to do podcasts, but when Ian offered and he talked about what he wanted to do, I jumped at the chance. A little background: we were missionaries together in Scotland in the late 1980s. That tells you how old we are. And Ian was as faithful and devoted a missionary as you could ever want to know. He went on to marry in the temple and raise a beautiful family and spend decades in church service, including service as a bishop and a member of a stake presidency. And so his leadership experience gives him a lot of insights. I've never been— I've been in bishoprics, but I've never been a bishop. I've never been in a stake presidency. So Ian's got some inside baseball that's really helpful in these discussions. He joined the church as a teenager in Yorkshire, England. He has a much cooler accent than I do, and he now lives in Canada. And his conversion story as well as his exit story are fascinating and well worth hearing, and they're also very lengthy, so we've recorded those separately and we'll put them online as bonus episodes in the near future. But the format here of the Inside Out podcast is very simple. I'm still on the inside, and Ian is on the outside of the Church. Yet both of us care about the Church and its future, and both of us want to see constructive dialogue between those who stay and those who leave. And hopefully all of us can come to a better understanding both of the Church and of each other, and we can have better empathy and better appreciation for one another as a result. So with that, I'd like to welcome officially my partner in crime, the one and only Ian Wilkes.

Ian, how are you, sir?

I'm very good today, sir.

How are you? I am doing very well. So we were talking before the podcast a little bit about a couple of things that you wanted to make sure listeners understand about the nature of this podcast. Do you want to get into that here a little bit right as we begin?

I will, and I'll be brief. I think it's really important, a little bit more like a, a forward statement, if you like, on what we're trying to do and why we're trying to do it. The first thing is that these experiences that you and I discuss, share on the podcast, is our own experience, our own perspective, our own opinions, our own views. We don't represent the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and so people are entitled to challenge us and question us, and that's great. Again, we're going on our own experience, our own perspectives, and also we relying on memory. You know, some of these experiences— and that was my other point that I now remember— is that we're relying on memory. Some of these experiences happened a long time ago, as far back as, you know, the '80s, where you and I were serving on our missions. We had conversations and meetings, and sometimes those memories are clear and sometimes those memories are vague. And so we want our listeners to be patient with us. And but by all means, if you, if you're not sure, if you have questions in your you can have any concerns or you want to challenge us, anything we said, by all means feel free to do so. This is a safe place to do that, and we'll do our best to respond to that. And the other thing was the importance of the reliability of information. The memory is limited in terms of these experiences, but we'll do our best to remember things accurately and our best to respond to any questions or concerns that anyone has.

Well, appreciate you stating that. And you'd also talked about the idea that we're not approaching this as apologists for the church. We're also not approaching this, I think, as critics of the church. I think that this is an important kind of way to model discussions for people wherever they may be in terms of the spectrum of their relationship to the church, but I don't think we do the church any favors when we tiptoe around hard questions. I don't think we do the church any favors when we refuse to even acknowledge the hard questions. A thriving, healthy church is one that is able to incorporate diverse points of view and also be able to deal with people who are outside of the church or who have left the church with a degree of respect and kindness. It's astonishing to me how many people think that the best way to deal with people who have doubts and who eventually leave the church is to treat them like garbage. And in that sense, I want to segue here into what we're going to be discussing. You talk about the idea that we're going to be dealing with this from memory. You shared with me a memory. There's one memory when you were serving as a leader that is sort of seared into your imagination. Can you give us a little more context on that? I'm being as vague as I can here.

Sure, yeah. As you know, leaders, especially leaders who are approachable— and I think I was— who can be trusted. You know, the church encourages members to confess and to go to the bishop and open up and, and share often very private, very personal experiences. Sometimes that's part of the repentant process, other times it relates to an individual's emotional recovery of an event, sometimes an often traumatic event. And so members come to leaders and share very deep personal private experiences that are very painful and very difficult to talk about and difficult to, to resolve. Bishops, stake presidents are not trained. Bishops often give poor advice, don't understand the issues, default to the belief that if you pray enough and if you fast enough, these complex emotional and sometimes sexual abuse-related issues will disappear through fasting and prayer. My experience as a leader is that that is not the case, that these individuals are vulnerable, um, they feel excluded, that they're disadvantaged in some way, uh, emotionally vulnerable, and they need much more than praying and fasting. So you can imagine as leaders, uh, as a leader, that you hear all kinds of things. From all kinds of individuals, all kinds of backgrounds. And it's, it's, it's quite common, or not uncommon, for an individual to meet with a leader and to share personal experiences and traumatic experiences, actually, where the individual has been subject to sexual abuse or some kind of sexual assault. And over the years as a leader, I've had a number of people who have come to me and in tears, very emotional, uh, have broken down and, and opened up and shared disturbing and very awful experiences that they continue to struggle with in their 40s, 50s, and sometimes 60s. These events that happen sometimes at a younger age stay with these individuals forever. They wrestle with them and they, they struggle with them, and, and many times they, they can't seem to escape the pain. So it's a very difficult meeting, and I think the for bishops to be trained, have some professional training, is absolutely critical. So there was, there was a few individuals over the years that I met with, and I tried my very best without the training and often found myself to be very inadequate, frankly. Unequipped, inadequate, untrained, trying to help these individuals with very complex historical traumatic emotional events, sometimes related to sexual abuse as a child, for example. And one individual came to me, uh, and this happened several times, where they'd read a scripture which is found in Moroni 9:9. Over the years, over the generations, as you know, the church has reviewed and modified its canonized text. It's made changes, literal changes, to its, its body of scripture over the years. We see this in Doctrine and Covenants and in the Book of Mormon. It's diluted and made changes. And I think those changes have been necessary. The church would perhaps give its own answers to why changes have been made, but there still remains within the main body of scripture scriptures which cause pain and suffering. Can you imagine that? You know, we're talking about the holy scriptures here, and they cause pain and suffering for people. And it's not unique just to the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price. We see these scriptures in the Bible. But this individual highlighted Moroni 9:9. Trigger warning here is that this relates to one of several meetings I had with a member who had been tragically raped at a young age, struggling with this traumatic event as a young leader, me trying to understand and how can I possibly help. And this individual shared the scripture with me, and I'm trying to— a scripture I've read a number of times, I'm sure, and didn't see it the way that this member did. And so if you could read that scripture for us, Jim Bennett, that would be helpful.

Sure. All right. Yes. Trigger warning. This gets very graphic. And notwithstanding the great abomination of the Lamanites, it doth not exceed that of our people in Moriantum. For behold, many of the daughters of the Lamanites have they taken prisoners, and after depriving them of that which was most dear and precious above all things, which is chastity and virtue, And after they had done this thing, they did murder them in a most cruel manner, torturing their bodies even unto death. And after they have done this, they devour their flesh like unto wild beasts because of the hardness of their hearts, and they do it for a token of their bravery. You know, I, I've read that scripture many times too, and I always focused— I, I went on to verse 10, the idea that they would, they would rape them, they would kill them, they would eat them.— and it never occurred to me when I was a missionary in reading that scripture the impact that the sentence about depriving them of that which was most dear and precious above all things, which is chastity and virtue, how that would scar somebody who was a victim of sexual abuse. And it sounds like that's what happened with the people you were meeting with.

Yes, that's what happened. So this individual had come to me. They had read this scripture. Uh, it bothered them so much that they, uh, for the very first time in their lives, they felt that they needed to open up and share their traumatic experience. They'd never had discussed it with anyone else prior, and this scripture was a catalyst and the pressure on this individual to talk to somebody about what this actually meant. And this individual went into not great detail about what happened, but she felt, having read the scripture, that, you know, she had a question: was she to blame for the sexual assault that had been forced upon her? And she interpreted this scripture. You know, the church says, I think, somewhere, that the scriptures are not open to private interpretation. So you can read stuff, you can read the scripture, arrive at an interpretation, And when a large group of people arrive at an interpretation, that can be defined as a generally common interpretation. The church may or may not agree with that or accept that, and will, and often or sometimes will say that, no, you've misinterpreted the scripture, this is what it really means. Notwithstanding, uh, this individual, and, and this has happened in my leadership experience, this happened several times where someone has read something like this and they've had this, they've had this experience in their lives, this traumatic experience. They've read this, and now they believe that they're no longer chaste and they no longer possess virtue. So without getting too much into the detail, because I don't think that would be appropriate, this individual, as they shared their experience with me, tried desperately to escape the situation, physically fought the attacker, was unsuccessful, resulting in a, a very serious sexual assault. At the time and over the years did not think or believe or feel that it was their fault. But having read the scripture, came to a couple of conclusions and interpretations. One was, with this happening to this individual, are they no longer seen by God, the Heavenly Father, a loving Heavenly Father? Are they no longer seeing— seen by the Lord as being chaste? Or virtuous. And that added significant additional pain on top of years of pain and suffering and hurt that this individual continued to struggle with. And the second interpretation and conclusion they came to was, did they carry any responsibility for that, any personal responsibility or blame for that assault? Were they at fault? Were they wearing something that was inappropriate?

I wish I could say that this individual was drawing a conclusion that was different from what the church taught. Unfortunately, there are teachings that the church has moved away from. To its credit, but there are teachings that reinforce that interpretation. I've pulled up here— this is Elder Richard G. Scott in 1992, gave a talk called Healing the Tragic Scars of Abuse, and I'm just going to play a segment of that. Here we go.

Most often the victim is innocent because of being disabled by fear. Or the power or authority of the offender. At some point in time, however, the Lord may prompt a victim to recognize a degree of responsibility for abuse. Your priesthood leader will help you assess your responsibility so that, if needed, it can be addressed. Otherwise, the seeds of guilt will remain and sprout into bitter fruit.

So there he is specifically saying you may have a degree of responsibility. At some point, the Lord may prompt a victim to recognize a degree of responsibility for abuse. Other statements by church leaders have gone in this direction as well. President Kimball talked about the fact that if you're being raped, you have to struggle and fight as much as you possibly can. If you If you just acquiesce, then yes, you, you have given up to some degree your virtue and your chastity. We no longer teach this. I think the Church recognizes that this is a mistake, that this is not an appropriate thing to be teaching, that all this does is reinforce needless guilt, needless shame. But the difficulty that we have is that as a church, we are terrible at admitting error. You know, President Oaks has said repeatedly, as a church, we do not look for apologies or give them. We do not apologize for making mistakes. We acknowledge in a sort of broad, vague, generic way that mistakes have happened. But the minute you, you point to one and say, well, isn't this a mistake? Everybody just sort of runs the other way. We want to just say, okay, well, we don't teach this anymore, so why does it matter that we used to teach it? And I think it matters significantly, particularly since you have a verse there in the Book of Mormon. When you say that the church has changed its scriptures, you are correct, but those changes have been few and far between since the time of Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith edited his revelations. The Doctrine and Covenants as we now have it was the result of many revisions. The Book of Mormon did not undergo a similar amount of revisions. Well, depends on who you want to talk to, because in other— when people will say, well, there have been hundreds of thousands of changes in the Book of Mormon, and that's true in that E.B. Grandin, the printer of the Book of Mormon, went through and punctuated the Book of Mormon. The manuscript that Joseph and Oliver delivered to the printer didn't have any punctuation at all. And so every one of those punctuation marks is a change. But in terms of actual doctrinal changes, uh, in the Book of Mormon particularly, they've been few and far between. Changing the phrase "Mother of God" to "the mother of the Son of God," which I think Joseph put in there to make it sound less Catholic or less Trinitarian, The most recent change of any significance that I know of was actually a change made by Joseph Smith that didn't make it into the Book of Mormon that existed from near the end of Joseph's life all the way until 1980. And that was the phrase white and delightsome. The Lamanites will become a white and delightsome people. That has since been changed to pure and delightsome. That is a huge change in terms of how we approach past racism and the kind of racism we still find in a lot of Book of Mormon scriptures today, particularly in 2 Nephi chapter 5. But we don't seem to have a mechanism or a procedure or a culture that allows for changes like this. And even though we also theologically accept the reality that the scriptures are not perfect, that there is human error in the scripture— on the title page of the Book of Mormon, it talks about, if there are errors, they be the mistakes of men. Uh, the Book of Mormon does not claim to be inerrant. But we treat it as inerrant. We treat Scripture as inerrant. So when you say, okay, this Scripture obviously is doing more damage than good, it's not teaching a true principle, we ought to change it, we have no way to do that that wouldn't cause huge consternation among a membership that have taken the false doctrine of prophetic inerrancy and prophetic infallibility. To a level that is really, really disconcerting and unsettling. How would the church go about getting rid of this?

First, I just want our listeners to know that when I was listening to Elder Scott, my— I was shaking my head. There's a few things that I find as disturbing and as shocking and as grotesque as those comments, those remarks. Notwithstanding what you said, that the church has moved away from that position, and thank goodness that material still exists, it's still out there. And yes, it has moved away from that position. But my question is, where have they done that? You know, where they have moved away from a position that they've said, no, this is not what we think or believe anymore— where is the explicit commentary, Max, to say that without it sounding like they're making a mistake? I think that's what the fine line that they're trying to walk. Just briefly, I just want to get— look at the scripture again. The wording is really important here. But this individual, going back to this individual experience, they said that how can something that was forced upon them deprive them? If something that was against their free agency— so this was against their agency, they didn't want this, they did fight, they were not successful, they were completely overcome physically and powered, overpowered, they were terrified is the word, horrified, terrified, they froze with fear. The question is, are they now deprived of virtue and chastity? And I said, absolutely not. And they said, well, It's in the scriptures, so it must be correct. And so yes, the church has made— has diluted some of the scriptures, you know, whitened and lightened some, and purified and lightened some. And I think we need to look at that scripture in 2 Nephi on this podcast. You and I chatted about that. It hasn't done enough to, uh, come out and say, look, this is wrong, this is not our position anymore, it's not clear. I can't find anything that where it's been so direct and open and transparent that it moved away from this position. And then to your last point, your last question, I don't know how the Church can remove this scripture or dilute it, because this is the most correct of any books ever written. It's the only book that will get an individual closer to Jesus Christ more than any other book. As the Tappanson said when he was the prophet, when you and I were serving a mission— and I think President Hinckley said this as well— the truth and divinity of the Church rests on the validity and truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. It's the keystone of our religion. I think when you're right on something, then you can say— make those statements with confidence because you're right now and you'll be right in the future. You know, like love, service, believing Christ— you're always going to be right on stuff like that. But when you're talking about, uh, Book of Mormon, uh, generally, and looking at these scriptures which are very harmful and very destructive, and the church can't remove it because it would be a dilution of the, the most important book has ever uh, happened to mankind? How does it remove that? It can give its interpretation of that, but you're still going to have people read it and interpret the scripture in the way that I shared earlier. I think it would be helpful, Jim, to go to the scripture that you mentioned here. I think there were 3 things that we were talking about here as an example. There's lots of examples, and we identified this scripture, Moroni 9:9, has been a difficult scripture. We identified the one that you referenced in 2 Nephi, and there's, there's other stuff which is not quite canonized but seen by many as being close to being canonized text. This example in the Mormon Doctrine there, second edition, with Bruce R. McConkie. Could, could you read your scripture in 2 Nephi?

This is 2 Nephi chapter 5, verse 21. Uh, this is not the reference to white and delightsome, although there's something close to it here. The Nephites and the Lamanites, they've just arrived in the New World and they've gone their separate ways. And so the Lord is cursing— according to Nephi, the Lord is cursing the Lamanites because they aren't following the commandments. Verse 21 says, and he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint. Wherefore, as they were white and exceedingly fair and delightsome that they may not be enticing unto my people, the Lord did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them. And thus saith the Lord God, I will cause that they shall be loathsome unto thy people, save they shall repent of their iniquities. And cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed, for they shall be cursed even with the same cursing. And the Lord spake it, and it was done. Given the church's history with regard to racism, with regard to excluding people of African descent from temple blessings, from priesthood, from full participation in the church, and for that ban to have lasted for over a century, for 120-something years, It's remarkable to me that this scripture was not used as justification for that ban, because the interpretation of this scripture is that this had application to Native Americans. The assumption was that all Native Americans were Lamanites, and the darkness of their skin is the result of this curse But that curse did not limit Native Americans from holding the priesthood or going to the temple. You talked earlier about the Book of Mormon being the most correct book on earth, the keystone of our religion. That's the quote that we hear again and again and again, that President Benson, when we were on our mission, kept re-emphasizing. I don't think, how can the Church fix this, is a rhetorical question. I think the way the church can fix this is leaning into the implication of errancy in a statement that this is the most correct book. Because if it is the most correct book, it's not the same thing as saying it is a perfectly correct book. And I think that the church needs to acknowledge the reality of error in the Book of Mormon, that prophets have made mistakes. And I think we can do that in a healthy and sustainable way. I can still love and embrace the Book of Mormon as scripture, which I continue to do. And I love the Book of Mormon, and the Book of Mormon has brought me closer to Christ than any other book throughout my life, and still recognize that there are problems in it. Somebody is racist here. In 2 Nephi chapter 5? Is it God? Is it Nephi? Or is it Joseph Smith? And from my perspective, I want to say it's either Nephi or Joseph Smith. And from the church's perspective, the church ties itself in knots trying to justify racism, trying to justify mistakes of the past, because they're far more comfortable saying that God is a racist than that Brigham Young was a racist for instituting the priesthood ban. That makes no sense to me whatsoever. None. The idea that we have to put these men on a pedestal and say they were perfect, and so we're willing to attribute all of the terrible things that have happened to God instead of to the weaknesses of men, that's getting it entirely backwards. From my perspective. And also, the Book of Mormon— the Book of Mormon, taken in its totality, preaches against racism. You take this one verse in isolation and you go, this is a racist document. But you look at the history of the Nephites and the Lamanites and Samuel the Lamanite being, I, I think, the most righteous prophet in the Book of Mormon, so much so that when Jesus arrives in America says you need to make sure you include Samuel the Lamanite's words. You have the injunction in 2 Nephi 33 saying, "And he denieth none who come unto him, black or white, bond and free. All are alike unto God." That's a verse that sort of got buried until 1978 when we discovered, hey, you know what, the scriptures tell us we shouldn't be racists. And then you get to the point where the Nephites and the Lamanites intermarry. I mean, here this is a verse saying you shouldn't intermarry with these people, you know, it's, it's just, it's just an awful, awful idea. But by the time you get to 4 Nephi, there are no manner of -ites, and everybody's intermarried, and everybody is a, is one people. And then Lamanite becomes a self-designation of people who are no longer following Christ. It is not a racial designation at that point anymore. By the end of the Book of Mormon, the Lamanites— we don't know if they're descended from Nephi or from Laman or who. We just know that they're calling themselves Lamanites. So the racism in the church where we say, aha, you're a Lamanite because you had your skin cursed The Book of Mormon actually doesn't argue that position by the end. So, I mean, there's a lot of complexity, there's a lot more, and taken as a whole, the Book of Mormon speaks out against racism far more than it encourages it. That does not excuse this scripture. That does not excuse other errors in the Book of Mormon. That does not excuse Moroni chapter 9, verse 9. Which is clearly an error. And I think that error was made— that comes from a sort of Victorian sensibility where they're trying to use a euphemism. Joseph Smith— I think that that's a translator error. Joseph Smith didn't want to use the word rape, and so he used this euphemism, which to modern audiences particularly is reprehensible. The church does that all the time. The church uses euphemism You know, I grew up in the church. You weren't 12 years old and handed a pamphlet by Boyd K. Packer that talked about your little factory and how you need to make sure that your little factory doesn't go into production before it's time and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's an anti-masturbation pamphlet. But the church was so— and Boyd Packer was so uncomfortable using the word masturbation. That he uses this euphemism that as a 12-year-old kid I was reading this thing, I'm like, what the hell is he talking about? I have no idea what this means. And I took it to my mother and I said, what does this mean?

Right?

And she, she, she went white and she finally said, it means don't play with your penis, which was terrible advice to me because then I would pee with my hands spread eagle on the wall so I made sure I wasn't getting my little factory into production. We have made mistakes. Some of them are benign and some of them are silly and some of them are very serious. These two scriptures particularly are very serious. The church right now, President Nelson, we've created this relationship with the NAACP. President Nelson has spoken out about racism and against racism more than any president in the history of the church, and that is commendable, and I appreciate that, and I want more of it. It rings hollow to so many people because we have not addressed the roots of where that racism came from. We now say— it's exactly like what you're saying— at no point has anybody gone back to 2 Nephi 5:21 and said, somebody's racist here and that's bad. We won't do that. We, we dance around it. When we studied the Book of Mormon just last year, there was a statement from Joseph Fielding Smith about 2 Nephi 5:21 that was printed in the manual that had everybody up in arms. And then Gary Stevenson, an apostle, went out and said, oh, that was mistakenly put in there, that's an old teaching, we shouldn't have put that in there. But we didn't disavow the scripture. We just— we try to move on and we try to do what's right now. And that is commendable. It doesn't have enough weight until you address what went before.

Putting aside the dark underbelly of historical, doctrinal, institutional racism that's does belong to the church history, notwithstanding that the church is trying to navigate itself away from those earlier entrenched doctrinal positions which are— were heavily influenced, we both know, at the turn of the, you know, in the 18th century, 19th century, and before, around slavery, etc., around going forward, you know, civil rights, uh, before that, the right of Black African Americans, etc., that the leaders had a position— Brigham Young being one of them— that was unquestionably racist at the time. And that continued all the way up into 1978, which I find extraordinary. I think that revelation came from significant pressure upon the church. We can say it was a revelation, and that's fine, we can say that, and, and I don't entirely disbelieve that. I think that there was a lot of prayer and fasting going on at the time, but only until 1978 did Black people have the right privilege to go to the temple and to hold the priesthood, which is a very, very long time not to have that authority and have that equality. I think putting aside just for a moment that dark underbelly of racist history that the church will never get away from fully and will only heal, help people reconcile with those early historical positions if they address it head-on. And if you were to put that aside and just to read these scriptures in and as of themselves, you would see that a lot of people read them that come to a generally a common interpretation, that the majority of people reading these scriptures would arrive at a common conclusion interpretation like we have without even the context of the historical racism. You add the historical racism, which you have to, and it's significant And it's understandable that people would come to those conclusions about that scripture in 2 Nephi. And so unless the church comes out and comes clean and addresses it and disavows— as it uses that word quite a bit in the essays— disavow its position with these scriptures and states very clearly that the Book of Mormon is not perfect, but a significant portion of it should be relied on. And if there's any mistakes in the Book of Mormon, then they are mistakes of men. You've mentioned that before. And if I was a General Authority, I would stand up and say these things that we're saying right now. The book is not perfect. It was translated by men. It was translated through the gift and power of God. It was written at the time of the day. There was things that were happening in America at that time that was influencing Joseph Smith, influencing Brigham Young, etc. We know that, and that all this came into the translation process. And now, through further light and knowledge, our position has changed. We disavow these common interpretations. This is our position. This is where we stand. We completely condemn any behavior or action that supports or sanctions, you know, this kind of behavior. This is our position, etc. And to actually remove those scriptures, what I would do, I'd write a note in the topical notes at the bottom with a special reference to a quote from the Prophet to disavow this and to give a more inclusive or a different interpretation, or at least to disavow it. The church hasn't done that. I think the church needs to be much more active in disavowing scripture beyond just saying they disavow something. I don't know how they're going to get around this, but until they address it head-on, you're going to have people in a very vulnerable state. They're going to read this stuff and they're going to arrive at this common interpretation. They're going to research into Elder Scott's talk, and they might not know that the church has moved away from its position. They might not know what you know, Jim Bennett, that you just shared with me earlier. And they will arrive at this conclusion, and it will cause more pain and suffering. And so the church, it does tie itself in knots, but if it's more open, transparent, and acknowledges mistakes and problems, it will be seen and behave much more inclusively and in a more compassionate, in a more kinder way. Because this is canonized scripture, this is not the inside material, this is actual scripture that is the bedrock of the church. The other thing that we talked about as an example— there's many examples— the third one was an experience that I shared with you when we were preparing this podcast. And I shared with you at the time of— I think I was 16 or 17 and had just joined the church through the missionaries.

And let me pull that up.

Yeah, a wonderful family who were very devoted, very committed to the church. You know, I was a new convert. I had to leave home for joining the church. This family took me in, very kind. And they were— I wouldn't say they were scholars, but they had quite a good lineup of excellent material, uh, Jesus the Christ, Articles of Faith, James E. Talmage, other scholarly books. I cannot recall all of them right now. And one of them was a book that caught my eye. It was a book with a black hardback, and it was Mormon Doctrine, second edition, Bruce R. McConkie. And as a new convert, I was on a mission. People who knew me back then, I was on a mission to learn as much as I could about the church. I was like a sponge. I was reading I was attending seminary. I was a committed student reading the stuff, doing the assignments. I was the full-in convert. I think I probably annoyed some people because I was asking so many questions. I wanted to learn everything about the church. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. And I, I read as much as I could. And one of the books I got my hands on was Mormon Doctrine. And I, and I read that. And as you know, it's written in alphabetical order. There's a first edition which I've seen once. I don't own a copy. I'd love to get my hands on a copy of the first edition, but I read the second one and I came across— when I got to the B section, I came across a piece there about, about, well, bastards. And if you could read that for us.

Bastards, see sons of God. Since a bastard is an illegitimate child, one born out of wedlock, Paul aptly and pointedly uses the term to describe those who are not sons of God, who have not been adopted into the family of God as joint heirs with Christ. According to his terminology, there are sons on the one hand and bastards on the other. The sons inherit the fullness of the Father's kingdom. The bastards, never having been born of God, are cast out of the eternal family as though they were illegitimate. They become servants to minister for those who are worthy of a far more and an exceeding and an eternal weight of glory.

Well, I read that 2 or 3 times. I was 17 years old, and I was deeply shocked and hurt and offended, actually, by that. And the reason why I had felt that was because I was born out of wedlock. My mother and father were not married legally. They were common law husband and wife, and I was born out of wedlock and technically was a bastard in that context. So when I read this, I was devastated is the word I would describe, and upset. I read again to make sure I understood it. And the interpretation I came to— we talked about coming to a common interpretation. Again, what I mean by that is that if 100 people read it and 80% come to this, this interpretation, then that's a common interpretation. And my interpretation was that because I was born out of wedlock, that I was not entitled to the fullness of the gospel. That I was not entitled to the fullness of the gospel here on this earth or in the next earth, that I wouldn't be in the celestial kingdom with my family and my Heavenly Father, and I wouldn't have the same type or level of blessings that would be afforded to other members who were not born out of wedlock. And it really bothered me, the scripture really bothered me. And I took it to the bishop, who was just an extraordinary man, and I, I took the book to him and opened it up and read it and was quite emotional, quite upset. I took the church extremely seriously. I was a boarding scholar, and it was the most amazing experience I'd ever had is joining the church. And so this was a blow to the stomach. I felt quite sick. The bishop opened it, read it, and said, Ian, you know, this is not the interpretation that he means by this, and if he does, he's wrong. This is not— and this is Bruce R. McConkie, it's his opinion, he's speaking as a man, right? So we've heard that before, you know, is, is the scripture that we— two scriptures that we read earlier, are they written as a man? I think that's an important question. Are they written as a prophet? I think that's an important question. How do you differentiate between someone as an apostle or prophet writing or speaking as a man versus being a prophet? We've seen policies implemented, very hurtful, destructive policies, and then we've seen a reversal of those policies, quite dramatic ones. It was that of man, was that of God? Bruce R. McConkie, was he writing as an apostle, which is also a prophet, as you know, or was he writing as a man? And so how do you— you know, this is Mormon Doctrine. I think at one time it was not a— I don't know if it was accepted as a canonized text, but it was close to, you know, when we were serving our missions. You remember going to the MTC? It's the same in the London MTC. I was given— I had the scriptures, and I had Jesus the Christ, and I had Articles of Faith by James E. Talmage, They were the books that I, um, was encouraged to buy. I think earlier, I think people were encouraged to— in the '70s and '60s, from people that I know, they were encouraged to take a copy of Mormon Doctrine with them because that was a very important collective group of doctrines, alphabetical order, that the church had, I think at one time, had formally acknowledged or accepted, notwithstanding some specific sections here that I think they were comfortable with. But my understanding, and others like me at that time in the '80s there, believe that Mormon Doctrine Mormon Doctrine was a, albeit not scripture, but was a serious book.

I have some inside baseball on that because it was never officially acknowledged as anything. And in fact, the behind-the-scenes story on Mormon Doctrine as a book is really fascinating. I would recommend to anybody to read the book David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. Which chronicles the publication of Mormon Doctrine. It was written at a time when Bruce R. McConkie was not an apostle. Bruce R. McConkie, I think he was an assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve. I don't even think he was a Seventy. He was a low-level General Authority, and he wrote this book without telling anybody that he was writing it, without any authorization from anybody. Published it, and there was a huge uproar. Not over this, you know, the thing about bastards. The most explosive thing in there was that he identified the Roman Catholic Church as the great and abominable church that's mentioned in the Book of Mormon. And he said that's very clearly the Church of Rome, and got very specific. David O. McKay is my great-grandfather, and my family would always tell the story of the bishop at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in downtown Salt Lake showing up at David O. McKay's office, plopping a copy of Mormon Doctrine on his desk, and said, "This is what you think of us? Is this true?" And David O. McKay said, "I'll take care of it." And he did, in a very quiet, non-public, and difficult-to-verify way. So David O. McKay was furious when the book was published, and he had apostles review the book. They came back and identified some— I think the number was like 1,729 specific doctrinal errors that Bruce R. McConkie had made in the book. And David O. McKay was not willing to let the church publish But the huge but is that he didn't want to do anything that would make it look like there was any problem behind the scenes. He didn't want to embarrass Bruce R. McConkie. He requested— and I'm saying that in quotation marks— essentially ordered Bruce R. McConkie to revise it, take out the stuff about the Great and Abominable Church if he was going to republish it. Which he did. I don't think that went near enough. I mean, it should have been disavowed specifically by the church, and it wasn't. David O. McKay had done a similar thing. Joseph Fielding Smith wrote a book called Man: His Origin and Destiny, which was a book that is an anti-evolution screed. It was, you know, the world was created in, you know, 6 24-hour periods and the earth is only 6,000 years old, and evolution is a tool of the devil, blah blah blah blah blah. And he wrote that with the assumption that he, as an apostle, would be able to get the church to publish it. And David O. McKay refused to allow the church to publish it. David O. McKay was a believer in evolution and refused to do that. And that book sort of fell by the wayside. Now we don't talk about it anymore, but Mormon Doctrine in I think because it was so easy, it was just so simple. You know, you had these nice little bite-sized sections and you could go to it to get an authoritative reading. You know, I was very interested in a girl at one point who was an evangelical Christian. She went and decided, okay, I'm going to learn more about Jim Bennett's church. She went and bought a copy of Mormon Doctrine. And I went, okay, well, we're done. That's the— you know, if that's the impression you're going to get of the Church, there's no possible way you're going to have a positive impression of the Church. And the Church again has quietly allowed Mormon Doctrine to go out of print. It is no longer printed. It is no longer sold at Deseret Book. But it did that without any fanfare, without any acknowledgment of the damage that this book had done to you, or the, you know, the attack on the Catholic Church had done, or any of the embarrassment. I mean, there are so many things in Mormon doctrine that are really weird and embarrassing. I used to read it with my kids just for a laugh. The section on card playing and the wickedness— we were only allowed to play, when I was growing up, we couldn't play Go Fish with face cards. We played Go Fish with rook cards, which only have numbers on them. They don't have faces. And Bruce R. McConkie, there's a whole section in Mormon Doctrine about face cards and how they're of the devil and blah blah blah. And so, and I just look back at that and said, what's the difference between playing Go Fish with face cards and playing Go Fish with rook cards? It's the same game. Does Satan somehow get into the picture of the, of the jack or the queen? It doesn't make any sense. I mean, there's so much in Mormon doctrine, the book, that we have moved away from, and that even at the time it was published was considered largely nonsense by most members of the church. But we do not have any— again, I'm coming back to this idea— we don't have any kind of mechanism, we don't have any kind of way to confront errors in our history. Confront errors, let alone confront errors in our scripture. Mormon doctrine was never scripture, and yet it was treated as such. We haven't been able to disavow it. We use that word, right? That word disavow appears in the Gospel Topics Essays that for many people have been their ticket out of the church, because they've been told their entire lives that these are all anti-Mormon lies, and then they read them in a church-sponsored essay and go, wait, the church wasn't honest with me. And then that's enough for them to say, I, I've got to leave. We disavow racism in that essay, but we don't identify and acknowledge previous mistakes. And we don't even say that the priesthood ban was a mistake. We walk right up to the line of saying it was a mistake, and then we refused to cross that line. That's a Rubicon that we're not willing to cross. And we can only go so far as a church in condemning racism, in condemning bigotry, and condemning all of these things if we're not willing to take responsibility for and accountability for the huge errors that we have made. And, you know, we're taught as individuals that when we repent, we have to recognize our sin, We have to take responsibility. We have to, you know, the R's of repentance. We have to make restitution. We do that, and we encourage people to do that on an individual level, and we refuse to do that on an institutional level, and it's holding us back.

It is. You said something earlier that you don't believe most of the men of the church took the book, the Mormon Doctrine book, seriously. I can't speak to that.

That's not what I meant. I meant that there were things in Mormon Doctrine that were nonsensical at the time they were published.

Okay, just wanted to clarify that. Again, in my experience, and the people, the leaders in the UK at that time spoke fondly and favorably and mostly positively about Mormon Doctrine, that it was a book that you should have on your shelf, Ian, that it's, uh, most of it's reliable. Yes, I heard some concerns over some of the passages, but it was again not canonized text, not scripture, but it was alongside Jesus Christ, James E. Talmage, Articles of Faith. And there were quite a few things in there that I took issue with. One of them was the position on gambling. My bishop just recently won the lottery, so we have an active bishop who's won the lottery. He's a good man, um, he's won the lottery, and I suppose if he paid tithing on it, he might be okay. But I don't know if the church has changed his position on, on gambling, but Bruce R. McConkie is very clear on the relationship between the devil and gambling. So just kind of bringing this to a circle here, so things are written about the church, whether it's scriptures or Deseret Publishing approved literature, etc., talks and signs. Talks are given about how to interpret something, and there's a lot of hurtful and harmful information in the scriptures and elsewhere and in talks which cause a lot of pain and suffering for people. And unless the church acknowledges that and apologizes or at least provides more transparency, discloses to, you know, why these things were written, and accepts responsibility for this, then I think it's going to be hard for people to move forward. The problem they've got, Jim, is that if they go too far, they will be seen as throwing prophets and apostles under the bus. And to your David O. McKay experience there, they prefer to keep that quiet and in-house. I think most people don't know about the details behind Mormon Doctrine to the extent that you do. I mean, the title Mormon Doctrine itself speaks to a canonized group of doctrines collected in that fashion and interpretations that's generally been approved or sanctioned by the church because it's Deseret published. So there's a whole bunch of questions here and a lot of issues that need to be addressed, and the church will continue to wrestle and struggle with how does it reposition itself on these doctrines, these issues, without alienating the traditional rank-and-file conventional Orthodox member. And then how do they bring the new rising generations with them with the more modernized progressive thinking We've identified just a few examples. There are many more examples which cause people a lot of concern and question and doubt and pain and suffering. We've just identified a few. But if it was me, I'd be going through these things and acknowledging them head on and apologizing where they've caused pain, making some kind of restitution and addressing them, because that's the only way to full reconciliation and truth and transparency.

No, you're absolutely right. There's a hymn we would sing and the chorus says, "Do what is right, let the consequence follow." And the thing is, you say, "Well, it's going to be really hard for the church." It really isn't. The church continues to pretend it has a choice as to whether or not it can confront all of these issues head-on, and it doesn't have a choice. The only choice it has is to do what is right and let the consequence follow. And if the consequence that follows is that some people are going to be unsettled, and some people are going to leave. You still have to do what is right. And the church is trying very, very hard to walk a line that is ultimately unwalkable. Uh, it's an untenable position to try to completely ignore the reality of mistakes, ignore the reality of pain and suffering that the church has caused in the past. And the only way the church can survive into the future— it has no other choice but to do what is right and let the consequence follow. We're out of time here, but I think this has been a good discussion. For those of you listening, please be sure to like us and subscribe to us wherever your podcasts are found. And until next time, thank you for listening, and we'll see you again on Inside Out. Thank you very much, Ian.

Thank you very much, Jim.