A Conversation with Peter Bleakley

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Hello and welcome to another episode of Inside Out.
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My name is Jim Bennett and I'm here as always with...
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I can't think of a proper adjective...
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It's Ian Wilkes, ladies and gentlemen.
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Ian, take a bow.
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How are you, sir?
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Thank you.
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I am now bowing officially, so it's an honor to be here with you, Jim.
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Good morning to you.
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How are you?
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I am doing great.
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I'm doing even better because we have a really, really fun guest here today.
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His name is Peter Bleakley.
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Hello, Peter.
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You know, we've exchanged many...
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a conversation on social media, but this is the first chance I've had to actually speak with you, and very, very thrilled to have you here.
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Can you just sort of kick us off with kind of a one-minute explanation of who you are and why you're so awesome?
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Oh, thank you.
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Absolutely, and it's a great privilege to be here.
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I've loved this show since it started, so I've been an avid fan, so it's a real pleasure to be here.
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So I live in England in the southeast corner of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
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My parents met at Brigham Young University and had me and came home.
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So I have dual citizenship and I didn't go back to the States till my mission in the Florida Tallahassee mission.
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So I've kind of had this slightly weird double identity existence and certainly growing up in a very Mormon church, a very American church, which was perceived as a ridiculous cult in my general community at a time where there were enough factual Christians around still to be annoyed by us, which hasn't been a problem for a long time now.
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And so I grew up very faithful in the church, but with a family culture of kind of taking responsibility you know, not expecting the church to be perfect.
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It's our job to make it what it needs to be.
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So always faithfully attending, always participating in leadership and callings, but also kind of having an ongoing conversation about, right, that was a bit rubbish.
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How do we do it better next week?
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Which I've discovered is quite rare and perhaps gave me some more resilience with the religion.
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Yeah.
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Like many others, I've been through the standard trust deconstruction upon discovering how much the church lied to us about the church's origins and history and starting to see living apostles blatantly lying about stuff that you can prove they're lying about, which is obviously an issue.
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And the key moments, a lot of people our age point to of things like the November policy being an existential disappointment, the gospel topics essays being a great moment in the sense of admitting so much we thought the church never would, but also confirming that the people we were told were anti-Mormon liars were actually quite accurate, which again was a paradigm shift.
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And other things, some key moments for me becoming rebellious Certainly when M.
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Russell Ballard said in the face-to-face that the church has never hid anything from anybody, a year after teaching the CES staff to stop lying and to basically tell the truth and quit face-promoting nonsense and to make sure that the kids hear the full difficult truth and history about the church at church to inoculate them.
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And then when it was his chance to step up with a global audience of young people, he did everything he told them not to.
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And my brain just exploded at that point.
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I was like, we can't go on like this.
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It's insane.
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I started ramping up my heated critique of all this in Facebook, which very much upset my state president, who's actually, in a sense, a woke hero, who's a really good guy and has done a lot to make safe space for LGBTQ people, for example, and to pioneer safeguarding in our state.
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So I'm in this sort of strange place.
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He is one of my heroes, but also he eventually excommunicated me.
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I was kind of given the ultimatum, you know, you need to stop doing this.
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I had just started turning these things into a podcast where I'm criticizing the leadership and saying what the church needs to change to survive.
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And the definitions of apostasy is so tight now, you can get anyone on anything for it.
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It just says any kind of public opposition, It used to be just church doctrine, but they've added leaders and policies, church policies.
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If you oppose them publicly, you can be excommunicated.
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And in fact, it's compulsory.
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The state president must initiate church discipline.
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So he was quite stickler for those rules.
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And I mostly got excommunicated as a tone policing act, which I find hysterical.
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He was very, very fixated on the rude things I'd said about the leaders.
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along with hours and hours of rational intellectual analysis with evidence.
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But that seems to be the real trigger thing.
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I think that highlights something that I've talked about a number of times.
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They tolerate criticism of ideas a whole lot more than they tolerate criticism of leaders.
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You know, I had that experience where I was very frustrated with the idea of the two great commandments being in conflict.
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President Oaks talked about that extensively.
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And there was at one point that Elder Christofferson talked about it.
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And I remember I posted on Facebook a link to Elder Christofferson's talk.
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And then my comments where I said, I hate these ideas.
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I never even mentioned Elder Christofferson by name, but the post had his picture on it.
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And I got called on the carpet for that.
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And it wasn't because of anything that I actually said.
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It was, how dare you criticize Elder Christofferson?
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Now, I have a huge soft spot in my heart for Elder Christofferson because he came and visited my father in the last days of his life, and I stood in a circle with him.
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and gave my father a priesthood blessing.
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Elder Christofferson was the voice.
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He gave the blessing, but I was standing in the circle with my hand on Elder Christofferson's shoulder.
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And that blessing essentially released my father from this life.
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It was a beautiful moment.
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Elder Christofferson could not have been more gracious and lovely and just entirely exactly what you would hope a man of God would be, what you would hope an apostle of God would be.
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So it was not my intent in any way to attack Elder Christopherson or criticize Elder Christopherson.
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But the fact that his picture was next to my critical sort of ruminations about an idea that I had a problem with, that was too much.
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That got me into trouble.
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Ian, have you had any kind of similar experiences to that or any insight into that?
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I have, and I'll respond in the same order that you have.
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So the church, I would say the last 10, 15 years, the last 10 years in particular, is less concerned, to your point, you're absolutely right, with doctrine and history and people questioning it because it's been buffeted aggressively, endlessly, fiercely.
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challenge, question on every point of doctrine in the last 15 years since all of this material has come to the surface.
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You know, the essays, look at the essays.
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The essays, in my view, scales a significant milestone in an indication of acceptance that there were issues doctrinally, politically, policy-wise, et cetera, past profits.
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Elder Uchtdorf said in 2013, that past leaders have made mistakes.
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Me thinking he was referring to a rogue bishop or state president, but no, he was talking about past prophets and apostles.
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So the church has been beaten to a pulp, frankly, on the doctrine and the history, and is now uncomfortable still, but more accepting and more tolerant of that.
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What it isn't, to your second point, what it will not tolerate.
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By the way, just one other point on the first point.
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It's easier for them to accept criticism about dead people who are no longer here, and they can throw them under the bus.
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You know, we disavow this, we disavow that.
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Living prophets trump dead prophets, right?
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And so to the second point, when you question a living apostle or prophet or leader, that is...
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much more difficult to accept when the people are alive and you can question them and challenge them and that's less tolerance.
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I remember when Elder Oaks was interviewing me, he talked, after two or three questions, he spoke about this and he spoke about, you know, supporting the prophet, you know, the state presidency calling that I was being called to requires absolute obedience, living with exactness, He said, President, you might not accept or believe or understand everything the prophet's doing, but you must, as a leader of the stake, you have an obligation, a very sacred obligation, more than the regular members, to follow the prophet and never to question the prophet.
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I was told that very expressly.
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I felt the magnitude of that.
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It was very clear evidence.
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direction and instruction.
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It felt like a commandment coming from him.
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You remember at the time I was obviously active and I'm here next to an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, very stern, very strict.
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And by the way, in contrast, and I've never shared this, when he set me apart, he gave the most beautiful blessing, Elder Oaks I'm talking about.
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And he said to me, and I'm almost in tears, he said, President Wilkes, the Lord loves you.
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And I really felt that.
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And I just remember that.
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I've not shared that before.
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But when you challenge or question a living prophet, when you question the leadership,
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that's a problem.
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So that's it.
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That's where I'm at.
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I'm riding this sort of tidal wave of the total destruction of everything generations of my family and I, for my whole life, worked to build.
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These congregations, it's very personal because as you know, Ian, and you, Jim, being a missionary in Scotland, we rebooted the Mormonism in Britain from the 1960s onwards.
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We built all these things from scratch within our lifetimes.
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And now we're watching them be destroyed and relentlessly decimated.
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These communities of amazing, lovely people are evaporating.
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And the elderly people who were promised that if they put the church first, they would have this wonderful retirement of seeing their children and grandchildren married in the temple, that our wards would be stakes by now, which they should, if we were growing anything like we should, or retaining our members, rather.
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We've got the members, they're just not active.
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And that there'd be people to look after them.
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This particularly makes me angry that people in my parents' generation, they worked so hard looking after the elderly when they were younger, and the community of the ward congregation, exemplary, sacrificial Christian service for vulnerable elderly people in their last years.
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But there's no one to look after them now because all the younger kids have been alienated away.
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And that safety net that they, in a sense, paid into is not there for them now.
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So that's where I'm at.
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And I'm mad as hell and I'm not taking it anymore.
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Yeah, yeah, don't look back, Peter.
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Give us the full...
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Oh, this is great.
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You know, I've listened to some of your podcasts.
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I've read a great deal of what you've written.
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You're clearly very passionate, very articulate.
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And I think recognize...
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a lot of the problems and you've run into a lot of opposition, even in the church, to your positions.
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You're also, you're one of what are called the Britvengers, which is a really fun, can you tell us just a little bit about that?
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Yeah, I started around the same time as I started my podcast, there suddenly emerged a few other British voices into this space.
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And the way I really try not to be mystical, I don't have like the angel Moroni turned up with a flaming sword and commanded me to have this mission.
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I'm not claiming to be a prophet.
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Anything beyond anyone can work out just by watching the data trends.
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You don't need a miracle vision to know the church is toast.
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But I do think that there is, in a sense, if you learn history and politics, that when an established institution starts to face its doom and people get squeezed, the pips start to squeak, that you will have a percentage of people who wake up and become revolutionaries who say, we cannot carry on like this.
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It's not acceptable.
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Look at the harm being done.
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Even in a very high demand or thought controlled environment, which we have in the church, where most people are keeping their heads down and just getting on with their Mormon busy work on the hamster wheel, there's going to be enough people who look up and see what's going on and see where it's all headed and will want to speak out.
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So Nemo the Mormon, who's Douglas Stilgoe in Oxford, who's in a quite liberal, open-minded ward because it's a university town and has been very dedicated to the church.
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He served a service mission at the temple.
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He started his podcast where he was just basically fact-checking things, and the trigger for him, interestingly, was the Ward radio crew.
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When Cardinalis and Kwaku and the others were first recruited by Fair Mormon to front their tits, this is the show show, which was so...
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completely not Mormon kosher as far as its attitude and language and everything and didn't last long.
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Yeah, this is the show.
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T-I-T-S was the acronym.
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That's the thing that actually introduced me to Cardin Ellis and to Kwaku and to the Ward Radio crew because the This Is The Show show was designed directly to respond to the CES letter and they didn't do any independent research at all.
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for that show, what they did was take my CES letter reply and quote me repeatedly.
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And I found myself getting increasingly disgusted by the fact that this show, which was crude and obnoxious and just belittling of not...
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I think apologists get into trouble when you start attacking people and you don't attack ideas.
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And This Is The Show was all about saying Jeremy Runnels, who wrote the CES letter, was just an idiot and a jerk and just beneath contempt.
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And they were just laughing at him the whole time.
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I didn't realize, I'm a big fan of Nemo, and I didn't realize what radicalized him was tits.
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Yes.
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The This Is
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The Show moment, because that sort of radicalized him.
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We should clarify for our audience, that became Midnight Mormons, who have recently renamed as Ward Radio.
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You've done a lot of conversations with them.
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Yeah.
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I have.
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And I remember I got a hold of Brad Whitbeck, who's one of the guys.
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And he's, I think, probably the most reasonable of those guys.
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And he put me in touch with Cardin Ellis, who flew me down to Los Angeles and put me up in a nice hotel.
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And we had an entire weekend together.
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Where the first thing we did was confront why I was so frustrated with them.
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And I was very, they called me a boomer, which I didn't enjoy.
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I'm not a boomer.
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I'm very solidly Generation X.
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But they had just sort of been very dismissive.
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And I pushed back very hard.
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And after I was done, they said, okay, well, let's talk about these other things.
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I mean, you're down here, you're down here with the weekend, let's talk about a bunch of things.
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And we recorded several episodes for them, but they've never released that first episode where I held their feet to the fire.
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And that's kind of frustrating.
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The time has passed now that I don't think it would do anybody any good to release it.
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But a few things that were said in that episode...
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One of the things I pointed out was, if you have to attack Jeremy Runnels and you're not able to attack his ideas, it shows that you don't have an argument.
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I'm finding myself getting attacked over and over and over again.
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The people who are rudest to me are not the people outside of the church.
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They're the people in the church who think that the fact that I...
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look for greater LGBTQ inclusion, means that I'm somehow a terrible heretic and I need to be destroyed at all costs.
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And you have all of these Twitter accounts that will repost anything, no matter how innocuous, that I post about the church.
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And they'll put some terrible spin on it that shows that I'm just the worst guy in the whole world.
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Do you see any of this in terms of...
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Ian, I want to bring you into this.
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Do you see people attacking...
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people or ideas when they're trying to defend the church?
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Both,
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to be fair.
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I see the intelligent people out there questioning, challenging the ideas, the rationale behind them, the facts, the data.
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So there are people out there that are more intellectual and more astute, and they want to have an adult conversation.
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And so I do see that.
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Thank goodness that those people are there.
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But I also see a lot of personal attacks on people's character.
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If they don't agree with someone, they have a different opinion than the person they disagree with, their character, they bring that character into question.
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I see more of that from people in the church than people outside the church.
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That said, there's an element, Jim, there's a percentage of people out of the church that, and I want to highlight this, that understandably feel very angry, hurt, incensed toward the church.
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They've been terribly hurt by the behavior of the church.
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And it's very difficult to forgive the members or forgive the behavior of the church.
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And I can understand that because I've been there.
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So you get them on both sides, in and out of the church.
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The worst elements on both sides are vindictive, can be cruel.
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And so you get very strong feelings on both sides for, I think, understandable reasons.
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So it's just a full spectrum of opinions and feelings from different people of different backgrounds, intellectuals, from people who reach for that on the internet and automatically accept it's true.
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They're an expert in a particular field and have learned it through the University of Facebook.
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And then they have an argument with a scientist who's got some medication and they know something a little bit, but they don't agree with them and they can be quite offensive.
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So it's human nature.
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You see this, this is not unique to the church.
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This is everywhere, right?
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And I think there's a need for a little bit more civility, a lot more civility.
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Let's come together.
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Let's question the issues.
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So I'll elaborate on that.
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And this is what my next episode is going to focus on.
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So I've been doing quite a deep dive.
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Normally, people who aren't used to them can cope with about two minutes of ward radio and then they want to throw their phones into a fire or shoot some people or something.
00:21:25.191 --> 00:21:32.700
And they just react with visceral revulsion, which you can totally understand.
00:21:32.740 --> 00:21:34.221
They take a bit of getting used to.
00:21:34.786 --> 00:21:45.977
But if you kind of inoculate yourself and you can gradually listen to longer and longer, I got to where I could do 10 minutes and then I had to take a break because it was just so massively frustrating.
00:21:46.396 --> 00:21:49.099
Because it's like, where do you even start with these people?
00:21:50.000 --> 00:21:53.984
But I've powered through and they're very prolific.
00:21:54.085 --> 00:21:54.744
I bless them.
00:21:54.785 --> 00:21:55.846
They work their socks off.
00:21:55.885 --> 00:22:00.070
They're cranking out content, as are several other podcasters of a similar ilk.
00:22:00.790 --> 00:22:02.512
It's hard to keep up with it all.
00:22:03.874 --> 00:22:22.766
What really struck me is they've joined in with the nuanced intellectuals like Patrick Mason and Terrell and Fiona Givens and the people like them in basically acknowledging we've got some major problems here and very specifically when they're having a more serious conversation.
00:22:23.425 --> 00:22:25.209
they get a bit humble and they acknowledge.
00:22:25.348 --> 00:22:33.520
So Carden has talked about how the church has lost its young people, that he, as a young father in California, his talents are being wasted.
00:22:33.560 --> 00:22:40.391
They've only ever had him teaching elders quorum every so often or something, and he's frustrated that he's dealing with technology from the Stone Age.
00:22:41.011 --> 00:22:49.525
So that's another one, which is the total inability to modernize and to really engage with modern media and teaching techniques.
00:22:49.585 --> 00:22:52.650
I'm a professional teacher in the curriculum.
00:22:53.122 --> 00:22:58.258
to waste the talent of the young people that they have just because they might be a bit controversial.
00:22:59.713 --> 00:23:58.817
that he they have sometimes he's he's because he'll say whatever sounds cool at the time he will say oh it's great that we have these elderly leaders because they're so wise and they have all this life experience and they're still in touch with the kids you know but in another episode he'll be very blunt he'll say no this is a problem these people are completely out of touch and he threw in a little phrase which was something like 1960s suburban culture As a shorthand for what I think he sees as the frustration with standard TBM thinking in wards, that they're not prepared to have difficult conversations, that they want everything safe, that obviously they have made the choice to be intentionally aggressive and aggressive and to use language that normally would be completely condemned in Mormon culture because they realise you're getting nowhere by...
00:23:59.266 --> 00:24:01.851
playing nicey-nicey all the time, so I respect that.
00:24:02.612 --> 00:24:08.221
So they're already somewhat rebellious in that sense, while claiming to be defenders of the faith.
00:24:10.085 --> 00:24:21.163
But then, and others, you know, I mean, an amazing moment was when Patrick Mason, who's one of the leading scholars in Mormon studies, who's usually quite wise.
00:24:21.263 --> 00:24:25.067
He didn't sign the Radical Orthodoxy Manifesto.
00:24:25.086 --> 00:24:27.869
He hasn't, I don't think, ever been employed by BYU.
00:24:28.009 --> 00:24:32.314
He's always kept a safe distance from being too much of a company man.
00:24:32.334 --> 00:24:34.675
I need to jump in there and just say that
00:24:35.196 --> 00:24:37.239
Patrick's mother is in my ward.
00:24:37.259 --> 00:24:38.460
Oh, cool.
00:24:39.421 --> 00:24:41.462
And she's one of my favorite human beings in the world.
00:24:41.482 --> 00:24:48.769
And the fact that Patrick has not been employed by BYU is not Patrick's choice.
00:24:49.473 --> 00:25:04.917
I don't think BYU was not willing to hire him because I think they consider him, he's faithful, he's committed, and he does a great deal of good, but he also is not afraid to acknowledge
00:25:04.958 --> 00:25:06.661
where the problems are.
00:25:06.760 --> 00:25:07.080
He's too
00:25:07.121 --> 00:25:08.083
honest.
00:25:08.222 --> 00:25:09.945
And I don't think BYU was ready for
00:25:09.986 --> 00:25:10.125
that.
00:25:10.657 --> 00:25:42.394
and he came on this adorable episode where he came on and he's been so generous with his time to all the little podcast outfits he came on 21st Century Saints and he cried they made him cry because they were talking about the actual pain and suffering of these people losing all their friends from the church because of the lies about the history and that really not being handled well and you know he feels it I He's also, I think, treading a very careful line.
00:25:42.435 --> 00:25:45.441
Therefore, he has to be disingenuous at times as well.
00:25:46.122 --> 00:26:02.963
So, for example, he wrote a book, something like Restoration, God's Voice for the 21st Century or something, which was meant to be a kind of State of the Union address of the kind I'd be all over, like, you know, This is where we're at as a church.
00:26:03.084 --> 00:26:04.746
This is the problems we have.
00:26:04.865 --> 00:26:07.469
How are we going to make it to the end of the 21st century?
00:26:07.509 --> 00:26:12.914
So I got it on audiobook and I was digging the garden all day in summer, listening to the whole thing through.
00:26:12.934 --> 00:26:21.904
And he mentioned the problems with race, because that's cool now, since President Nelson has made it all right to pretend we're over racism.
00:26:21.924 --> 00:26:24.288
You can talk about that being a mistake.
00:26:24.788 --> 00:26:29.834
And this is another thing that Ward Radio and others have completely internalized now.
00:26:30.273 --> 00:26:34.839
that they say the racism was a mistake, it was never of God.
00:26:35.440 --> 00:26:40.086
How they reconcile, they deny it was ever taught as doctrine because they're ignorant.
00:26:40.165 --> 00:26:43.691
You listen to them talk about any topic and they are half-baked.
00:26:43.830 --> 00:26:48.497
They know half the stuff but not the other half and they make up things to fill the gaps.
00:26:48.957 --> 00:27:07.724
So in that sense, these apologist podcasters are kind of typical of local members that rather than actually consulting the full range of sources to get fully informed, they will just know a few things enough to gaslight themselves and then make up the rest based on their wish fulfilment.
00:27:08.286 --> 00:27:13.153
And that comes through loud and clear any time they talk about the history of racism in the church.
00:27:13.913 --> 00:27:23.066
So Patrick mentioned that, but at no point in a book about Mormonism in the 21st century did he mention LGBTQ people anywhere.
00:27:24.162 --> 00:27:25.845
And that was a gaping hole.
00:27:26.045 --> 00:27:32.634
And that showed me he is not the scholar I think we should be able to expect him to be in respect.
00:27:32.976 --> 00:27:50.082
He intentionally left that out because he knows perfectly well that the church's attitude to LGBTQ people and its incompatibility with the values of people in the 21st century is a fundamental issue for the survival or future of the church and the current one.
00:27:50.382 --> 00:27:51.564
And he didn't mention it once.
00:27:52.285 --> 00:27:56.696
So These people, honestly, do start to compromise so much.
00:27:56.717 --> 00:27:58.519
I think they start to sell their souls.
00:27:58.558 --> 00:28:00.642
They lose their integrity.
00:28:00.682 --> 00:28:03.765
But where does this come from?
00:28:03.805 --> 00:28:19.241
In his wonderful series of interviews with John Dillon on Mormon Stories, at one point he literally said, without batting an eyelid, as if this was completely okay, he said that the apostles and prophets of the church...
00:28:19.682 --> 00:28:35.019
should basically focus on getting on with raising the money and keeping the lights on and doing the admin, and that it should be scholars and historians and theologians who actually decide the doctrine of the church, i.e.
00:28:35.079 --> 00:28:35.901
people like him.
00:28:35.921 --> 00:28:40.606
And that was a gobsmacking thing to say.
00:28:41.207 --> 00:28:43.789
Why was he not excommunicated immediately?
00:28:43.829 --> 00:28:46.693
Because he really should have been at that moment.
00:28:47.329 --> 00:29:23.395
but he's so used to working in these nuanced intellectual circles where everyone just accepts and they talk openly about how the general authorities don't know their religion anymore they don't know the history then they keep using that as an excuse and ward radio use it as an excuse all these other people at times they're saying oh they're too busy doing their other jobs it's like well what the hell is their job description if they can't be trusted to determine the doctrine of the church and to be the guardians of its history and heritage and meaning in the world, what are they for?
00:29:24.198 --> 00:29:29.250
But these people who know them well and can see what they do and say just know they're useless at it.
00:29:29.289 --> 00:29:32.497
So all these people are now doing workarounds.
00:29:33.153 --> 00:29:39.103
You have the prepper fundamentalists who are just basing everything on their own revelations.
00:29:39.483 --> 00:29:43.650
There's a whole group of them now that are getting super excited about eclipses.
00:29:44.049 --> 00:29:50.500
They're apparently writing the letters Alpha and Omega all over America and Israel at the moment.
00:29:50.599 --> 00:29:54.046
And they're all teaming up to announce the second coming, basically.
00:29:54.465 --> 00:30:31.526
goaded on by Abraham Gileady with his idea who also is into this idea that the eclipse this year is really significant and a sign in his obsession with the Davidic servant has led to loads of children being kidnapped or tortured to death because their parents think they or they themselves are the Davidic servant like Chad Daybell thought he was the guy who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart the Thibodeaux who kidnapped her son and took him to Alaska to sort of raise him to fight the Terminators in the end times because they were convinced he was the Davidic servant.
00:30:32.027 --> 00:30:37.353
And this is all from Avraham Gileadi and he's got a huge following and now it's all playing out.
00:30:37.432 --> 00:30:47.944
So people who are, I think the state of Mormonism is people have been told to expect incredibly dramatic and exciting things in their lifetime now.
00:30:48.506 --> 00:30:51.489
They've been promised crazy stuff in their patriarchal blessings.
00:30:52.162 --> 00:30:58.892
Every other testimony meeting, you've got some little old lady proclaiming it's the end times and the second coming's any minute now.
00:30:59.472 --> 00:31:04.078
You know, they're all geared up for this amazing, momentous world events and excitement.
00:31:04.859 --> 00:31:10.909
And all they get from their actual first presidency is changes to meeting schedules and waving a hanky.
00:31:11.890 --> 00:31:12.490
That's it.
00:31:13.311 --> 00:31:14.074
So they
00:31:14.153 --> 00:31:14.775
freelance.
00:31:15.015 --> 00:31:19.602
Freelancing, I think, is a great way to describe this, you know, because people...
00:31:20.417 --> 00:31:27.268
If you go back to the original history of the church and Joseph Smith, he was the ultimate freelancer.
00:31:27.688 --> 00:31:33.817
He was the one who went out into the woods and sought to find out which church was true and got this wonderful vision.
00:31:33.856 --> 00:31:40.787
And so the entire enterprise of the church is based on somebody freelancing like this.
00:31:41.488 --> 00:31:58.946
But those kinds of dramatic, powerful spiritual experiences as the church goes on over time, those become the province, the sole province of church leaders.
00:31:59.968 --> 00:32:11.303
You know, if somebody were to stand up in testimony meeting and say, God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to me when I was praying in the woods last night, they'd probably be called up into a disciplinary council.
00:32:11.844 --> 00:32:12.805
They'd get into trouble.
00:32:13.066 --> 00:32:15.869
So I can understand...
00:32:16.834 --> 00:32:24.464
The desire for that, the desire for drama, the desire to make yourself the center of a great story.
00:32:24.724 --> 00:32:42.809
The people that are sort of stirring up that drama, the people who are freelancing now, who have sort of stepped up and decided to be the defenders of the church, they are actually quite critical of the church in a lot of ways.
00:32:43.111 --> 00:32:58.993
We talked about Jacob Hansen attacking the church for hiring Aaron Sherinian, for allowing a transgender woman to be baptized, and Jacob refused to use the proper pronouns to describe this woman.
00:32:59.755 --> 00:33:03.480
And he's sitting there complaining that the first presidency had approved this and knew all of this.
00:33:04.300 --> 00:33:14.794
And so you have all these people that are attacking the church, and they want credit for being defenders of the church while they do it.
00:33:15.554 --> 00:33:25.123
Jacob Hansen repeatedly, when he comes back to these issues, he repeatedly plays snippets of my conversation with him that Steven Peinecker moderated.
00:33:25.163 --> 00:33:35.313
And it's getting really old because he was like, here's Jim Bennett, the activist against the church, because Jim Bennett is waiting for further light and knowledge to come on the LGBTQ issue.
00:33:36.354 --> 00:33:41.719
And he insists that no further light and knowledge can or will come and that he will leave the church if it does.
00:33:42.559 --> 00:33:44.541
Yet somehow I'm the activist.
00:33:44.961 --> 00:33:47.185
Somehow I'm the one who's attacking.
00:33:48.166 --> 00:33:50.210
And it's nonsense.
00:33:50.750 --> 00:33:51.372
It's garbage.
00:33:52.334 --> 00:34:00.968
These guys, these defenders of the church who are freelancing, are doing so and attacking the church because the church isn't...
00:34:01.008 --> 00:34:07.478
The church is moving in a direction that they don't like and that they're not willing to participate in.
00:34:07.518 --> 00:34:09.842
And so they just...
00:34:10.594 --> 00:34:28.771
They go out there and they do this kind of apocalyptic kind of warning that the church is doomed if they don't do exactly what Jacob Hansen and Greg Matson of Quick Media and these other guys, all the things that they insist have to be done or the church isn't true anymore.
00:34:29.972 --> 00:34:32.034
And I think that figures into this.
00:34:32.114 --> 00:34:33.396
I mean, they're not apocalyptic.
00:34:33.436 --> 00:34:39.141
They're not like Brian David Mitchell who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart, who think that they're a new prophet.
00:34:39.842 --> 00:34:49.434
But they do think that their big, powerful ideas are things that the brethren need to hear, that the brethren are missing.
00:34:49.474 --> 00:34:55.623
And they're the only ones who are brave enough and strong enough to be able to do this.
00:34:55.963 --> 00:35:00.228
This is a phenomenon that I think is going to continue to increase.
00:35:00.248 --> 00:35:09.762
And because, as Peter points out, anybody with a microphone can have a platform.
00:35:10.402 --> 00:35:26.106
You know, nobody called us to do this, and yet here we are in our second year of doing this podcast, and technology allows anybody who wants to to step up and say what they want to say about the church.
00:35:27.047 --> 00:35:38.744
And it's kind of hard to hold people's attention with the same kind of repetition that we get, the mind-numbing Sunday school answers that we've heard for decades.
00:35:39.585 --> 00:35:42.668
People are looking for more, and I don't blame them.
00:35:43.530 --> 00:35:45.811
But I think Peter's right.
00:35:46.072 --> 00:35:47.333
That can lead us into trouble.
00:35:47.934 --> 00:35:47.994
Do
00:35:48.014 --> 00:35:48.454
you agree?
00:35:48.474 --> 00:35:48.554
I do.
00:35:48.574 --> 00:35:51.197
I do agree with that.
00:35:51.717 --> 00:35:54.340
This is another fantastic comment that Peter made.
00:35:54.360 --> 00:35:58.264
He made many excellent points in his conversation.
00:35:58.304 --> 00:36:00.887
And so let's look at this.
00:36:00.947 --> 00:36:03.148
Look where the church came from, right?
00:36:03.369 --> 00:36:05.190
We just did a podcast on Kirtland.
00:36:05.291 --> 00:36:08.414
Look at all the things that happened in Kirtland before that happened.
00:36:09.153 --> 00:36:15.885
You know, at Kirtland, the heavens were open and people, crowds spoke, you know, congregations spoke in tongues.
00:36:15.945 --> 00:36:17.188
They saw angels, right?
00:36:17.349 --> 00:36:22.858
These were, you know, Moses, Elias, which we think is a messenger, Elijah.
00:36:23.539 --> 00:36:25.724
And I think I was right on the messenger thing, wasn't
00:36:25.764 --> 00:36:25.784
I?
00:36:25.804 --> 00:36:28.548
Well, yeah, but it's funny because I just want to jump in here.
00:36:28.668 --> 00:36:33.597
Sorry to interrupt you, but, you know, we went and looked that up and you said that the messenger was Michael.
00:36:34.465 --> 00:36:36.307
Yes, yes, I thought it was Michael, yes.
00:36:36.588 --> 00:36:37.108
And Bruce R.
00:36:37.168 --> 00:36:40.072
McConkie says he thinks the messenger was Gabriel.
00:36:40.112 --> 00:36:41.054
All right,
00:36:41.153 --> 00:36:42.755
well, I can tell you right now, Bruce R.
00:36:42.775 --> 00:36:43.876
McConkie was wrong.
00:36:43.916 --> 00:36:47.661
And I'll tell you why he's wrong.
00:36:47.840 --> 00:36:53.106
I'm right, he's wrong, and there's nothing he can do about it, because I'm alive.
00:36:53.748 --> 00:36:54.268
There you go.
00:36:54.748 --> 00:37:02.197
And also, I had a dream about this, and that makes me, and a division that I'll share one day.
00:37:03.010 --> 00:37:04.851
And for the whole world should follow this vision.
00:37:04.891 --> 00:37:06.172
No, no, seriously, I'm joking around.
00:37:06.574 --> 00:37:12.199
But yeah, I knew it was some ancient prophet or I heard something that was an ancient prophet.
00:37:12.239 --> 00:37:12.380
Yeah.
00:37:12.780 --> 00:37:15.842
So, I mean, these extraordinary things happened at Kirtland, right?
00:37:16.824 --> 00:37:19.766
It wasn't exclusive to the first presidency.
00:37:19.967 --> 00:37:26.313
You know, these stories about Satan riding up with his angels on the back of the horse and being commanded.
00:37:26.393 --> 00:37:29.597
I need to interrupt you there because that was not at Kirtland.
00:37:29.637 --> 00:37:30.478
That was at London.
00:37:30.978 --> 00:37:31.858
Logan, okay.
00:37:31.878 --> 00:37:32.039
That's
00:37:32.099 --> 00:37:33.061
the Logan Temple.
00:37:33.400 --> 00:37:35.463
I got my temples mixed up, but I think it happened.
00:37:35.945 --> 00:37:45.619
I remember that story, and that's very much a folklore story, but it has been perpetuated over the years and passed down over and over.
00:37:45.659 --> 00:37:48.463
But it was a Logan Temple dedication, not the Kirtland Temple.
00:37:48.702 --> 00:37:51.766
Well, let me throw a bit of a, what do they call it?
00:37:53.429 --> 00:37:54.271
What's the American term?
00:37:54.431 --> 00:37:55.512
Left ball, left wing.
00:37:56.173 --> 00:37:56.693
Not left.
00:37:57.114 --> 00:37:57.856
A curveball?
00:37:58.396 --> 00:37:59.358
A curveball.
00:37:59.905 --> 00:38:01.449
Anyway, careful.
00:38:02.429 --> 00:38:08.599
When I heard that story, Logan, now, I just told me, Logan, I felt the spirit.
00:38:10.503 --> 00:38:12.527
And you're telling me it's a folklore story, correct?
00:38:13.427 --> 00:38:14.951
That's what I'm telling you, yeah.
00:38:16.032 --> 00:38:17.114
Oh, there's another podcast.
00:38:17.255 --> 00:38:17.735
Oh, my goodness.
00:38:17.835 --> 00:38:18.436
Anyway, whatever.
00:38:19.038 --> 00:38:21.621
So all these major things happen, right?
00:38:21.802 --> 00:38:24.686
You know, Myra, Kirtland, Nauvoo, right?
00:38:24.867 --> 00:38:26.309
The trip to Salt Lake, et cetera.
00:38:26.818 --> 00:38:27.938
Major things happened.
00:38:27.980 --> 00:38:31.543
There was revelation after revelation, visions after visions.
00:38:32.626 --> 00:38:36.271
And then you contrast that with the church today.
00:38:37.072 --> 00:38:39.494
The church teaches that the heavens remain open, they're not closed.
00:38:40.516 --> 00:38:46.784
And we're now living, arguably, and you can challenge this, in a much more tumultuous time.
00:38:46.824 --> 00:38:49.809
We're more connected globally, economically, politically.
00:38:50.429 --> 00:38:53.853
We're connected technically globally.
00:38:54.210 --> 00:38:57.775
Things that happen in the world now impact us.
00:38:58.637 --> 00:39:03.242
We're definitely more connected than the time of Joseph Smith on a global scale.
00:39:04.405 --> 00:39:08.331
And major events are happening on a very different scale.
00:39:08.530 --> 00:39:12.376
I think, if I'm right, I don't think they were happening at the same scale.
00:39:12.396 --> 00:39:14.380
There were wars going on around the world, etc.
00:39:15.260 --> 00:39:17.724
This is before the First World War, the Second World War.
00:39:18.025 --> 00:39:19.867
This is before major events, for sure.
00:39:19.887 --> 00:39:23.344
But I don't think it was on the same scale.
00:39:23.505 --> 00:39:26.989
So we're living in a time of extraordinary change and challenge.
00:39:27.871 --> 00:39:44.853
And you contrast the first presence in the leadership experiences of revelation and visitations that happened in the early days of the church, where there was less tumultuous time versus now where we needed more than ever.
00:39:45.922 --> 00:39:53.371
in a world of, that's very scary, let's face it, increasingly scary, threats of nuclear war.
00:39:54.132 --> 00:39:56.255
Putin's made three threats, I think, so far, right?
00:39:56.835 --> 00:39:59.760
The world is pretty unstable at the moment.
00:40:00.181 --> 00:40:01.382
And where's the church on this?
00:40:01.563 --> 00:40:02.483
Where's the leadership on this?
00:40:02.543 --> 00:40:03.385
Where's the direction?
00:40:03.985 --> 00:40:07.309
Where's the relevancy of the church on key topics that are happening?
00:40:08.211 --> 00:40:09.813
Is it our position politically?
00:40:10.306 --> 00:40:11.827
What's his position on abortion?
00:40:12.288 --> 00:40:15.010
What's his position on LGBTQ, his official position?
00:40:15.431 --> 00:40:17.474
What's the position of what's going on in the world, politics?
00:40:18.454 --> 00:40:21.617
Where's the revelation now compared to what happened in the past?
00:40:21.657 --> 00:40:23.099
Why are we not getting those visitations?
00:40:23.679 --> 00:40:32.349
Why are we not having, in such a tumultuous time that we're experiencing right now, more than ever, we need those visitations.
00:40:33.010 --> 00:40:41.536
We need a restoration of those older, those teachings, those principles, Heaven's open.
00:40:41.635 --> 00:40:42.137
We need help.
00:40:42.436 --> 00:40:43.338
Goodness be, we need help.
00:40:43.860 --> 00:40:45.601
We need Moses to come back.
00:40:45.643 --> 00:40:47.224
Elias the messenger to come back.
00:40:47.344 --> 00:40:48.626
We need Elijah to come back.
00:40:49.469 --> 00:40:50.309
We need help.
00:40:50.510 --> 00:40:51.130
Where is it?
00:40:51.952 --> 00:40:54.416
Where's the church in direction and leadership?
00:40:54.516 --> 00:40:59.784
And so you've got people leading the church and rightly talking about these things.
00:40:59.864 --> 00:41:01.728
You know, what's the church relevance in the world today?
00:41:02.228 --> 00:41:03.070
Where's its leadership?
00:41:03.090 --> 00:41:03.731
What's the direction?
00:41:03.771 --> 00:41:04.954
What's the position on different things?
00:41:05.313 --> 00:41:08.277
And you've got people inside the church asking the same questions.
00:41:08.536 --> 00:41:09.858
What's its stand?
00:41:10.259 --> 00:41:11.739
What's its role in the world?
00:41:12.460 --> 00:41:17.885
Remember, this is the only true living church upon the face of this, section 130.
00:41:18.827 --> 00:41:31.619
It's the only church that represents the universe, God, Jesus Christ, and the prophet is the only mouthpiece of the only true church.
00:41:32.880 --> 00:41:34.081
So what does that mean?
00:41:34.594 --> 00:41:38.581
Does he still meet with Christ?
00:41:39.684 --> 00:41:40.445
Surely he does.
00:41:41.146 --> 00:41:42.329
And if not, why?
00:41:42.369 --> 00:41:44.152
Why has that changed?
00:41:44.293 --> 00:41:46.858
Is there some revelation that says he's no longer going to be around?
00:41:47.117 --> 00:41:49.603
Christ is not going to visit for a while or whatever.
00:41:49.643 --> 00:41:51.405
You're on your own for the last few days, right?
00:41:52.489 --> 00:41:55.114
Or what about all the prophecies and all the revelation about the last days?
00:41:55.809 --> 00:41:57.092
What's the latest on that?
00:41:57.132 --> 00:41:57.652
What do we do?
00:41:57.952 --> 00:42:00.675
How do we prepare for all the events that are unfolding?
00:42:01.036 --> 00:42:02.538
Remember what President Nelson said?
00:42:02.577 --> 00:42:04.981
He said when he was called, you ain't seen nothing yet
00:42:05.282 --> 00:42:06.422
and take your vitamins, right?
00:42:06.824 --> 00:42:13.271
And all he said is the most anodyne dreck that he heard in Sunday school in the 1940s as a young adult.
00:42:13.391 --> 00:42:14.954
He hasn't moved on intellectually.
00:42:14.974 --> 00:42:18.838
He's still a young earth creationist and evolutionist.
00:42:18.918 --> 00:42:21.362
He hasn't got an intellectual mind.
00:42:21.826 --> 00:42:27.454
But they're so desperate for something meaningful to happen, they're just running with anything.
00:42:27.996 --> 00:42:29.018
So that's one faction.
00:42:29.498 --> 00:42:36.048
You've got the other end of the spectrum, the nuanced intellectuals and academics like the Givens and others, who purge themselves.
00:42:37.492 --> 00:42:42.900
In a sense, I appreciate them trying to do what they're doing and create space for thinking about the religion differently.
00:42:42.920 --> 00:42:46.126
And when you look at what they publish, they're very blunt.
00:42:46.530 --> 00:42:53.440
You know, the Givens have come up with a totally alternate monarism to the one of the first presidency, but haven't been excommunicated.
00:42:54.181 --> 00:43:02.793
Patrick Mason's appearing on Mormon stories, telling everyone that the prophets are so useless they can't be trusted with doctrine anymore.
00:43:02.813 --> 00:43:05.498
Nothing happens to him.
00:43:05.518 --> 00:43:18.329
And then there's the rest of us sort of in the middle, sort of the UI and us who are like, We have got to bite the bullet and stop being denial about where the church is going, that it's in extreme danger of total collapse.
00:43:18.389 --> 00:43:19.710
The leadership are useless.
00:43:20.351 --> 00:43:25.818
They are visibly incompetent and unable to cope with the challenges of today.
00:43:25.838 --> 00:43:35.951
And hey, what a surprise, people are leaving in droves and their missionary program is causing more missionaries to leave to the church than they actually baptize.
00:43:35.971 --> 00:43:43.693
And the real statistic globally, for retention of converts is 80% leave within two years now.
00:43:43.733 --> 00:43:48.760
We all see it locally, but we convince ourselves it's just a low collaboration.
00:43:48.840 --> 00:43:49.201
It's not.
00:43:49.400 --> 00:43:50.722
That is the global picture.
00:43:50.762 --> 00:43:53.266
We're a machine of failure.
00:43:53.286 --> 00:43:56.532
And no one is holding the leaders accountable for that.
00:43:56.572 --> 00:43:59.396
They're all blaming themselves because that's what they've been trained to do.
00:43:59.436 --> 00:44:00.518
It's your fault.
00:44:00.577 --> 00:44:01.739
You didn't try hard enough.
00:44:01.780 --> 00:44:02.760
You didn't do it right.
00:44:03.161 --> 00:44:04.163
Hasten the work.
00:44:05.025 --> 00:44:07.168
Keep doing the thing you were doing before, but more.
00:44:07.208 --> 00:44:08.610
That was a damp squib.
00:44:09.025 --> 00:44:18.240
And then you have the people like Ward Radio and Co who are waking up from a conservative point of view.
00:44:18.260 --> 00:44:36.150
I think they know that gay marriage is coming and they're having a big panic, especially this year since the church has visibly allowed a gay married man to have a calling and take sacrament in his ward and has called an LGBTQ ally as president newsroom.
00:44:36.610 --> 00:44:41.315
Although interestingly, as some have pointed out, he hasn't done anything since then for three months.
00:44:42.097 --> 00:44:43.199
It's radio silence.
00:44:43.358 --> 00:44:47.123
So we don't know if he's being shuffled out already or what's going on there.
00:44:47.623 --> 00:44:48.565
But it's rattled them.
00:44:48.726 --> 00:44:49.427
They're panicking.
00:44:49.766 --> 00:44:52.731
I can say I know Aaron Sheridian well.
00:44:53.010 --> 00:44:53.210
Yeah.
00:44:53.831 --> 00:44:56.815
And I have not spoken to him about that.
00:44:56.916 --> 00:45:03.164
But my guess is that he is extraordinarily embarrassed by being the story.
00:45:04.166 --> 00:45:04.306
Yeah.
00:45:04.545 --> 00:45:16.221
And so I don't think that he's been muzzled so much as he's decided that he wants to keep a low profile because he knows who his client is and wants to bring attention to the client, not to him.
00:45:16.260 --> 00:45:19.704
But Ian, I want you to jump in here if you can.
00:45:19.724 --> 00:45:26.373
Does Peter's assessment here ring true with your own?
00:45:27.074 --> 00:45:29.858
Is this how you're seeing the environment out there?
00:45:29.898 --> 00:45:32.161
Yeah, it does.
00:45:33.282 --> 00:45:33.342
I'm...
00:45:33.538 --> 00:45:42.648
I was going to ask Peter, you know, with all your knowledge and understanding of these different moving parts, Peter, it's all fragment.
00:45:43.329 --> 00:45:56.623
You've got this, it's like a plane that probably reached its peak in the 80s in terms of church consolidation, growth, et cetera, et cetera, and things working and stakes being created, wars being created, et cetera.
00:45:56.663 --> 00:46:02.809
The time when Jim and I were serving in missions, I think that's probably the 70s, 80s when it all peaked, and then 90s.
00:46:03.329 --> 00:46:04.371
sadly declined then.
00:46:05.112 --> 00:46:15.101
And you've got this plane in the air that seemed to operate really well at the time within its own world, of course, its own sphere of influence.
00:46:15.722 --> 00:46:18.885
And then the plane is watching this crash and burn happening.
00:46:19.164 --> 00:46:21.847
Wing fall off, an engine fall off, the instruments are not working.
00:46:22.708 --> 00:46:25.130
The pilot still thinks everything's going well.
00:46:25.811 --> 00:46:29.335
A bunch of old guys who are really not in touch with reality.
00:46:29.735 --> 00:46:46.753
All these fragmented pieces, if you like, beginning to fall off the plane as the turbulence intensifies and they're going through all these storms, all the lightning, the thunder, et cetera, and the plane is really not designed to operate in those kind of conditions.
00:46:47.614 --> 00:47:03.132
So maybe that's not the best analogy, but from your vantage point with all the different ruling parts and where people are, different ages, different generations, You know, you've got the traditionalists, you've got the Generation X, you've got the millennials, et cetera, et cetera.
00:47:03.893 --> 00:47:04.512
What's the new one?
00:47:04.554 --> 00:47:04.873
What's that?
00:47:05.474 --> 00:47:05.735
The...
00:47:06.295 --> 00:47:06.735
Alpha.
00:47:06.956 --> 00:47:07.797
The alphas.
00:47:08.518 --> 00:47:09.498
That moves on.
00:47:09.539 --> 00:47:10.681
Right.
00:47:11.262 --> 00:47:11.541
Yeah.
00:47:12.063 --> 00:47:16.967
The millennials are grandparents now, so there's Gen Z, and then there's the alphas.
00:47:17.148 --> 00:47:18.831
Yeah, I was watching a TikTok all about that.
00:47:19.271 --> 00:47:20.952
All
00:47:21.012 --> 00:47:21.873
these things going on.
00:47:22.034 --> 00:47:23.876
Politics, LGBTQ...
00:47:25.282 --> 00:47:25.822
Right.
00:47:25.842 --> 00:47:28.146
I mean, all these different things moving.
00:47:28.385 --> 00:47:40.420
But from your perspective, Peter, if you were to plot the trajectory of things are heading, you've got all these things happened historically.
00:47:41.021 --> 00:47:42.463
You've got recent historical things.
00:47:43.063 --> 00:47:44.786
You've got current stuff going on.
00:47:44.826 --> 00:47:48.391
And you've done a fantastic job trying to piece all these things together.
00:47:48.471 --> 00:47:49.753
Podcasts, talking about different things.
00:47:49.833 --> 00:47:50.474
I think it's great.
00:47:51.074 --> 00:47:57.983
And if you were to plot in your mind the trajectory of where things are heading, where do you see things in the next five, ten years?
00:47:58.023 --> 00:48:04.192
Because we talked earlier about the relevancy of the church.
00:48:04.932 --> 00:48:12.081
And let's remind our listeners, the only truly living church upon the earth, that claim has been made, albeit not recently.
00:48:12.963 --> 00:48:19.693
Where do you see, two questions, the plotting trajectory of where things are going to go, and the other question is...
00:48:21.538 --> 00:48:30.971
in the context of the only true living church upon the face of the earth, what do you see the role of the church looking forward along that trajectory?
00:48:32.132 --> 00:48:45.489
Right, and I've got, I think, and it's been a journey, I think I've got some really interesting and very simple, which is a relief, answers to both of those questions and why I still have hope and bother.
00:48:45.951 --> 00:49:03.320
So we'll come to why I believe Mormonism was meant to be and could still be the most relevant global religion for the space age ongoing because of some of its unique qualities or ideas, not that they're necessarily being reflected by the mainstream today.
00:49:03.360 --> 00:49:06.505
But the first question is the trajectory.
00:49:06.525 --> 00:49:15.498
For me, I think there are two key components or two things if you want to get informed about, go to these.
00:49:15.659 --> 00:49:20.106
Number one is Hugh Nibley's valedictorian farewell address.
00:49:20.641 --> 00:50:01.400
to Brigham Young University which I think was in 1981-ish something like that which was titled Leaders and Managers and he nailed it he saw exactly where the church was going and he warned everyone in that moment he was the most useful prophet of the 20th century in our church and I'll talk about what he said in a minute and the other one is one of Radio Free Mormon's early episodes which was called Apostolic Coup which I think is one of his highest rated for good reasons In the Apostolic Coup, he talked about how Brigham Young shut down the separation of powers and democracy and how the church was led at a very early point.
00:50:02.081 --> 00:50:08.007
And I pinpoint that as the key cause of all the problems that have inevitably played out today.
00:50:08.047 --> 00:50:12.351
And if we're going to save the church, it will have to go back to a point before that.
00:50:13.891 --> 00:50:19.438
Brigham Young, the church had been leaderless for a long time after Joseph Smith's death.
00:50:19.809 --> 00:50:22.760
They're in winter quarters in transit to the west.
00:50:23.393 --> 00:50:29.862
His own personal center of power was as president of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, but you also had the Seventy.
00:50:29.902 --> 00:50:33.146
You also had the stake leaders who used to be quite high up.
00:50:33.726 --> 00:50:40.434
If you go to section 107 of the Doctrine and Covenants, we have a very democratic system of government in our church.
00:50:40.516 --> 00:50:51.369
We have a written constitution, which cracks me up when Americans who obsess about their written constitution then want to have a dictatorship of the prophet.
00:50:51.528 --> 00:50:51.909
They don't.
00:50:52.226 --> 00:51:26.023
realize that they've got one too and it's also meant to be quite democratic and well they insist we're a theocracy the opposite um yeah in section 107 it says the first presidency is equal in authority to the first the quorum of 12 apostles also equal in authority to them are the first quorum of 70 if they're voting unanimously And equal in authority to all of them as well, not inferior, equal, are stake-hard councils.
00:51:27.809 --> 00:51:32.201
At the time in the early church, they only had two stakes, so that was quite a significant thing.
00:51:32.994 --> 00:51:40.601
And the 12 apostles were a bit like the New Testament model where they roamed around and local leaders would kind of direct them.
00:51:40.742 --> 00:51:47.789
The apostle Paul deferred to local leaders in some locations about where he should go next on his ministry.
00:51:47.809 --> 00:51:58.581
And they kind of tried to make that work that, you know, in a sense, the leadership presiding authority was in stationary locations and the apostles were traveling missionaries doing what they told them to.
00:51:59.041 --> 00:52:02.166
But anyway, that's a bit of, you know, biblical context for that idea.
00:52:02.882 --> 00:52:11.931
And it says in there that any of those quorums can discipline the other ones when it comes to church discipline.
00:52:11.972 --> 00:52:22.324
And it says that any bishop can convene a council of 12 high priests to put the president of the church on trial if needed.
00:52:22.364 --> 00:52:31.014
And it says specifically because the president is not above any other member of the church when it comes to church discipline.
00:52:31.746 --> 00:52:39.802
And the council of the bishop, which they give it a fancy name in those verses, but it is clearly explained that that's what it is.
00:52:39.842 --> 00:52:46.777
It's a bishop and 12 high priests, as a judge in Israel, the common council, they call it.
00:52:47.233 --> 00:52:49.356
can put the president on trial.
00:52:49.815 --> 00:53:01.086
So for a start, like all healthy democracies, we have a strong separation of powers of equally authorized institutions to be checks and balances on the others.
00:53:01.807 --> 00:53:16.041
So there should be no leadership decision made without accountability and without at least all the other general authority quorums and any state presidency or even a bishopric agreeing to it.
00:53:16.577 --> 00:53:24.286
And if people step out of line and commit crimes and sins, which our First Presidency have been, they should be disciplined immediately.
00:53:24.306 --> 00:53:25.748
They should be dealt with.
00:53:25.788 --> 00:53:26.909
They're not irreplaceable.
00:53:28.309 --> 00:53:29.030
So that's that.
00:53:29.130 --> 00:53:39.581
Then you have the idea of common consent, that that is not enough, that any decision made in the church should be presented to the whole membership for a democratic vote.
00:53:40.422 --> 00:54:20.695
And in the very early days of the church, they'd have a debate about they weren't pretending to be all unified you know joseph and the classic case which can is now has crept into the curriculum in the support resources the church offers on its website as context for studying church history in the doctrine covenants they do reference this account situation where sydney ridden who had a lot of struggles with mental illness had been basically quite useless to joseph smith as a first presidency counselor for a long time so joseph wanted to fire him and have him replaced but sydney was very popular and So they had a conference and it was all written up in times and seasons.
00:54:21.438 --> 00:54:22.599
And it was a heated debate.
00:54:22.699 --> 00:54:27.068
Joseph Smith explained his reasons for wanting to fire Sidney.
00:54:27.108 --> 00:54:31.576
He spoke to defend himself and other people supported him continuing.
00:54:32.157 --> 00:54:37.266
And then the members voted and they voted against Joseph Smith to keep Sidney.
00:54:37.858 --> 00:54:39.981
So Joseph reconciled to Sydney.
00:54:40.001 --> 00:54:43.766
They had a few more years of a much more productive working relationship.
00:54:44.327 --> 00:54:51.376
But the president of the church was voted overruled by the membership after being presented with the dilemma.
00:54:51.416 --> 00:54:55.222
And they discussed it and prayed about it and made their decision.
00:54:55.262 --> 00:55:02.914
All of that democracy, accountability got swept away at winter quarters.
00:55:03.362 --> 00:55:08.347
when Brigham Young decided to create a dictatorship of the 15 apostles.
00:55:09.369 --> 00:55:15.175
He kind of appointed himself as president of the first presidency.
00:55:15.195 --> 00:55:21.804
He rejigged the high councils in the 70s by basically swapping them around.
00:55:22.244 --> 00:55:25.728
He broke up their institutional loyalty and sense of identity.
00:55:26.108 --> 00:55:40.117
But I think basically releasing the high councillors and making them from the state's leadership and making them 70s, and really seeing the 70s and making them high councillors, but now a much more junior ranking level.
00:55:40.137 --> 00:55:44.545
And that's how the church has been led ever since, as a dictatorship of the apostles.
00:55:45.547 --> 00:55:55.925
When we were kids, the language around voting to sustain someone in conferences was always about the leaders being held accountable to the people.
00:55:56.545 --> 00:55:58.068
Is that what you guys heard?
00:55:58.447 --> 00:56:00.371
It's certainly what I did consistently.
00:56:00.791 --> 00:56:07.219
The word accountability was all over the rhetoric from President Kimball and others during the 70s and 80s.
00:56:07.239 --> 00:56:10.083
They've shifted it now.
00:56:10.123 --> 00:56:24.802
This is one of the other things that have turned me into rebellion, is the leaders started in general conference teaching that your vote to sustain the leaders is an unconditional loyalty vote, that you sustain them whatever they do thereafter.
00:56:25.409 --> 00:56:25.769
And F.
00:56:26.150 --> 00:56:28.614
Whitney Clayton taught that in no uncertain terms.
00:56:29.454 --> 00:56:33.539
But they always give it away while ironically insisting this is not blind obedience.
00:56:33.619 --> 00:56:35.802
But then he literally defined blind obedience.
00:56:36.583 --> 00:56:37.043
Henry B.
00:56:37.304 --> 00:56:57.059
Eyring taught in The Power of Sustaining Faith in 2019 in General Conference, I don't think it was 2019 or 18, that it is literally a sin you should repent of before any Temple Recommend interview or any conference to think that of the leaders of the church as even having human weaknesses.
00:56:58.201 --> 00:56:59.923
And he quoted George Q.
00:56:59.943 --> 00:57:08.277
Cannon saying that if the leaders need disciplining or sorting out, God can do that.
00:57:08.378 --> 00:57:11.061
It is not our job to hold leaders accountable.
00:57:11.503 --> 00:57:12.824
It would be a sin to do that.
00:57:13.105 --> 00:57:14.788
It's for God to kill them, basically.
00:57:14.807 --> 00:57:17.012
And that's been their new narrative.
00:57:17.733 --> 00:57:20.597
And this is literally the opposite of what the scriptures say.
00:57:21.313 --> 00:57:24.237
It's destroyed common consent accountability.
00:57:24.257 --> 00:57:28.804
It is the opposite of what we were taught about the votes growing up.
00:57:29.545 --> 00:57:33.771
And they know, and I think is because their dictatorship is illegitimate.
00:57:33.791 --> 00:57:34.472
They know it.
00:57:34.753 --> 00:57:38.077
They know they're not practicing the written constitution of the church.
00:57:38.617 --> 00:57:43.766
They know they are not practicing a common consent, even though they keep claiming to.
00:57:44.418 --> 00:58:14.684
therefore they have to make sure that no one realises we could all vote at the Mount of Power and it wouldn't break the church that's what they're terrified of so they're now teaching that it's unthinkable to vote against them it's a sin to even contemplate that they might be doing anything wrong and that's a child abusers power hungry charter that you can't ever hold leaders accountable they've got carte blanche they can do anything and it's up to God to stop them not you And that's not how the church was established.
00:58:15.126 --> 00:58:18.771
The church, as originally constituted, understands human weakness.
00:58:19.351 --> 00:58:23.398
It will deal with people going off on a tangent and not being sensible.
00:58:23.858 --> 00:58:25.282
It trusts collective wisdom.
00:58:25.322 --> 00:58:33.835
And then I realized our scriptures are power, and this is one of the reasons the church is relevant to the 21st century and the modern age.
00:58:34.817 --> 00:58:40.264
All of our scriptures teach democracy, and democracy is the future in a civilized world.
00:58:40.737 --> 00:58:47.867
This 20th century was the power of the century of the empowerment of people away from dictators and monarchies.
00:58:48.688 --> 00:58:54.114
The Pearl of Great Price teaches that God runs heaven as a democracy.
00:58:54.655 --> 00:58:58.161
The war in heaven wasn't people getting out guns and shooting each other.
00:58:58.201 --> 00:59:00.583
It was a debate before a vote.
00:59:01.704 --> 00:59:05.250
And God let us vote about the actual plan of salvation.
00:59:05.269 --> 00:59:08.414
And the majority view got one vote.
00:59:08.802 --> 00:59:15.429
And he trusted them because the collective, if you talk things through and think, you will arrive at the right decision.
00:59:15.489 --> 00:59:17.612
The majority will usually be right.
00:59:18.512 --> 00:59:24.398
The Book of Mormon teaches that democracy is the system of secular government that God wants.
00:59:24.599 --> 00:59:31.387
One of the huge story arcs in it is a transition from monarchy to democracy, to elected judges and chief judges.
00:59:31.407 --> 00:59:36.753
And again, it describes a separation of powers that the local judges...
00:59:38.177 --> 01:00:07.994
regional senior judges can be put on trial by a team of lesser judges and that even the overall chief judge can be put on trial and held accountable by a congress or a quorum or whatever of lower ranking judges to remove them from power if needed so that is modelled in the Book of Mormon as how government should work and it teaches that the voice of the people is usually correct If the people by majority vote for something bad, so be it.
01:00:08.094 --> 01:00:09.878
They deserve the cataclysms coming.
01:00:09.918 --> 01:00:14.925
But that's a much more trustworthy system than even a prophet monarch.
01:00:15.947 --> 01:00:26.382
And then the Doctrine and Covenants, with its constitution, section 107, teaches that the church should be led by exactly the same principles.
01:00:26.762 --> 01:00:34.994
Separation of powers in secular government, that is your executive, which is for us a monarchy, for you guys, elected president.
01:00:36.534 --> 01:00:40.119
The legislature, which for you guys is Congress and Senate.
01:00:40.798 --> 01:00:43.181
In Britain, it's the House of Lords and the House of Commons.
01:00:43.981 --> 01:00:45.284
And you have the judiciary.
01:00:46.605 --> 01:00:51.128
And they all have the power to discipline and hold each other accountable.
01:00:51.650 --> 01:00:52.510
And that's essential.
01:00:55.833 --> 01:00:59.338
So, you know, so that...
01:00:59.938 --> 01:01:10.815
from RFM pointing to the moment where we shifted from democracy to autocracy is a very important bit to understand that we lost it early on.
01:01:11.436 --> 01:01:11.896
Yeah, that is
01:01:11.956 --> 01:01:12.798
a great point.
01:01:13.079 --> 01:01:25.739
My brother-in-law at one point pointed out to me that the 107th section of the Doctrine and Covenants provides the process by which the president of the church can be excommunicated.
01:01:27.202 --> 01:01:27.262
And
01:01:27.650 --> 01:01:32.677
Early on in the days of Joseph Smith, that was not a hypothetical.
01:01:33.237 --> 01:01:38.143
The idea right now of Russell Nelson being excommunicated is ludicrous.
01:01:39.065 --> 01:01:39.885
How would it happen?
01:01:40.746 --> 01:01:49.559
I mean, the entire church would have to rise up against him in unity for it to even be taken seriously.
01:01:49.840 --> 01:01:57.530
I remember as a kid, even, saying to my father, why do we bother voting?
01:01:57.985 --> 01:01:58.547
in church.
01:01:59.126 --> 01:02:00.108
Why do we even bother?
01:02:00.568 --> 01:02:03.952
I said, I've never seen anybody vote opposed.
01:02:04.753 --> 01:02:09.318
And to this day, I have never been in the room when someone has voted opposed that I'm aware of.
01:02:10.079 --> 01:02:14.585
I think maybe I've been in the conference center when somebody's voted opposed, but I haven't noticed it happening.
01:02:15.326 --> 01:02:17.929
It's certainly never happened on the local level when I've been there.
01:02:18.909 --> 01:02:21.192
And my father's point was, you're not voting.
01:02:21.972 --> 01:02:23.215
This isn't a democracy.
01:02:23.255 --> 01:02:25.958
You are saying, I sustain this decision.
01:02:26.882 --> 01:02:41.425
And I always was kind of moved by the fact that we'd be watching conference at home, and my father would always raise his right arm to the square whenever they asked to sustain, because he says, this is to the Lord.
01:02:41.445 --> 01:02:45.012
This is an indication of the Lord that I sustain these leaders.
01:02:46.173 --> 01:02:59.818
And so I can see some value in that, but it's very clear, as Peter has pointed out here, that the intention initially was something very different, that you were supposed to vote.
01:02:59.898 --> 01:03:09.030
You know, this whole story about Sidney Rigdon, who Joseph Smith wanted to release as a counselor in the first presidency, and the church wouldn't let him.
01:03:10.233 --> 01:03:22.730
You know, that is a really compelling story that demonstrates that early on, that's the way it was supposed to work, that the church as a whole did everything by common consent.
01:03:23.489 --> 01:03:35.927
And we don't conduct anything by common consent that way anymore, but we also haven't had a lot of the big kinds of revelations that have been adopted by common consent.
01:03:36.289 --> 01:03:43.097
You know, when people talk about the proclamation on the family, it's worth pointing out that that has never been presented to the church as a revelation.
01:03:43.199 --> 01:03:45.641
It has never been sustained by common consent.
01:03:46.302 --> 01:03:59.335
It's just been issued— And it's held up as a kind of scripture or as a kind of revelation, even though it hasn't gone through the process that the canonized revelations have gone through.
01:03:59.894 --> 01:04:03.880
So I think this is a really powerful idea that Peter's raised here.
01:04:03.920 --> 01:04:08.525
And I really think that I'd like to see more of it.
01:04:09.146 --> 01:04:10.708
I'm not seeing any of it.
01:04:10.827 --> 01:04:12.150
Are you seeing any of it, Ian?
01:04:13.634 --> 01:04:14.655
I'm not, I'm not.
01:04:14.715 --> 01:04:15.195
And I agree with you.
01:04:15.215 --> 01:04:16.918
I think Peter's raised another really good point.
01:04:16.938 --> 01:04:19.081
I think section 107 is fascinating.
01:04:19.101 --> 01:04:22.724
You know, he talks about the relationship, the 70 with the 12.
01:04:22.786 --> 01:04:35.722
He talks about the 12 and the keys and the accountability of the 12, about standing high councils at the stake of Zion, form an equal and authority in the affairs of the church and all the decisions to form the presidency or to the traveling high council.
01:04:36.242 --> 01:04:47.788
It's a whole fascinating group of verses there in regard to the structure, the democracy, and holding each quorum accountable in front of a council.
01:04:48.347 --> 01:04:49.710
It's there, the black and white.
01:04:51.110 --> 01:05:05.246
Interestingly, and check me on this, when Joseph Smith started practicing or teaching polygamy, I don't think that, that came as a revelation to an exclusive small group of people.
01:05:05.567 --> 01:05:14.367
It wasn't, I think it was the first presidency that received that revelation, or Joseph Smith, rather, received that revelation about practicing polygamy.
01:05:15.248 --> 01:05:19.773
I don't think it was put to the church as a vote.
01:05:19.793 --> 01:05:21.396
I think there's a few reasons for that.
01:05:21.416 --> 01:05:23.117
I don't think the church would have accepted that.
01:05:23.197 --> 01:05:35.730
And these mechanisms, these structures that 107 discusses quite a bit wouldn't have allowed Joseph Smith to practice polygamy officially.
01:05:35.750 --> 01:05:45.081
I think these instruments would have been activated and he would have been released or been called out or had to change his revelation
01:05:45.141 --> 01:05:46.003
that he would have been accepted.
01:05:46.123 --> 01:05:46.903
Absolutely, yes.
01:05:47.224 --> 01:05:55.436
So the other thing to point to is Hugh Nibley, who said, this church is being taken over by lawyers and businessmen.
01:05:56.797 --> 01:05:59.581
And he said this was the downfall of the Roman Empire.
01:06:00.545 --> 01:06:07.835
Because when you allow the managerial class of people, not leaders, he said leaders are often mavericks.
01:06:07.994 --> 01:06:09.336
They think outside the box.
01:06:09.396 --> 01:06:11.960
True leaders are a bit revolutionary.
01:06:12.000 --> 01:06:13.581
They're not company men.
01:06:13.621 --> 01:06:14.784
They're not predictable.
01:06:14.824 --> 01:06:16.985
You need that variety.
01:06:17.025 --> 01:06:29.501
But he said what destroyed the Roman Empire, and he made a clear comparison to the church, was they became obsessed with money and the profit motive and the business management motive.
01:06:29.634 --> 01:06:34.619
became the dominant mindset and that lawyers also came to power.
01:06:35.061 --> 01:06:36.902
And what do you see now in the church today?
01:06:36.943 --> 01:06:43.231
Every corner of it, including most of the general authorities, are either lawyers or business managers.
01:06:43.711 --> 01:06:45.034
My companion, Peter,
01:06:45.353 --> 01:06:50.440
who was just enrolled into BYU there, said, you nibble it, lift around the corner.
01:06:50.460 --> 01:06:53.164
Actually, I didn't believe him.
01:06:53.204 --> 01:06:56.228
And I said, for over a half an hour, I didn't believe him.
01:06:56.367 --> 01:06:57.809
He said, Ian, go around the corner.
01:06:58.114 --> 01:07:00.557
knock on this door, and that's Hugh Nibbler.
01:07:00.597 --> 01:07:03.963
And I thought, I've been a complete idiot here, because they wound up.
01:07:04.443 --> 01:07:08.228
I went round the cottage, two or three blocks away, knocked on the door, and Hugh Nibbler came to the door.
01:07:08.809 --> 01:07:11.675
And I had a meeting with him, and Jim's not aware of this.
01:07:11.855 --> 01:07:19.146
I met with him for about an hour in his house, three or four blocks from where I was staying for a few weeks in Provo.
01:07:20.507 --> 01:07:23.351
And he talked about some fascinating things.
01:07:23.632 --> 01:07:26.878
And Jim, I think we should do a podcast on this, because it's all coming back to me now.
01:07:27.233 --> 01:07:37.907
One of the things that he talked about, Peter, is he said that the church is far removed from the original constitution of the church as it was, how it's organized, how it's structured.
01:07:37.947 --> 01:07:39.869
He had some grievances.
01:07:40.510 --> 01:07:47.858
I think, Jim, okay, I'll be careful, but he came across a bit tipsy to me.
01:07:47.878 --> 01:07:51.922
I have to say that, guys.
01:07:51.943 --> 01:07:53.786
I have to say that it was a bit tipsy and...
01:07:54.146 --> 01:07:56.489
Yeah, you know, I joined the church at 16.
01:07:56.849 --> 01:07:58.793
I know what tipsy is.
01:07:58.853 --> 01:08:01.518
I grew up with people being tipsy around me.
01:08:01.577 --> 01:08:05.523
But anyway, he seemed very liberal with his quite open talk of a complete stranger.
01:08:05.543 --> 01:08:08.449
I introduced myself at the door and told him, you know, who I was.
01:08:08.509 --> 01:08:09.911
I'd served a mission in Scotland.
01:08:10.351 --> 01:08:13.958
He told me that he had family relatives, of course, in Scotland, Nibley, right?
01:08:14.278 --> 01:08:16.381
Charles Nibley, I think, and other relatives.
01:08:16.481 --> 01:08:19.545
He said he used to go to climb Ben Nevis most years.
01:08:20.024 --> 01:08:21.987
Oh, you told me that story about him
01:08:22.186 --> 01:08:23.448
saying he wanted to climb Ben Nevis.
01:08:23.628 --> 01:08:24.449
I have told you.
01:08:25.149 --> 01:08:27.112
Forgive me, I thought I didn't mention that, but I obviously have.
01:08:27.632 --> 01:08:36.180
So, yeah, we spent about an hour, and he was talking about the church has gone far away from the Book of Mormon, from the original restoration of the church.
01:08:36.902 --> 01:08:39.064
It's becoming too secular.
01:08:39.203 --> 01:08:48.863
It's not respecting the constitutions and the divisions of the organization of the church, the sanctity of the The boat, he made some references to that.
01:08:48.943 --> 01:08:54.291
I didn't spend hours with him, but a good hour, maybe an hour and a half was what I had with him.
01:08:54.792 --> 01:09:06.310
But he talked about the destruction of the church as uninspired changes that were made, man-made changes that were coming that he was concerned about.
01:09:06.721 --> 01:09:11.988
and not following the principles of the Book of Mormon.
01:09:12.007 --> 01:09:13.849
He talked at least half an hour of the Book of Mormon.
01:09:14.109 --> 01:09:22.337
We all know he was an extraordinary Book of Mormon scholar, perhaps the church's most prolific Book of Mormon scholars at that time and probably since.
01:09:22.838 --> 01:09:26.462
But he talked about a lot of, or rather some of the things that you were talking about.
01:09:27.243 --> 01:09:33.109
And so when you mentioned Hugh Dibley, that kind of reminded me of some things that I'd actually forgotten about.
01:09:33.601 --> 01:09:55.304
And so he kind of talked about the disintegration of the church and the church becoming fragmented and dissolving and all these fractions and not really staying on the steady path, the true and narrow steady path and the original constitution as it was revealed through the prophet Joseph Smith.
01:09:55.323 --> 01:09:58.386
So I just want to highlight that because that opened up some...
01:09:59.667 --> 01:10:01.310
But he could see it.
01:10:02.018 --> 01:10:07.007
Yeah, his scholarship hasn't necessarily stood the test of time, but he was a great social conscience.
01:10:07.109 --> 01:10:08.411
He was quite a liberal thinker.
01:10:08.872 --> 01:10:17.170
I found a book soon after our mission called Of All Things, which is loads of quotes from Hugh Nibley on all kinds of topics, not the usual ancient studies stuff.
01:10:17.793 --> 01:10:19.136
And he was quite a radical.
01:10:19.155 --> 01:10:23.021
And it's amazing watching that speech at BYU, how he brought it all there.
01:10:23.042 --> 01:10:29.011
And he also predicted that these managers and lawyers would destroy the historical monuments of the church.
01:10:29.431 --> 01:10:35.921
I think at the time they were gutting the Logan Temple, which Spencer Kimball later said he regretted doing.
01:10:36.402 --> 01:10:41.109
But we've just watched President Nelson destroy the Sistine Chapel of...
01:10:41.858 --> 01:10:42.960
Mormonism or the St.
01:10:43.000 --> 01:11:11.791
Peter's he's absolutely gutted the temple after promising one of his many lies after standing in a press conference which I watched in which he and the people with him promised that they were going to restore and preserve the original Victorian era sort of Brigham Young architecture of the inside in order to shuffle all the workers out and then they just destroyed it and he kept changing his mind and wanting more baptistries and so on and they've they've they've pulped everything.
01:11:12.011 --> 01:11:13.072
They've lost the murals.
01:11:13.752 --> 01:11:24.804
When they sent missionaries to study with the Impressionists in France to create these murals, this monument of the pioneers that was going to greet Christ as his second coming.
01:11:25.305 --> 01:11:36.515
President Nelson, because in his ego as an autocrat, and autocrats always destroy the art of the people that they didn't create because they get jealous of it.
01:11:36.676 --> 01:11:37.797
It's absolutely cliche.
01:11:38.369 --> 01:11:41.543
And this is something the Brits just cannot understand.
01:11:41.604 --> 01:11:48.113
Why on earth was there not people surrounding that temple site in protests and camps?
01:11:48.673 --> 01:11:50.595
protecting it from the bulldozers.
01:11:51.036 --> 01:11:57.682
You have no concept in America, or certainly in Mormon America, of your heritage of preserving historical artifacts.
01:11:58.184 --> 01:11:59.364
We're all over that here.
01:11:59.444 --> 01:12:07.212
You know, I can walk 10 minutes and I'll be in a church that's a thousand years old, and we look after this stuff, or we don't destroy it easily.
01:12:07.252 --> 01:12:10.095
But there seems to be no sense of preservation.
01:12:10.155 --> 01:12:28.024
There was enough protest to save Minerva Taisha's murals in Manti, but They're all sitting there watching the Salt Lake Temple absolutely destroyed after these people promised they wouldn't and that they'd consulted with conservation experts to preserve it all.
01:12:28.765 --> 01:12:29.527
What a lie.
01:12:29.546 --> 01:12:30.970
They were always planning this.
01:12:31.770 --> 01:12:33.012
I mean, it's extraordinary.
01:12:33.233 --> 01:12:36.158
And Brigham Young, and sorry, and Nibley predicted that.
01:12:36.658 --> 01:12:38.220
He said they were going to do it.
01:12:39.462 --> 01:12:39.863
Sorry,
01:12:40.585 --> 01:12:47.235
the Manti Temple, what was interesting to me, is that there was a huge grassroots protest against it.
01:12:48.097 --> 01:12:50.162
And that the church changed its mind.
01:12:50.903 --> 01:12:53.609
But I think it was Elder, was it Elder Rasband?
01:12:53.649 --> 01:12:57.015
I think it was Elder Rasband who insisted that the
01:12:57.074 --> 01:12:58.597
protest had nothing to do with it.
01:12:58.677 --> 01:12:59.520
No, no, no, no, no.
01:13:00.381 --> 01:13:03.387
The prophet had a revelation to make another temple down the road.
01:13:03.688 --> 01:13:04.510
And that's another thing.
01:13:04.833 --> 01:13:06.497
No one needs these extra temples.
01:13:06.596 --> 01:13:07.537
They're mostly empty.
01:13:07.578 --> 01:13:14.951
They're desperately trying to persuade elderly Utahns to serve missions and second and third missions because they can't keep the buildings open.
01:13:15.310 --> 01:13:19.557
They no longer require a critical mass of members in an area to have a temple.
01:13:19.899 --> 01:13:27.671
Because when you have hundreds of billions of dollars, you can't buy people's hearts and converts with money, but you can buy temples.
01:13:27.731 --> 01:13:31.497
You can build as many of those as you like to keep the illusion of growth going.
01:13:31.938 --> 01:13:37.123
So to kind of get back to and wind up sort of the overall narrative here and what the question was.
01:13:37.503 --> 01:13:43.329
So I've identified why the church is crashing, that the leadership has lost its democracy.
01:13:43.369 --> 01:13:46.113
Therefore, it's lost the collective wisdom of all the members.
01:13:46.193 --> 01:13:47.094
It doesn't consult.
01:13:47.515 --> 01:13:53.560
And immediately you do that, you have a completely disconnected oligarchy living in a bubble.
01:13:54.042 --> 01:13:57.645
They've taken on the values of the lawyers by normalizing lying.
01:13:58.337 --> 01:14:01.788
They have patronizing people by withholding information from them.
01:14:02.250 --> 01:14:10.817
They've taken on the ethos of the business managers of judging success by gaining unbelievable eye-watering wealth.
01:14:11.681 --> 01:14:30.029
You've got all these apologists being delusional that literally they can hand a checkbook to Jesus and isn't his central bank coming in good shape and the church will save the world, when they've forgotten that the first thing to fritter into non-existence is the theoretical concept of money when society collapses.
01:14:30.069 --> 01:14:39.082
As soon as you have the kind of disasters they're expecting in the last days, their stocks and shares evaporate overnight and no good was done with that wealth.
01:14:39.778 --> 01:14:51.795
Whereas if you got a classroom of 10, of 30 primary kids who are 10 years old, it would take them 20 minutes to decide how to spend$200 billion exactly how Jesus would.
01:14:52.796 --> 01:14:55.340
But our first presidency and apostles can't.
01:14:55.820 --> 01:14:56.622
So they haven't.
01:14:57.002 --> 01:14:58.203
They're just growing the money.
01:14:58.243 --> 01:15:02.130
They haven't spent any of it even to save the dying church.
01:15:02.649 --> 01:15:07.858
That's how useless they are and how little imagination or inspiration they have.
01:15:08.481 --> 01:15:10.104
That's how bad it is.
01:15:10.564 --> 01:15:12.367
So what's the solution?
01:15:12.407 --> 01:15:13.408
What's the way forward?
01:15:13.429 --> 01:15:33.996
As things are, young people are not going to remain in an institution that is institutionally racist and still hasn't apologized for the racism of the past and still hasn't addressed the racism in its scriptures, which is there still canonized, including in the Doctrine and Covenants telling people not to liberate slaves.
01:15:35.810 --> 01:15:49.469
You are not going to have young people stay in a religion that's the last institutionally sexist institution in their lives, where women are second-class citizens, where they're not allowed authority or decision-making power.
01:15:50.090 --> 01:15:52.072
It's simply unsustainable.
01:15:52.091 --> 01:16:04.630
And increasingly, they are not going to stay in an organisation that treats them and their LGBTQ friends as anathema, as impossible, as outside of God's plan and purpose.
01:16:05.122 --> 01:16:06.764
They just aren't.
01:16:07.305 --> 01:16:13.592
So the reality is until the church changes and liberalizes socially, it's doomed.
01:16:14.154 --> 01:16:23.907
The young people are not staying, never mind the lying and the child abuse machine that it has become, which usually is older people who care about that.
01:16:24.688 --> 01:16:28.854
And that's enough for them to leave, but certainly for the next generation.
01:16:29.274 --> 01:16:34.521
Sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia, total no-go zones.
01:16:34.978 --> 01:16:37.161
however people try to deny that.
01:16:37.240 --> 01:16:38.762
You just have to accept that reality.
01:16:41.747 --> 01:16:44.430
So it's doomed.
01:16:44.489 --> 01:17:01.122
While you have elderly people with dementia appointing nepotistically their friends and family to all the decision-making and leadership roles and the bureaucracy, they will never have a missionary program that works, even though they've got the money to hire Bill Gates.
01:17:01.182 --> 01:17:03.728
They could hire Bill Gates to sort their IT out.
01:17:04.068 --> 01:17:12.523
They could hire the most expensive and skilled Nobel Prize winning advertisers to create a missionary program that works.
01:17:13.305 --> 01:17:16.430
We have nothing that appeals to the educated middle classes.
01:17:16.791 --> 01:17:22.621
The only people we're baptizing now are the very poor and vulnerable, usually single males who are lost.
01:17:23.362 --> 01:17:31.171
When we, you know, I asked my Elder Scorn president, when was the last time we baptised a middle class family?
01:17:31.212 --> 01:17:37.979
And he said, oh, I know exactly, it was the Rayfields, you know, who joined the church in the 70s.
01:17:39.282 --> 01:17:41.344
And that's pretty much my experience as well.
01:17:42.225 --> 01:17:44.648
This is a religion, and here's the positive vision.
01:17:44.667 --> 01:17:46.329
So it's doomed.
01:17:46.831 --> 01:17:48.332
It's already gone.
01:17:48.372 --> 01:17:52.318
Wards fall below a threshold from which they cannot recover.
01:17:52.770 --> 01:17:54.372
And it's happening in America now.
01:17:54.672 --> 01:17:56.135
It's already happened here long ago.
01:17:56.154 --> 01:18:07.109
As soon as you lose so many of your young people, you've got no one to look after the elderly, no one to fulfill the callings, no one to be the missionaries, and it quickly disappears.
01:18:07.489 --> 01:18:13.637
Your wards become a hospice, but you're just caring for the elderly till they die, and that's it.
01:18:13.717 --> 01:18:15.279
That will be the end of your congregation.
01:18:15.921 --> 01:18:22.449
And all you can do then is start merging the wards and the stakes until all we have is online church, and then it's gone.
01:18:23.234 --> 01:18:30.082
And that's already happened here in Britain, or it's about to, and across Europe and in most of the rest of the world.
01:18:30.143 --> 01:18:37.631
So these people who spent so much energy going into the world to convert the global church, they've then completely neglected us.
01:18:38.233 --> 01:18:42.538
They've ignored us while we were screaming at them, we won't be here soon.
01:18:42.578 --> 01:18:49.327
The church will functionally cease to exist in Britain or have any hope of recovery in the next five years.
01:18:49.346 --> 01:18:51.229
It will be that fast.
01:18:51.841 --> 01:18:53.823
And certainly next 10.
01:18:54.564 --> 01:18:57.608
And the changes that need to happen are going to be difficult and painful.
01:18:57.627 --> 01:19:03.654
So they need to be happening now because you can't pull them out of a hat overnight then in five years' time when it's too late.
01:19:04.175 --> 01:19:05.195
It's already too late.
01:19:07.698 --> 01:19:08.739
So it's doomed.
01:19:09.501 --> 01:19:10.742
Just accept that.
01:19:11.063 --> 01:19:12.264
Have the reality check.
01:19:12.965 --> 01:19:15.006
So what are the immovable objects?
01:19:15.507 --> 01:19:17.489
We have to ordain women.
01:19:18.190 --> 01:19:20.412
We will have to have LGBTQ inclusion.
01:19:20.453 --> 01:19:21.194
It's a given.
01:19:21.537 --> 01:19:24.802
we're going to have to address our racist scriptures and be honest about them.
01:19:25.543 --> 01:19:34.238
But the point is, Mormonism has within itself the tools to do all of that, and always has, because we're meant to be run as a democracy.
01:19:34.278 --> 01:19:43.212
And we have an overriding philosophy of learn from your mistakes, repent and do better, eternal progress and progression.
01:19:43.252 --> 01:19:52.394
We map God's interaction with mankind as being very dependent on the social developments of mankind historically.
01:19:52.434 --> 01:20:00.122
When the people were living in small tribes, we have the patriarchal religion that is small tribe based.
01:20:01.043 --> 01:20:12.978
As soon as the first nation states began in the Sumerian region in the Fertile Crescent, boom, Abraham is there in one of the first places to develop writing.
01:20:13.761 --> 01:20:15.604
And you then have a different phase.
01:20:15.644 --> 01:20:19.028
You have a national sense of the Israelites.
01:20:19.668 --> 01:20:22.532
And that's how Bronze Age society functions.
01:20:23.432 --> 01:20:26.576
The second, you then have international empires.
01:20:26.817 --> 01:20:29.739
The Empire of Alexander and then the Roman Empire.
01:20:30.260 --> 01:20:31.100
Jesus comes.
01:20:31.282 --> 01:20:32.182
Christianity.
01:20:32.222 --> 01:20:33.783
The international religion.
01:20:33.804 --> 01:20:37.047
And each time it's more sophisticated.
01:20:37.087 --> 01:20:38.550
It's less brutal.
01:20:38.569 --> 01:20:41.073
It's more modern in a sense.
01:20:41.632 --> 01:20:42.014
And then...
01:20:43.010 --> 01:20:49.400
Restoration, the Industrial Revolution, the next leap forward into technology in the world of today.
01:20:50.103 --> 01:20:57.997
Joseph Smith saying, and it's with this modern idea, stop being led by dictators.
01:20:59.819 --> 01:21:01.904
Religion is about common consent.
01:21:02.265 --> 01:21:03.587
We all learn from each other.
01:21:03.627 --> 01:21:05.050
Everyone is a priest.
01:21:05.474 --> 01:21:06.775
Everyone is a prophet.
01:21:07.277 --> 01:21:13.865
And some argue, despite his polygamizing, he was moving towards women having certainly at least a parallel priesthood.
01:21:14.886 --> 01:21:25.341
And the idea, this should be the religion for the space age, because he also said every culture in the world has had gods talk to them.
01:21:25.793 --> 01:21:28.277
So we're not the only true church anymore.
01:21:28.597 --> 01:21:36.689
And the church leaders, Brigham Young and Joseph Smith said, Mormonism is all truth, even if it comes from heathens, even if it comes from scientists.
01:21:37.168 --> 01:21:37.510
Boom.
01:21:37.970 --> 01:21:41.574
Humanism as a religion, that will last forever.
01:21:42.256 --> 01:21:45.159
Well, Peter, we're coming up here on a hard stop.
01:21:47.141 --> 01:21:51.028
But, I mean, there's a lot to digest there.
01:21:53.090 --> 01:21:57.779
But we very much appreciate your willingness to come and share this with us.
01:21:58.801 --> 01:22:00.283
Ian, do you have any final words here?
01:22:00.304 --> 01:22:00.323
I
01:22:01.246 --> 01:22:02.146
have no final words.
01:22:04.171 --> 01:22:05.554
All right.
01:22:06.135 --> 01:22:07.618
We'll continue talking.
01:22:08.800 --> 01:22:10.002
We'll let that stand.
01:22:10.042 --> 01:22:13.509
We appreciate you spending your time here with us, Peter.
01:22:13.529 --> 01:22:13.949
Thank you.
01:22:14.177 --> 01:22:15.180
Thank you for being here.
01:22:15.421 --> 01:22:16.805
And as always, thank you, Ian.
01:22:16.826 --> 01:22:17.788
Thank you.
01:22:17.869 --> 01:22:24.350
To all of you listeners, we will see you next time on Inside Out.