A Conversation with Richard Bushman

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Thank you.
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Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Inside Out.
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I am Ian Brooks.
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As always, I'm here with the illustrious Mr.
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Jim Bennett.
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Jim, how are you today, sir?
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I'm as illustrious as ever.
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Thank you very much.
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Good, good.
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And to describe someone as illustrious means that they are well-known, respected, and admired for past achievements.
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Well, I think that
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describes our guest.
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I guess you were about to say that.
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I was just about to say that.
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And that word aptly describes our next guest, who is quite an extraordinary and highly distinguished individual.
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And so it's a great honor, actually, to welcome Richard Lyman Bushman.
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Richard, welcome, and thank you for taking the time to be with us today.
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Happy to be here.
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Okay.
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Perhaps a better way to introduce you to our listeners, many of whom I'm sure know you already, some perhaps less familiar with your work, is if we could kindly ask you to provide an overview of your professional and church life.
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I think that would help in terms of context, especially those who are familiar with your work.
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For example, your education, work, callings, authorships, historical, research, documentaries, et cetera.
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And I believe that also you were a lead historian for the Joe Smith Papers Project.
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So quite an exciting background.
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If you could share some information about yourself for our listeners, that would be wonderful.
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Well, as I got to thinking about this occasion, I thought there's quite a few things I might say about myself that could be interesting to readers.
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So I may go on five or 10 minutes.
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Is that okay?
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Absolutely.
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And as mentioned earlier, this is really important for context because you've done some extraordinary work.
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And your background, your experience informs your perspective on so many things.
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So yeah, please take whatever time you need.
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Well, as I started jotting down some notes...
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It sort of fell into three categories.
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One is my spiritual life, which I mean what motivates me, what drives me.
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Second is my academic career.
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And the last is my church life.
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So those are the three chunks of what I have to say.
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I was born in Salt Lake, but I think it's quite important to know that I was part of the diaspora.
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My father left Utah during the Depression because they couldn't get work.
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He was a fashion artist and freelance.
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And so we moved to Portland where he got a job with Mother and Frank.
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And I grew up in Portland.
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My parents were married in the temple, but I don't think they were very active in the church until they got to Portland.
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when they became very active.
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And so I was raised to Latter-day Saint the usual ways until I got to college, intending to go to BYU.
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But I happened to graduate 1949 at a time when Ivy League colleges and especially Harvard were revising their admission policy.
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They had relied too heavily on prep schools in the Northeast, and they wanted to recruit students from around the country.
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So I was invited out of class one day to talk to Dana Cartman, very New England name, and eventually ended up with what was called a national scholarship.
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This is a scholarship aimed at finding people all over the nation.
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So I was part of that class.
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And it really changed my life deeply.
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I felt very much alone there.
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I loved Harvard.
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But it had some effects, too.
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And I'll tell this story.
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I've told it many times.
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You may have heard it.
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but it keeps taking a new shape.
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I was studying history and science.
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I was sort of interested in a liberal arts view on science.
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I had studied first physics and then math my first couple of years, and then I went into history and science and worked with a very distinguished scholar.
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I saw him every couple of weeks.
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He'd sign me something to read, and we'd talk it over.
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His name was I.B.
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Cohen.
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And he, I don't know, he became sort of interested in me.
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I was a little different type coming from the West.
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He knew I was a Mormon.
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And one time, he said to me, he said, you know, Richard, around here, people think Mormonism is garbage.
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And it was a little bit of a shock to me.
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I don't remember stinging or...
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feeling fear, but a little resentful that he had treated my people that way as garbage.
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But it represented something deeper that was going on.
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I was encountering sort of 20th century skepticism and materialism and more specifically logical positivism, which argued that the only things that were real were things you could touch or sense.
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and then deduce the conclusions.
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It was sort of stylish at that time.
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It came from Bertrand Russell.
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I became quite enamored of it, so much so that I had, in the middle of my sophomore year, decided I couldn't say I knew God existed.
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There wasn't enough evidence.
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Well, what's the evidence?
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There's a God.
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And so I was in the unfortunate position that I'd been interviewed at Christmas time in my ward in Salt Lake to go on a mission.
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And by the time I got home in the spring, this resolve and plan was undercut by the fact I didn't believe in God.
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And I told my stake president that.
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He said, oh, don't worry about that.
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It'll all change in the mission field.
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Got into the mission field and Jay Howard Maughan, my mission president from Logan, said, do you have a testimony?
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I said, no, I don't.
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And he said, okay, well, would you read this book and tell me what you think of it?
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Put me on a train, sent me up to Halifax, Nova Scotia with the Book of Mormon in my hand.
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And I had labored and fought over that, asked all the questions, all the difficult questions that set people.
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They were a different set then, but I listened to them all.
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Could the witnesses be trusted?
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Were they all his family and friends on the church?
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So all the questions I could.
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And by the time the mission president came back to Halifax for his own meeting, we were all to hear a testimony and I stood up and said, I know the Book of Mormon is right.
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So I I came with a testimony, and for years I told that story, sort of the story of a young man hit by 20th century materialism and skepticism, who then overcomes it by going on a mission, becomes a faithful member of the church thereafter.
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But five or six years ago, the incongruity in the story struck me.
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And that is that I said I didn't believe in God, but here I was in the mission field.
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What was I doing in the mission field if I didn't believe in God?
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And so I came to the realization I didn't really not believe in God.
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I really, I'll tell you frankly, a believer by nature, I just believe these things.
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They just seem right and true to me.
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So I don't have to fight in very much But there he was in the mission field as a one-time atheist or a temporary atheist.
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And I realized that the real problem was not I.B.
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Cohen and logical positivism.
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It was my long, drawn-out discussions at the dinner table with my fellow students.
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We would sit for hours.
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after dinner and sit around and talk about everything under the sun.
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And my religion came up a lot and I had to talk about it a lot.
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And I realized that the problem was not that I didn't believe, but I couldn't explain my belief in a way that was intelligible.
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And I felt helpless and sort of defeated by that.
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And I'll tell you, brethren, that experience lies at the heart of my intellectual and spiritual life.
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My great aim is to make my beliefs intelligible, not persuasive in the sense that it compels belief in the way scientists try to compel people to believe with the evidence and experiments and so on.
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But I just want to make it intelligible so they could at least understand where I was and why I believed as I did.
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And that's the story of my life.
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When I went to BYU, I wanted to make BYU a Harvard in the West.
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I wanted it to be a believing Harvard.
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I somehow wanted to blend that high culture and intellectual life of Harvard with my belief in the church and where I believe in the church was one among many.
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I didn't insist that everyone accepted it as the only true gospel, but I just wanted it to be understandable.
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And so that's really what I've tried to do and what I encourage in others is to write for a broad audience and try to be as intelligible as you possibly can.
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Not necessarily bearing testimony, but being clear.
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and coherent.
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So that's sort of the heart of my spiritual life.
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And I'm not combating, I don't argue with people.
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I don't even try very hard to make them believe.
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I just want to make myself understandable to people.
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So that's part one.
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I'm going on a long time, but I hope it's okay.
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You take the time,
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Richard.
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Okay.
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So my academic career, I decided after I got back from my mission to study history.
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And so I've been a history historian ever since.
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But I didn't study church history.
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I wasn't interested in Mormonism as a topic.
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I was interested in American cultural history.
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and especially early American history.
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I will admit that I had a plan that I would try to study American cultural history up to the Civil War, sort of anti-Bellum, colonial anti-Bellum history, with the possibility that sometime down the line, I could write about the church in a deep cultural depth, that I would know enough about the world in which Joseph Smith was brought up that I could explain him in some later way.
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But that didn't mean that I just did religious topics.
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By any means, I didn't wrote everything under the sun.
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And no one would think of me as a historian of religion Then my colleagues, they were just a social and cultural historian.
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Religion was all part of that.
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So that was sort of the way I was going along.
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I started teaching at BYU, then like many academics, I started moving around, taught at Boston University, and for a number of years moved to the University of Delaware.
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Finally, I ended up at Columbia all the time writing books.
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I wrote a book called From Puritan to Yankee about character in the social order from 1690 to 1765, and that was my dissertation.
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And I was writing all sorts of books along that way.
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Meanwhile, I was very interested in what Mormon historians were doing.
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I knew Leonard Derrington very well.
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I was in on the organization of the Mormon History Association, and I would respond.
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If they asked me to write something, I would do it.
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So when Leonard asked me to write a book about Joseph Smith before the church organization, I wrote Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, and I would write an article.
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here and there.
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But still, you know, when I was saying, now I'm doing research, it was on another subject.
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And that was through up to 2018.
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In 2018, I published a book called American Farmer in the 18th century.
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So I was very interested in farming.
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It was partly to see the background that would explain Joseph Smith and his culture and, you know, So there was always that churchy thing in the background.
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But I was seriously writing for other historians.
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I didn't relate it to the church at all.
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That's changed in recent years.
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Ever since I did rough stone ruling, I really thought of myself as a historian of religion.
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Like lots of old men, you sort of go back to your roots when you get into your later years, want to write about them.
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So I recently published a book and bachos and skull plates.
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So that's sort of where I am career-wise, professionally.
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That's what I'm up to.
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All right, final, the church life.
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I was involved in church service, that is taking positions in the church.
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really from my mission on.
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Our mission, I'd started my mission during the Korean War, and the mission was cut back deeply.
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Instead of having 150 missionaries for New England and the Miratimes, we had 50.
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We had a third of our normal contingent.
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I was the assistant to the mission president, and I didn't have a companion.
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He gave me a car and had me travel all over New England, meeting with the missionaries.
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But we were so short on missionaries, he didn't even give me a companion.
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Then when I finished, my mission was in New England, I went back to Harvard.
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I'd been at Harvard two years before my mission, served, then came back for my last two undergraduate years and my five graduate years.
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So Claudia and I were meeting the heads of the mission for all of New England.
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So I was very busy in that.
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And then from then on, when I went to BYU and so on, I just had sort of one church jump after another.
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I had an elders current president and I did a scout master and a seminary teacher.
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branch president or bishop three times.
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I was a state president of the Boston State.
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I was a counselor at L.
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Tom Perry, and when he was called to the general authorities, I was made president.
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And as soon as I got to New York, I was called as a patriarch in 1989, and so I've been a patriarch ever since then.
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That's sort of the end of it.
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church assignment should unfold on.
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So my view of the church is the view of someone who's trying to manage the church in one capacity or another.
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And it's had a great effect on my life.
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One time I was in Williamsburg, for a conference of the Council of Early American Historians.
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I was on the council that year.
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And Williamsburg is sort of the center where the organization is settled and where the William& Mary Quarterly is published, which is our number one journal.
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And I went to dinner with the editor of the journal, a man named Michael McGifford.
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And he came from a, very strong Presbyterian family.
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His grandfather had been a very distinguished theologian, but Mike had a lot of trouble believing.
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He was a Unitarian, a little sort of thin on his belief, but torn, because he really should believe, and couldn't, and back and forth.
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So when we were coming home from a dinner one night, just He asked me, how can you believe, Richard?
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You know, he knew I was a Mormon.
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It's hard to believe in Mormonism in the activity world.
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That's really wild and crazy.
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And so he thought, how do you do it?
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And, you know, I worked up this argument, and that argument was sort of rational.
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And he sort of nodded his head.
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You know, my payment bishop, As a bishop, I have people come to me with problems that I can't begin to handle.
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I don't know what in the world to say to them.
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If I couldn't pray to God for help, I just couldn't survive.
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And he said, oh, now I see what you mean.
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Your religion is, your God is functional.
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You believe because it works in your life.
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And I think that's true for all my by church assignments.
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I'm sort of a believer because even to be a scoutmaster, that's a heck of a job, or a seminary teacher with a bunch of ruffians come to my house every morning to study the gospel or to cause me trouble.
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No, you just have to have help.
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So I would say I'm sort of a believer I believe the truth of it, and I'm never in trouble with that.
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My trouble was not Joseph Smith.
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There were a lot of arguments against him in my day, too, but they all seemed sort of a matter of interpretation, and they didn't seem decisive.
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My problem always been with God, is there God?
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But with a God that sort of was there in my life, in my experience, in my church jobs, that was the God I worshiped.
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Well, that's kind of a lengthy tale.
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I hope your viewers really would follow me that far.
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Well, I think they will.
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That is quite extraordinary and distinguished, Maria.
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You've achieved so much.
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And again, it's a great honor to have you with us here today, Richard.
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When the three of us met last week to discuss and plan and prepare for this conversation, we agreed that we would, Jim and I was very excited actually about asking a number of questions that we'd been thinking about for quite some time.
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And Jim and I was like, well, I want to look to ask him this question.
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I want to ask him this question.
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And so we were discussing back and forward about, you know, what's the most appropriate way of using and respecting your time and asking some pretty interesting and compelling questions.
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And so we agreed that we would send you in advance a number of questions for your review.
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And your response, I think, earlier on, before we started the podcast, is that you seemed to be quite comfortable with the questions, many of which I think you've probably heard a number of times.
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So if you are okay, Richard, if we could get into some of those questions, that would be great, if we can.
00:23:15.663 --> 00:23:24.635
So the first question, so Jim and I, we put these questions together, and I've got my name next to some of my questions.
00:23:24.695 --> 00:23:29.603
He's got his name next to some of his questions, so I'll ask my questions, and we'll kind of take it in turn.
00:23:29.702 --> 00:23:32.991
And of course, Jim and I share some of the questions as well.
00:23:33.031 --> 00:23:34.173
We were thinking about the same things.
00:23:34.834 --> 00:23:53.281
And so my first question is, you know, perhaps the most important work or some of the most important work that you've done, academic, historical, religious, historical work you've done, was writing Rust on Rolling, which I have a copy of, which I think everybody, I'm sure, or many people have a copy of.
00:23:53.803 --> 00:23:56.365
It's quite an extraordinary piece of work.
00:23:57.127 --> 00:24:04.096
And the title suggests that Joseph Smith started out as a rough or unpolished character.
00:24:05.417 --> 00:24:10.364
And again, correct me if this is an incorrect assumption, but do you think...
00:24:10.845 --> 00:24:15.009
I was thinking about why you gave it the title.
00:24:15.150 --> 00:24:28.046
Is that because you saw Joseph Smith as a, again, relatively unpolished and like a stone rolling down the mountainside, the rough edges are brushed off?
00:24:28.481 --> 00:24:32.988
and becomes much more polished, more refined individual.
00:24:33.028 --> 00:24:35.711
Is that how you saw Joseph Smith?
00:24:35.730 --> 00:24:40.176
And was that behind the reason why you gave the book the title?
00:24:42.339 --> 00:24:42.721
It was.
00:24:42.941 --> 00:24:44.623
It was also a colorful phrase.
00:24:45.223 --> 00:24:47.767
I thought it was really sort of a fun title.
00:24:48.528 --> 00:25:07.384
I discovered the background of that some years later When I was visiting a Masonic Lodge, it had an open house one weekend, and we went to this Masonic Lodge and walked through it.
00:25:08.765 --> 00:25:19.816
And on the dais, you'd go up, there was a big chair sitting on it, and on the steps, there were two big stones.
00:25:20.997 --> 00:25:25.560
One was a very rough-hewn stone, and the other was quite smooth.
00:25:25.580 --> 00:25:26.826
It had been worked.
00:25:28.127 --> 00:25:30.951
And we asked the guide about it.
00:25:30.971 --> 00:25:32.933
He says, that's what masonry does for you.
00:25:34.095 --> 00:25:42.385
It takes men who are just rough human stone and smooths them off and makes them beautiful and sculptural.
00:25:43.125 --> 00:25:49.153
And I realized that that got into Joseph's language because he'd become a mason.
00:25:49.855 --> 00:25:51.016
So that's where it came from.
00:25:51.036 --> 00:25:52.939
I had no idea when he chose it.
00:25:53.799 --> 00:26:04.441
But yeah, Actually, that question, I never thought of it that way, and I don't know why, since I'm the one who used the title.
00:26:04.480 --> 00:26:17.198
And in some ways, it does describe Joseph in that he started out pretty good.
00:26:17.238 --> 00:26:32.798
That is, you know, your first major work is a 500-page history that goes rolling on and on.
00:26:34.181 --> 00:26:38.507
Yeah, that's some polish required to do such a thing.
00:26:39.367 --> 00:26:42.632
And the same is true for his revelations.
00:26:43.432 --> 00:27:01.192
The first revelation, as it appeared in the Book of Commandments, the first where God spoke through him, other than the Book of Mormon, has the phrase, the works and the designs and the purposes of God cannot be frustrated, neither can they come to naught.
00:27:01.893 --> 00:27:03.013
That's July 1828.
00:27:03.114 --> 00:27:06.337
He is just, you know, 22 years old.
00:27:06.597 --> 00:27:08.780
Those are the first words he spoke.
00:27:08.800 --> 00:27:16.390
He's speaking for God, for himself, and starts out in that sort of grand manner.
00:27:17.131 --> 00:27:20.796
I thought that was, you know, that's pretty startling.
00:27:21.656 --> 00:27:21.977
So...
00:27:23.458 --> 00:27:26.580
I think, and the first chapter of the Book of Moses.
00:27:27.001 --> 00:27:28.824
That's a gorgeous piece of writing.
00:27:29.605 --> 00:27:38.354
I asked an intellectual historian friend of mine to read it one time when he was visiting here and gave it to him as bedside reading.
00:27:39.635 --> 00:27:44.901
He came back the same morning and I said, what do you think of that?
00:27:44.942 --> 00:27:46.583
He says, it's so beautiful.
00:27:47.523 --> 00:27:50.047
You know, it's just a lovely piece of language.
00:27:50.086 --> 00:27:52.068
So that's June 1830.
00:27:53.410 --> 00:28:05.385
So you can't say that he didn't have a gift for writing under the Lord's inspiration right from the start.
00:28:05.946 --> 00:28:08.589
But he was a country boy.
00:28:08.609 --> 00:28:22.890
His neighbors thought of him as sort of a liar, as sort of a treasure seeker, a person who claimed gifts.
00:28:23.617 --> 00:28:27.344
So he served as a very low status in society.
00:28:28.185 --> 00:28:29.888
He's the lower class.
00:28:29.989 --> 00:28:32.512
He's the lower working class.
00:28:33.434 --> 00:28:35.699
And he was always very sensitive about that.
00:28:36.559 --> 00:28:41.327
And he suffered from what's called by the Marxists, the permanent insult of class.
00:28:41.429 --> 00:28:49.182
He's just, just because you are that low grade, you're always thought of as lesser class.
00:28:49.506 --> 00:28:51.308
He was very, very sensitive about that.
00:28:51.910 --> 00:29:06.150
But by the end of his life, you know, you have Josiah Quincy and Charles Francis Adams, two hotshot Boston Brahmins, come to Nauvoo, and they're very impressed with him.
00:29:06.932 --> 00:29:08.693
He can talk to them casually.
00:29:08.753 --> 00:29:09.715
He can make jokes.
00:29:11.238 --> 00:29:22.001
Josiah Quincy says he had a natural gift for writing as much as anyone he'd ever known and for leading as much as anyone ever had known.
00:29:22.041 --> 00:29:31.237
And he could go to Washington, he could talk to reporters, he could talk to the president of the United States, he wasn't intimidated by any of these.
00:29:31.277 --> 00:29:44.678
So all of his life experiences had really honed his capacities and his gifts as a talker and a personality.
00:29:47.137 --> 00:29:47.558
Thank you.
00:29:48.279 --> 00:29:53.267
Jim, you had, I think, the next three questions that you compiled.
00:29:53.446 --> 00:29:54.248
Oh, okay.
00:29:54.268 --> 00:29:56.211
If you could lead us on those, that would be great.
00:29:56.692 --> 00:30:02.180
Well, my questions focus primarily on the Book of Mormon.
00:30:02.539 --> 00:30:09.809
Ian made fun of me when I said I was your number one fan, but I am indeed your number one fan.
00:30:09.931 --> 00:30:14.612
I'm such a huge fan of of everything I've read of yours.
00:30:14.652 --> 00:30:24.944
And I had mentioned to you that my family, when Rough Stone Rolling was published, my parents gave all of the children a copy of Rough Stone Rolling as our Christmas present.
00:30:26.046 --> 00:30:33.355
And just an absolutely magnificent work that really provides...
00:30:33.715 --> 00:30:36.038
I think it's the definitive work about Joseph Smith.
00:30:37.220 --> 00:30:41.045
But one of the things that I found interesting in it was...
00:30:42.273 --> 00:30:43.895
your comments about the Book of Mormon.
00:30:43.997 --> 00:30:45.960
Rough Stone Rolling isn't about the Book of Mormon.
00:30:46.000 --> 00:30:47.141
It's about Joseph Smith.
00:30:47.882 --> 00:30:55.733
But one of the things you said in it that I thought was really interesting is you said something to the effect of the Book of Mormon refuses to argue its own thesis.
00:30:56.976 --> 00:31:03.266
That is, it was presented by Joseph Smith and early members of the church as a history of the Indians.
00:31:04.627 --> 00:31:13.984
And in fact, there's nothing in it that really reflects the what you would expect a 19th century history of Native Americans to be.
00:31:14.244 --> 00:31:21.055
There are no wigwams, and there are no teepees, and there's none of the cliches or any of that.
00:31:22.717 --> 00:31:29.226
You said something along the lines of, you go to looking for that, and you find ancient American Christianity instead.
00:31:29.266 --> 00:31:37.258
And this has always struck me as evidence that Joseph was a translator, not the author.
00:31:38.145 --> 00:31:41.770
He didn't quote frequently from the Book of Mormon throughout his life.
00:31:42.771 --> 00:31:56.270
And in fact, didn't seem to even be all that intimately familiar with its contents, which if he had written it, if he was the author of the work, that doesn't make any sense.
00:31:57.712 --> 00:32:03.039
So my question is, how well did Joseph actually know the Book of Mormon?
00:32:04.141 --> 00:32:14.306
And And just any commentary you can give on sort of his relationship with the text as a translator as opposed to an author.
00:32:15.867 --> 00:32:16.689
How you view that?
00:32:18.731 --> 00:32:19.011
Well,
00:32:19.212 --> 00:32:29.385
we're in a very confused state right now on how translation occurred.
00:32:30.114 --> 00:32:33.617
And this isn't an argument between Mormons and non-Mormons.
00:32:34.198 --> 00:32:36.361
It's among Mormons themselves.
00:32:38.041 --> 00:33:00.145
And, you know, we have Roy Skousen's thesis that he sees in the seer stone of the hear him and thumb him the very words and just reads them off.
00:33:01.007 --> 00:33:05.491
So that it's sort of straight dictation of what he's seeing.
00:33:05.531 --> 00:33:24.592
But on the other hand, there are others who say, believe me, Latter-day Saints, like Sam Brown, or what's his name, Brent Gardner, who say, no, it's a loose translation.
00:33:25.532 --> 00:33:35.652
He's And he's taking the words and sort of adapting them to make it clear to a 19th century audience what the book is.
00:33:36.333 --> 00:33:39.356
So it's got a lot of evangelical language in it.
00:33:39.416 --> 00:33:58.717
It's got all these passages of King James English, which Nephi could not have known, and many other items that are right on the 19th century because it is a book that was to be read by the 19th century.
00:33:58.797 --> 00:34:00.859
The Nephites didn't read the Book of Mormon.
00:34:01.641 --> 00:34:03.522
It was written for us.
00:34:04.324 --> 00:34:08.188
And so it had to be translated in those ways.
00:34:10.992 --> 00:34:16.179
So I don't know how we're going to stand on that.
00:34:17.300 --> 00:34:33.192
I would say that I just don't think you can make the case that Joseph Smith composed it himself.
00:34:34.132 --> 00:34:35.795
It's just too complex.
00:34:35.876 --> 00:34:36.958
It comes out of the blue.
00:34:37.719 --> 00:34:42.485
Automatic writing doesn't begin to explain the complexity of the book.
00:34:43.367 --> 00:34:45.489
And it's kind of a strange argument.
00:34:45.710 --> 00:34:46.670
He couldn't have written it.
00:34:47.552 --> 00:34:53.922
But I just have never been the least bit persuaded by any historians.
00:34:54.657 --> 00:34:59.784
This book just came out of Joseph Smith's experiences.
00:35:00.246 --> 00:35:08.416
You can get little bits of this and little bits of that, but the overall structure of the narrative is just too complex.
00:35:09.438 --> 00:35:13.764
So what I'm getting around to, I'm giving you very low answers today.
00:35:13.784 --> 00:35:14.625
I'm sorry about that.
00:35:16.748 --> 00:35:23.657
This is Rand Hardy's position, a very distinguished scholar of Mormonism, I think most here.
00:35:24.353 --> 00:35:26.315
Our listeners will know the name.
00:35:27.157 --> 00:35:29.079
He believes in Skousen.
00:35:29.920 --> 00:35:36.288
That it's a fairly timely controlled thing that Joseph Smith almost read off.
00:35:36.909 --> 00:35:37.969
It's right there for him.
00:35:38.971 --> 00:35:44.237
On the other hand, Grant says there's a lot of 19th century material in it.
00:35:45.237 --> 00:36:00.126
So if you've got a Nephi text by an original Nephi, and then Joseph Smith just reading out the words and running them down, they're almost forced to an intermediary translator.
00:36:00.146 --> 00:36:02.670
I mean, it's a wild hypothesis.
00:36:03.112 --> 00:36:04.713
You can't begin to see how it works.
00:36:05.434 --> 00:36:19.117
But someone who is taking Nephi, turning it into a text that can be understood in modern times, and then Joseph Smith being told the very words that he put down.
00:36:19.905 --> 00:36:22.168
So I don't feel comfortable with that.
00:36:22.188 --> 00:36:24.231
It's just too strange.
00:36:25.172 --> 00:36:28.737
But it's sort of where we are at this moment.
00:36:31.041 --> 00:36:36.648
Well, that actually goes into my second question, which I think you've answered to some degree.
00:36:36.768 --> 00:36:40.153
I wanted to ask about the translation process.
00:36:40.273 --> 00:36:42.237
Did he just read the words off the stone?
00:36:45.101 --> 00:36:47.423
My mission president, I had two mission presidents.
00:36:47.463 --> 00:36:48.505
One I shared with Ian.
00:36:49.025 --> 00:37:06.907
And then Ian went home, and my mission president went home and was replaced by Joseph Fielding McConkie, Bruce R.''s son, who on our mission gave zone conferences where he talked about what he considered to be very controversial ideas in the church.
00:37:07.668 --> 00:37:12.773
And he mocked the idea of Joseph reading off of a seer stone.
00:37:13.409 --> 00:37:14.972
He said, that's absolutely ridiculous.
00:37:15.012 --> 00:37:22.079
The only reason we have that is that David Whitmer said it many, many years after he had been disaffected with the church, and that's just not true.
00:37:22.099 --> 00:37:36.996
And whereas we seem to have come around to the fact that, yes, there are other contemporaneous witnesses that talk about the seer stone and not the German thumb and the rock and the hat and all that stuff that is getting us into trouble here at the moment.
00:37:37.896 --> 00:38:00.168
But the one document we have that Joseph Smith wrote contemporaneously, or at least the revelation he received, is the eighth section of the Doctrine and Covenants where Oliver Cowdery is berated because he wanted to translate, but he took no thought, see if it was, to ask me.
00:38:00.208 --> 00:38:07.300
And that the Lord said, you have to study it out in your mind, which very much...
00:38:08.130 --> 00:38:17.021
suggests that Joseph was an active intellectual participant, that he wasn't just a newsreader, that this wasn't just dictation.
00:38:17.061 --> 00:38:32.744
And as you've talked about, the fact that it's written in King James English is very much, I think, Joseph Smith demonstrating that that's, with his understanding of the King James Bible, that's what religious language is supposed to sound like.
00:38:33.485 --> 00:38:36.588
The revelations of the Doctrine and Covenants are written in King James English.
00:38:37.346 --> 00:38:44.414
I don't think that King James English is what we're all going to be talking in the Celestial Kingdom.
00:38:45.737 --> 00:38:51.103
That just seems to be something that's tied to Joseph Smith's particular time and place.
00:38:52.927 --> 00:39:09.335
So I kind of want to combine a couple of questions here in that I'm curious as to what you believe the relationship is between the text on the plates was and the text in the Book of Mormon.
00:39:09.376 --> 00:39:12.780
Because I know I've just read your book about the gold plates.
00:39:12.860 --> 00:39:15.043
You believe in the existence of the gold plates.
00:39:15.103 --> 00:39:17.766
You believe that there was a Moroni.
00:39:18.467 --> 00:39:27.458
I'm curious if you also believe some of the other sorts of fantastical claims like, do you believe the three Nephites are still wandering the planet?
00:39:28.559 --> 00:39:32.284
And if so, why don't they ever speak to us in general conference?
00:39:33.525 --> 00:39:33.565
No.
00:39:33.826 --> 00:39:34.686
Maybe they are.
00:39:36.028 --> 00:39:36.670
Maybe they are?
00:39:36.690 --> 00:39:36.771
Yeah.
00:39:37.652 --> 00:39:40.936
Some of these brethren, they age very slowly.
00:39:42.139 --> 00:39:45.764
President Nelson may very well be one of them.
00:39:46.706 --> 00:39:47.447
We'll see.
00:39:48.748 --> 00:39:52.173
So that's kind of a sprawling sort of question.
00:39:52.233 --> 00:39:56.701
But how do you reconcile sort of these fantastical elements?
00:39:57.623 --> 00:39:59.045
And how do you...
00:40:01.057 --> 00:40:07.784
And what do you think the translation, what was going on in Joseph Smith's brain while he was translating?
00:40:08.284 --> 00:40:14.490
I remember in Ruston and Rowling at one point you talk about what's missing from all of these accounts is Joseph's sense of himself.
00:40:15.532 --> 00:40:28.965
And I'm very curious as to, in your studies, what you've come to conclude with regard to Joseph's sense of self, sense of his own prophetic mission while he's engaged in producing the Book of Mormon.
00:40:31.905 --> 00:40:35.030
Well, I agree with you on two points.
00:40:35.489 --> 00:40:41.976
One, the Doctrine and Covenants implies you really have to think and concentrate in order to do this.
00:40:42.557 --> 00:40:43.860
Study it out in your mind.
00:40:43.900 --> 00:40:47.884
That could be just penetrating into your inner spirit.
00:40:47.923 --> 00:40:53.650
It doesn't necessarily mean composition that you're dreaming up words.
00:40:53.751 --> 00:40:55.432
It could, but it doesn't have to.
00:40:55.472 --> 00:41:04.586
On the other hand, I think that Fogel is a Book of Mormon text as we have it has lots of 19th century stuff in it.
00:41:05.427 --> 00:41:11.074
I think there's a lot of reshaping of things.
00:41:11.735 --> 00:41:17.440
I couldn't nail down which ones precisely, but I have some nominations.
00:41:19.543 --> 00:41:29.393
So I think it has to be thought of as a loose translation from the original text, which we, of course, have no way of knowing.
00:41:29.922 --> 00:41:30.682
of what it was.
00:41:30.722 --> 00:41:37.231
So, sometimes you just don't know the answer.
00:41:37.811 --> 00:41:45.340
You can ask the questions, but there's just not enough evidence to give you the answer, and I think you just have to rest with that.
00:41:46.702 --> 00:42:12.317
When it comes to miracles, I mean, do we believe that it was at Choseph 9 or one of the nights was elevated where the three Nephites The thing is, once you admit there's a realm of supernatural existence, supernatural intelligence, you can't tell what's possible.
00:42:13.398 --> 00:42:23.233
Just because something's fantastic to our frame of mind doesn't mean that our frame will dominate the whole universe.
00:42:23.833 --> 00:42:28.822
Everything that happens has to be a consideration of us.
00:42:29.505 --> 00:42:34.273
It even changes for us over the centuries.
00:42:35.655 --> 00:42:39.559
On Earth, among earthly people, I'm reading a book about elevations.
00:42:41.081 --> 00:42:47.271
Early saints would have a beatific vision, and they would be lifted in the air for a couple of hours and stand there.
00:42:47.771 --> 00:42:50.775
Huge amount of evidence that this actually happened.
00:42:51.637 --> 00:42:54.221
Do you see how it can possibly happen?
00:42:55.262 --> 00:42:57.485
We know that can't be.
00:42:58.402 --> 00:43:06.695
Well, the guy who's making the argument, Yale historian, says there's the evidence.
00:43:07.155 --> 00:43:07.777
It's all there.
00:43:07.817 --> 00:43:17.070
So you just have to suspend belief.
00:43:17.612 --> 00:43:19.795
I think it's wrong to say it couldn't have happened.
00:43:20.255 --> 00:43:21.458
That's out of the question.
00:43:22.199 --> 00:43:24.222
That's an arrogant statement.
00:43:24.902 --> 00:43:25.764
That's a little hard word.
00:43:25.864 --> 00:43:26.846
I don't mean to use it.
00:43:27.010 --> 00:43:28.632
but it goes too far.
00:43:29.512 --> 00:43:33.858
But I try to sort of live with as it is.
00:43:33.898 --> 00:43:56.186
Richard, just to jump in real quickly, for clarity, if it is done, you know, looking, reading, restoring, Joseph Smith, did he use the sea stone and the plates interactively to translate the Book of Mormon?
00:43:57.153 --> 00:43:58.396
But I had no idea.
00:44:00.498 --> 00:44:05.425
We know he looked into either the Sears tune or the Irwin Thummel.
00:44:05.927 --> 00:44:06.748
The Irwin Thummel, right.
00:44:07.329 --> 00:44:14.559
And we have accounts that the plates lay covered on the table.
00:44:15.480 --> 00:44:18.525
So he may not have seen the plates at all.
00:44:18.585 --> 00:44:20.206
He had to have them.
00:44:21.047 --> 00:44:23.411
They had some effect on him.
00:44:23.492 --> 00:44:24.873
We don't know exactly what.
00:44:25.954 --> 00:44:35.623
But, you know, he got them out every morning from under the bed or wherever they were, put them on the table beside him, but he didn't necessarily look at the plates.
00:44:38.728 --> 00:44:40.128
Jim, did you ask your questions?
00:44:40.889 --> 00:44:48.418
Those are my Book of Mormon-related questions, and my next one's changed the subject, so I'll turn it back over to you, Ian.
00:44:49.099 --> 00:44:51.541
Yeah, I just had one more quick question, if I may.
00:44:51.862 --> 00:44:58.418
You know, when I was, you know, when I joined the Church of 16, the missionaries gave me while I was investigating the Book of Mormon, I read it.
00:44:58.438 --> 00:45:14.965
I wasn't well-educated at the time or literate, but there were passages of it, apart from the wars and all the stuff that was going on, all the battles, there were elements of the Book of Mormon that I did understand, even at the age of 16 and being somewhat uneducated at the time.
00:45:15.527 --> 00:45:17.630
And I felt that the characters, Richard, were real.
00:45:17.670 --> 00:45:20.434
Nephi and Baroni was real.
00:45:20.454 --> 00:45:21.916
It could really resonate with them.
00:45:22.657 --> 00:45:25.820
with some of them, and I felt a spirit when I was reading about them.
00:45:26.601 --> 00:45:34.931
I think you probably answered this already, but were the characters in the Book of Mormon real, in your opinion,
00:45:36.112 --> 00:45:36.833
historically?
00:45:37.373 --> 00:45:42.780
I still, in back where you were in your day, I think they're real.
00:45:42.800 --> 00:45:47.244
I mean, this is a very ancient time.
00:45:47.284 --> 00:45:55.157
As you go back, there's less and less direct evidence that you can assemble.
00:45:58.302 --> 00:46:04.550
There's not a lot of evidence for Jesus, but we've got some.
00:46:05.612 --> 00:46:08.876
And so we believe that he actually walked the earth.
00:46:11.119 --> 00:46:16.708
Same is true for Homer, or some of the characters in Homer's writings.
00:46:17.889 --> 00:46:24.887
But I took a course in Greek history at Harvard, a guy named Sterling Dow taught.
00:46:25.827 --> 00:46:35.121
And they believe now that, you know, behind the Odyssey and Homer's writings, there was some historical reality.
00:46:35.902 --> 00:46:40.150
It's been sort of revised and reshaped, but there's something there.
00:46:40.190 --> 00:46:47.199
So I said, yeah, it's not only a matter of you read it and it's real stuff.
00:46:48.581 --> 00:46:51.126
It isn't entirely, Joseph Smith couldn't make this up.
00:46:51.489 --> 00:46:52.512
It's a town like that.
00:46:53.233 --> 00:46:58.681
But that, you know, they seem like real people doing real things.
00:46:59.442 --> 00:47:03.007
So I'm sort of with you in your earlier state.
00:47:05.010 --> 00:47:14.985
And then, Jim, you had a question here that changes the subject, but we thought this was a really good and interesting question about the priesthood.
00:47:16.188 --> 00:47:19.873
Well, yeah, so, and we're going to get into...
00:47:20.610 --> 00:47:22.853
some little more controversial stuff here.
00:47:22.893 --> 00:47:51.018
So I am of the opinion that one of the biggest challenges, or really at the root of just about every problem with the modern church, is this sort of false doctrine of prophetic infallibility, that we're never willing to admit that we make mistakes, The church institutionally is never willing to admit that we make mistakes.
00:47:51.199 --> 00:48:00.411
I mean, we make these kind of blanket concessions that, yes, mistakes are possible and mistakes happen.
00:48:01.893 --> 00:48:08.081
Then President Uchtdorf gave that famous talk where he says that in the history of the church, people have simply made mistakes.
00:48:08.943 --> 00:48:15.936
But when you ever start to sort of ask, what are those mistakes, you you're shut down fairly quickly.
00:48:16.396 --> 00:48:18.298
You're really not allowed to pursue that.
00:48:18.338 --> 00:48:23.545
So this may be putting you on the spot a little bit.
00:48:24.786 --> 00:48:27.469
So feel free to answer how much or how little you would like to.
00:48:27.510 --> 00:48:40.425
But do you consider, for instance, I am of the opinion that the ban on priesthood and temple blessings for people of African descent was a colossal mistake.
00:48:41.090 --> 00:48:49.840
rooted in 19th century racism and the 19th century justification for slavery that black people bore the curse of Cain.
00:48:49.860 --> 00:49:01.934
And it continued, in my estimation, it continued partially because it was reflective of the mores of the time for a very long time.
00:49:01.974 --> 00:49:08.942
It wasn't really until the early 20th century or even mid-20th century where people start to question that, hey, maybe this isn't a good idea.
00:49:09.858 --> 00:49:24.458
But I think it continued even longer because people weren't willing to say Brigham Young could have been wrong on something like this or that his successors could have been wrong in perpetuating it.
00:49:25.480 --> 00:49:29.505
So I'm curious where you fall down on that kind of an issue.
00:49:29.525 --> 00:49:32.048
Do you think the priesthood ban was a mistake?
00:49:33.110 --> 00:49:38.077
Do you think this sort of idea of prophetic infallibility is a problem in the church today?
00:49:40.865 --> 00:49:44.431
Well, I'm certainly willing to entertain the possibility it was a mistake.
00:49:45.331 --> 00:49:49.797
I mean, I think it's asked too much of general authorities to be infallible.
00:49:50.599 --> 00:49:52.581
That's asking an impossible thing.
00:49:52.601 --> 00:50:10.827
On the other hand, I'm a little uneasy about imposing our sense of what is absolutely right and what is absolutely wrong on the past.
00:50:13.690 --> 00:50:26.487
We, especially right now, we're in a moment where we're merciless and insisting and all that oppression that was involved in slavery and so on was just a moral horror.
00:50:27.469 --> 00:50:32.795
And all we could do is condemn those people for making this horrible mistake.
00:50:33.938 --> 00:50:38.184
And the same is true for Brigham Young's decision.
00:50:41.538 --> 00:51:04.030
It's not that I insist on its infallibility, but I think if you step back, there are other ways, there are other possibilities about the importance, about the long-term effects of that decision that at least you can think about.
00:51:05.391 --> 00:51:15.856
If you say, Brigham Young's great mission was to create a unified science society in the Great Basin.
00:51:16.476 --> 00:51:22.804
He had to gather people from all over the world and create the culture, which still sustains the church to a large extent.
00:51:23.364 --> 00:51:27.791
That Utah culture, it's sort of the root place for keeping us going.
00:51:28.190 --> 00:51:29.932
So that's an important mission.
00:51:30.773 --> 00:51:43.561
If he had introduced priesthood, temple, which would lead to intermarriage, he might have put screens in the church that were filled by other churches.
00:51:44.141 --> 00:51:52.550
The Methodists split, the Southern Baptists split over the question of slavery in that very decade.
00:51:53.652 --> 00:52:07.389
By postponing it until the time when sort of the American culture had shifted, when the 1978 change made, everyone rejoiced and we're thrilled.
00:52:08.994 --> 00:52:13.739
And there's probably little quarters of racism remaining that's through everywhere.
00:52:14.559 --> 00:52:18.224
But it didn't come anywhere near dividing the church.
00:52:19.005 --> 00:52:21.146
Bruce McCauley went along with it.
00:52:21.327 --> 00:52:21.987
Everyone did.
00:52:23.170 --> 00:52:27.675
So I wouldn't really make that argument as what I truly believe.
00:52:28.375 --> 00:52:34.282
But it makes me a little humble about me passing judgment on Brigham Young's decision.
00:52:37.697 --> 00:52:40.202
I think that's a very thoughtful and helpful answer.
00:52:42.125 --> 00:52:57.329
Whereas, notwithstanding, I believe that and understand that there were many people back then who lived at that time who had white folks as well, of course.
00:52:57.568 --> 00:53:08.344
Obviously, black folks had a big problem here with slavery, obviously, but I believe a lot of people found the whole thing abhorrent.
00:53:09.525 --> 00:53:26.288
And, you know, the concept of slavery, owning someone, you know, and the concept of the decision to ban or restrict sacred temple blessings, endowment, ceilings, et cetera, and preacher authority, equal rights to black people.
00:53:26.909 --> 00:53:30.653
I think there were people back then who found that a problem.
00:53:31.675 --> 00:54:08.773
And, you know, for me personally, an element of this is quite simple is it right or is it wrong and from what I've researched it's fundamentally was a mistake was wrong a terrible decision in my opinion to ban and restrict black folks from these sacred blessings notwithstanding what you said earlier about is this a on the part of Brady and Byung was this a strategic decision looking at the impact of slavery and these decisions and how they split other churches.
00:54:09.713 --> 00:54:17.364
And I just think if I was catapulted back in time, into that time, would I feel the same way I did now?
00:54:17.405 --> 00:54:18.065
And I think I would.
00:54:18.146 --> 00:54:20.769
It's about a sense of right and wrong.
00:54:20.809 --> 00:54:26.036
And I don't think, for the most part, I don't think history changes that.
00:54:26.418 --> 00:54:30.724
And I'm not alone in thinking and feeling like this, of course.
00:54:30.764 --> 00:54:33.623
I think a lot of people have a problem with this.
00:54:34.643 --> 00:54:40.431
And the church has produced that essay, you know, The Race and the Priesthood, which I thought was quite interesting.
00:54:40.451 --> 00:54:45.396
It was a trigger for me to explore that issue and other issues.
00:54:45.876 --> 00:54:51.543
But the church, of course, is not willing to, at this stage, you know, make it a formal apology.
00:54:51.784 --> 00:54:55.166
I think the church says we don't receive them or we don't give apologies.
00:54:56.168 --> 00:54:59.813
And we all know that the church leaders are not perfect.
00:54:59.853 --> 00:55:08.340
I think they will tell you privately and probably publicly, that they're not perfect, that they are not infallible, that they make mistakes, and elder doctors acknowledge that.
00:55:08.981 --> 00:55:22.295
I think the race of the priesthood will continue to be a very difficult issue for the church, and I don't have any answers how it gets around that, other than just to come out and say, hey, we messed up, we made a mistake.
00:55:23.257 --> 00:55:25.900
Jim, you had another couple of...
00:55:26.760 --> 00:55:29.059
Sorry, Richard, do you have any comments on that?
00:55:29.219 --> 00:55:30.579
Do you want to respond to that?
00:55:30.699 --> 00:55:32.141
Or if not, we can go to the next question.
00:55:33.001 --> 00:55:35.505
Well, I understand your views completely.
00:55:35.525 --> 00:55:39.889
I think there are a lot of people in the church who feel the same way.
00:55:39.909 --> 00:55:52.119
It's just that I'm a little uneasy delivering moral judgments on people.
00:55:52.179 --> 00:55:56.704
I mean, of course, there are people you detest, think they were awful.
00:55:57.405 --> 00:56:07.027
This may be one of them, but it was a long ago and many different circumstances.
00:56:07.608 --> 00:56:16.478
So I'll just say I understand you perfectly and agree that you have a position that's shared by many people in the church.
00:56:18.079 --> 00:56:19.460
Yeah, thank you.
00:56:19.521 --> 00:56:25.788
Jim, you had another, looking at the list of questions, you had another couple of questions that you wanted to ask.
00:56:26.128 --> 00:56:26.528
Sure.
00:56:27.550 --> 00:56:27.869
Go ahead.
00:56:28.130 --> 00:56:49.597
So, you know, as a history professor, as an author, as a scholar, you have engaged more deeply, I think, with a lot of the thornier aspects of church history and doctrine than most members of the church, most lay members of the church have or will.
00:56:49.637 --> 00:57:07.016
And I'm very curious, as in your experience, because I know there are a lot of people who who read Rough Stone Rolling, and in my experience, I found it to be a tremendous testimony builder.
00:57:07.856 --> 00:57:24.447
It was really fascinating to me to see Joseph Smith as a human being and not as a demigod, but also to see that the thing that I found so remarkable about it was Joseph Smith was sort of continually surprised by his own revelations.
00:57:24.567 --> 00:57:28.271
He would get so far and say, okay, well, this is the church, this is the restoration.
00:57:28.311 --> 00:57:32.155
Then all of a sudden it's, oh, wait, here's the vision of the three degrees of glory.
00:57:32.315 --> 00:57:35.097
Oh, wait, here's a vision of baptism for the dead and temple work.
00:57:35.237 --> 00:57:37.159
Oh, wait, there's more, there's more.
00:57:37.199 --> 00:57:40.561
And Joseph seemed to be really surprised by that.
00:57:40.722 --> 00:57:52.514
And that's neither here nor there, other than to say that that understanding of Joseph Smith gave me a greater appreciation for him and a greater...
00:57:53.250 --> 00:57:59.077
testimony, if you will, that he was indeed divinely inspired and a prophet of God.
00:57:59.117 --> 00:58:06.186
Other people have read Rough Stone Rolling and had the opposite reaction.
00:58:07.206 --> 00:58:15.157
And they felt, oh my gosh, I didn't know Joseph Smith married Fanny Alger, his housemaid, who was a teenage girl.
00:58:15.317 --> 00:58:20.682
I didn't realize that Joseph Smith did all of these things that were not talked about in Sunday school.
00:58:20.722 --> 00:58:33.110
And When those kinds of things are discussed in gospel doctrine classes, if they ever are, because they very seldom are, they get shut down very quickly.
00:58:33.150 --> 00:58:49.853
And so I'm very curious, particularly with your experience, because you have obviously engaged with these kinds of ideas, engaged with the more controversial ideas, the more difficult doctrines and historical events.
00:58:50.876 --> 00:58:52.438
How much freedom...
00:58:53.570 --> 00:58:58.878
or academic freedom, for lack of a better term, do church members actually have?
00:59:00.019 --> 00:59:11.577
If church members are concerned about the fact that Joseph Smith was married to teenage girls, how can they express those concerns?
00:59:11.617 --> 00:59:13.559
How can they get those concerns resolved?
00:59:15.262 --> 00:59:20.771
Where is the line for expressing disagreement with church leaders and or church doctrine?
00:59:22.373 --> 00:59:22.494
Mm-hmm.
00:59:24.289 --> 00:59:25.471
Well, it's strange.
00:59:25.572 --> 00:59:34.121
I got, after the book came out, I got people coming up saying, oh, you saved my testimony.
00:59:34.161 --> 00:59:37.045
My father was baptized because of this book.
00:59:37.106 --> 00:59:38.827
All sorts of high praise.
00:59:38.867 --> 00:59:42.411
And I thought I was really rolling.
00:59:42.431 --> 00:59:44.273
I'd done something wonderful.
00:59:44.333 --> 00:59:48.518
Then I got people saying, my son left the church because of your book.
00:59:48.960 --> 00:59:49.800
He couldn't take it.
00:59:49.820 --> 00:59:53.806
And I felt bad about it.
00:59:54.210 --> 01:00:07.445
that often people would say, well, it's a wonderful book and I liked it, but it's not a book you'd want to show to a new convert to the church.
01:00:07.565 --> 01:00:10.028
You'd have to really be sturdy in the church.
01:00:10.909 --> 01:00:12.351
And I say that's just the reverse.
01:00:13.273 --> 01:00:23.525
The people who have trouble with the book are people who have been brought up in the church and have this idealized view of the problem that's disrupted new converse readings.
01:00:23.905 --> 01:00:27.250
They just think, well, he's an interesting guy, did lots of wonderful things.
01:00:30.233 --> 01:00:34.617
But, you know, you hate troubling people.
01:00:35.778 --> 01:00:47.030
But all through my early life, people would ask later during the question, you've looked at all the material in the church headquarters about Joseph Smith.
01:00:47.590 --> 01:00:51.556
Have you ever found anything that disrupted your testimony?
01:00:51.576 --> 01:00:54.887
And he would assure them, He had not.
01:00:55.869 --> 01:01:05.704
But as long as you're worried that if you turn over a stone, there'll be a scorpion underneath it, you just cannot be secure.
01:01:06.465 --> 01:01:14.097
You have to be willing to go with all the facts, get them out in the open, or you'll always be unsteady.
01:01:14.137 --> 01:01:27.898
And it's true that, you know, the grandmothers of the church who want to have a Josephic love, who's idealized a perfect gentleman, sweet and good on all occasions.
01:01:29.260 --> 01:01:38.670
And they're troubled a little bit, but it's to save their grandsons and daughters who need to know the whole story in order to stay in the church.
01:01:39.630 --> 01:01:43.436
So that's sort of my answer to the first part of your question.
01:01:45.257 --> 01:01:51.367
The second part is, how do you talk about these things without getting your bishop all upset.
01:01:52.728 --> 01:01:56.914
I think we're getting better, certainly in Manhattan.
01:01:57.313 --> 01:02:07.065
You can talk about anything, and no one in my ward, no one gets excited, but they'll get up and sort of bear a testimony of their uncertainty.
01:02:09.206 --> 01:02:11.630
So there's lots of room for...
01:02:11.650 --> 01:02:31.192
I think in general, we have to look at the larger picture that we have a kingdom of God based on revelations where we try to be brothers and sisters to each other and help each other out.
01:02:32.632 --> 01:02:37.038
And I don't think that's helped by attacking the general authorities.
01:02:38.119 --> 01:02:46.670
I think the fact that we believe there's revelation anchors not only the revelation to President Nelson, but the revelation to us.
01:02:47.554 --> 01:02:50.056
It's the idea that God is guiding the church.
01:02:50.717 --> 01:02:58.527
I think we have to respect that and be very generous to one another.
01:02:59.329 --> 01:03:05.376
And it's true that some authorities are not this, and the generous does, or at least the people you hear about.
01:03:05.757 --> 01:03:06.958
I'm never having trouble with them.
01:03:08.239 --> 01:03:14.708
But it's a complicated thing.
01:03:15.268 --> 01:03:16.289
But I do say this.
01:03:17.793 --> 01:03:21.800
I think if your heart is pure, your mind can roam free.
01:03:23.782 --> 01:03:29.431
What you want to do is make sure you're close to the Lord and that you're seeking his guidance.
01:03:30.353 --> 01:03:34.679
And then you can think anything you want and pursue any thoughts.
01:03:35.802 --> 01:03:39.807
I don't think it's necessary to tell them to everybody you ever knew.
01:03:40.208 --> 01:03:40.849
I have thoughts.
01:03:41.451 --> 01:03:44.355
I wouldn't tell the people I ever knew.
01:03:44.394 --> 01:03:45.637
But...
01:03:46.945 --> 01:03:48.989
I talk about it with my wife.
01:03:49.088 --> 01:03:50.389
I talk about it with my friends.
01:03:50.951 --> 01:03:52.032
I don't try to hide them.
01:03:52.893 --> 01:03:56.418
But I'm not so sure that my ideas are so right or true.
01:03:56.699 --> 01:03:58.019
They have to be expressed.
01:03:58.820 --> 01:04:05.289
The world has to know all the things I'm believing and thinking.
01:04:06.371 --> 01:04:20.835
So I think if you get in a position where you're teaching or writing your ideas, trying to persuade others that you know the truth that others don't know, then you're probably gonna get in trouble.
01:04:22.518 --> 01:04:29.746
Well, it's interesting the way you frame that because it kind of goes along with where I have found the line.
01:04:30.326 --> 01:04:54.132
Something that I've said frequently on this podcast, but on other occasions is the amount of tolerance or acceptance for a wide variety of opinions and a wide variety of beliefs within the church is, I think, much higher than people realize, that there is a much broader tolerance for that.
01:04:54.172 --> 01:05:04.849
But the converse to that is the amount of tolerance for any criticism of any specific leader is much lower than people realize.
01:05:06.090 --> 01:05:16.289
I think I would get in more trouble for making fun of a general authority's choice and ties than I would for expounding on my ideas of Heavenly Mother.
01:05:17.291 --> 01:05:35.777
I mean, I don't think anybody would mind if I had these wild-eyed ideas that I'm expounding, but the minute I go on any degree of attack, no matter how small, and say I really got a problem with Elder So-and-So, and I don't see any...
01:05:36.673 --> 01:05:38.476
tolerance for that at all.
01:05:40.237 --> 01:05:41.038
Jim, I have some
01:05:41.159 --> 01:05:41.699
advice for you.
01:05:42.179 --> 01:05:42.500
Yes.
01:05:43.099 --> 01:05:44.181
Leave Salt Lake City.
01:05:45.041 --> 01:05:45.943
Move to New York.
01:05:46.724 --> 01:05:48.045
Things are triggering in the church
01:05:49.146 --> 01:05:49.226
here.
01:05:49.246 --> 01:05:51.329
I keep trying to tell my wife to do that.
01:05:52.829 --> 01:05:57.574
We visit New York on occasion and we visit my cousin who is in your ward.
01:05:57.614 --> 01:06:11.496
And my grandparents, my mother's parents, were the presidents of, I think it was the Eastern States Mission at the time, in the early 1970s.
01:06:12.556 --> 01:06:22.567
And the church owned 973, I think, no, 937 Fifth Avenue, which is- Is those the building, Will?
01:06:23.007 --> 01:06:23.829
Yeah, yeah.
01:06:24.028 --> 01:06:26.690
And I remember going there as a very young child.
01:06:26.811 --> 01:06:28.693
I was four or five years old.
01:06:29.773 --> 01:06:36.605
And I have since told my wife that if we are ever billionaires- we're going to buy that building.
01:06:37.445 --> 01:06:39.449
It's been on the market for$50 million.
01:06:40.088 --> 01:06:41.050
Yeah, yeah.
01:06:41.331 --> 01:06:45.396
So if you want to go in on it with me, I'd be happy to do that.
01:06:46.878 --> 01:06:50.521
But no, I absolutely love Manhattan and I love New York.
01:06:51.242 --> 01:07:04.313
But I think you may be right in that the tolerance level for some of that is higher when you get outside of Salt Lake City and you get outside of the Mormon Corridor.
01:07:05.193 --> 01:07:11.800
But I still think geography becomes less and less important when we have vehicles like this.
01:07:11.900 --> 01:07:16.704
You know, this podcast, you're in Manhattan and Ian's in Canada and I'm in Sandy, Utah.
01:07:17.726 --> 01:07:19.708
And this is going to be public.
01:07:19.989 --> 01:07:37.461
And if I were to start using this as a platform to criticize a general authority, I don't know that it would matter that I was doing it in the hinterlands or if I'm doing it in Utah, it's public enough that I think the brethren get concerned about it.
01:07:38.163 --> 01:07:50.635
But that's sort of been my experience in that I think people get all bent out of shape with the idea that, oh, I can't express my point of view.
01:07:51.817 --> 01:08:12.266
And I find that when I express my point of view and I divorce it from attacking a leader for it, Instead of saying, I think Elder so-and-so is wrong for teaching this, and instead I just engage the idea and say, I have a problem with this idea, I've never gotten into trouble for that.
01:08:12.286 --> 01:08:24.298
Whereas I've never gotten into serious trouble, but I've brushed up against a little bit of trouble when I bring in the name of a general authority, if that makes sense.
01:08:24.800 --> 01:08:26.782
I'm sure that's true for lots of people.
01:08:28.162 --> 01:08:35.029
Richard, what you said earlier, I mean, you said that really struck me was that if you have a pure heart, you know, your mind can roam free.
01:08:35.869 --> 01:08:44.177
You know, when I was, the Race and the Priesthood essay triggered a lot of investigation for me at that time, I think 2013.
01:08:44.899 --> 01:08:49.603
I think I was serving on the state presence at the time and I had, I thought I had a pure heart.
01:08:50.024 --> 01:08:51.725
My questions were honest.
01:08:51.784 --> 01:08:52.706
I had lots of questions.
01:08:52.725 --> 01:09:01.127
The essays were rolling out From there on, I think we released a number of different essays.
01:09:01.627 --> 01:09:02.488
I had a bunch of questions.
01:09:02.547 --> 01:09:05.851
I wasn't alone in asking my questions.
01:09:05.872 --> 01:09:10.717
There were members in Azteca who had similar questions, some of whom approached me and I had no answers.
01:09:11.278 --> 01:10:01.029
But when I tried to ask questions, I was shut down and told that I should be behaving differently because of the state presidency at the time and need to be acting with a little bit more decor, a bit more understanding my role and my calling etc and I felt shut down and I didn't feel I felt when I went to church that my right to ask and to express my view express an opinion openly honestly constructively ask questions that was taken away and I found that incredibly frustrating and this is in British Columbia in Canada so New York sounds much more liberal perhaps if I want to go back to church I should go to New York sounds like a much more open church culture.
01:10:01.250 --> 01:10:01.711
What
01:10:03.353 --> 01:10:05.935
I haven't seen in that situation is insecurity.
01:10:05.956 --> 01:10:09.942
The people you ask the questions don't really have answers.
01:10:10.722 --> 01:10:19.515
They can answer lots of questions, but this just baffles them when they feel frustrated and unable to do their jobs properly.
01:10:19.534 --> 01:10:24.662
So it's a difficult situation for everybody.
01:10:25.090 --> 01:10:26.412
And I agree.
01:10:26.431 --> 01:10:41.396
I think the church would do so well if it could, you know, be mature about this and don't isolate people or don't make them feel, don't intimidate them and don't kind of label them as apostate because they have questions.
01:10:41.497 --> 01:10:43.038
Let's listen to people.
01:10:43.158 --> 01:10:43.779
Let's respect them.
01:10:43.820 --> 01:10:44.341
Let's love them.
01:10:44.360 --> 01:10:44.981
Let's be kind.
01:10:45.042 --> 01:10:48.228
I mean, you know, it is the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
01:10:48.247 --> 01:10:49.309
It's Jesus Christ's church.
01:10:50.011 --> 01:10:52.094
You know, we teach that teaching.
01:10:52.322 --> 01:10:52.983
We love people.
01:10:53.042 --> 01:10:53.823
We build people.
01:10:54.243 --> 01:10:55.104
People have questions.
01:10:55.565 --> 01:10:56.766
God created us like this.
01:10:56.827 --> 01:10:57.807
We have a free mind.
01:10:58.509 --> 01:11:00.171
Allow us to ask questions.
01:11:00.751 --> 01:11:05.296
And if we don't have the answer, just say we don't have the answer.
01:11:05.336 --> 01:11:07.399
Let's just be honest and say we don't know the answer to that question.
01:11:07.439 --> 01:11:10.681
And I respect that approach.
01:11:11.002 --> 01:11:12.003
Jim, you had another question.
01:11:12.484 --> 01:11:16.889
And then I had a couple of final questions for Richard, which are on the list.
01:11:16.929 --> 01:11:19.492
Do you want to take your next question?
01:11:20.193 --> 01:11:20.953
Okay, well...
01:11:21.537 --> 01:11:28.765
And I'm sorry to keep putting you on the hot seat, because this question is a little bit loaded.
01:11:29.645 --> 01:11:42.618
But one of the things that I am seeing with the rising generation, particularly, is that there is no tolerance for anti-LGBTQ bigotry.
01:11:43.980 --> 01:11:57.216
And a lot of young people are sort of coming up in the church and saying, They're not going through the kind of huge faith crises that we talk about, people in my generation or other generations.
01:11:58.457 --> 01:12:01.943
They're just sort of shrugging the church off like an ill-fitting suit.
01:12:02.783 --> 01:12:04.966
It's like, oh, well, they don't accept gay people.
01:12:05.186 --> 01:12:08.792
I just don't have any interest in this, and they're just sort of walking away.
01:12:08.832 --> 01:12:18.706
And I see LGBTQ inclusion as being one of, if not the primary...
01:12:19.489 --> 01:12:24.596
catalyst for that disaffection among the rising generation.
01:12:24.877 --> 01:12:37.753
And I'm curious if you see that as well, and if you envision a day where LGBTQ people are fully accepted in the church and even allowed to be sealed in the temple.
01:12:38.756 --> 01:13:14.289
And as an ancillary to that, the other thing that I'm seeing is that young women growing up, who are professionals in the workplace and are every bit equal to their male counterparts out in the rest of the world, don't have any tolerance for showing up at church and being second-class citizens and not being allowed to have the priesthood or have any kind of a leadership role where they can't be overruled by a man.
01:13:15.202 --> 01:13:25.653
And so my loaded questions are, do you envision greater inclusion for LGBTQ people and greater inclusion for women, even with the possibility of women getting the priesthood?
01:13:27.555 --> 01:13:29.016
I think those are excellent questions.
01:13:29.037 --> 01:13:30.418
I agree with your analysis.
01:13:31.340 --> 01:13:36.985
These are large questions for our kids who are sensitive to injustice.
01:13:37.525 --> 01:13:42.452
I mean, their society has alerted them to these problems, and they are real problems.
01:13:42.532 --> 01:13:51.247
I've got three gay kids among my grandchildren and one trans daughter.
01:13:52.729 --> 01:13:58.595
And of course, we've accepted them without any question.
01:13:58.675 --> 01:14:02.538
They still feel part of the family, but they don't everywhere.
01:14:03.840 --> 01:14:07.024
And I don't know what's going to happen.
01:14:07.064 --> 01:14:08.744
I wouldn't predict what's going to happen.
01:14:11.347 --> 01:14:11.768
What I...
01:14:14.434 --> 01:14:19.498
What I think is we have a perplexity, a contradiction.
01:14:20.819 --> 01:14:24.082
On the one hand, we're trying to defend the traditional family.
01:14:24.904 --> 01:14:33.612
Families bearing children is at the, growing up with their parents is at the heart of things.
01:14:34.493 --> 01:14:40.939
And we have trouble accepting queer families where they have two gay people or one and you.
01:14:42.900 --> 01:14:44.082
That's hard for us.
01:14:44.514 --> 01:14:48.279
But at the heart of it is protecting the family.
01:14:49.681 --> 01:14:56.152
On the other hand, we have immense pastoral urges.
01:14:58.074 --> 01:15:01.820
Bishops really want to take care of their people and find a place for them.
01:15:03.222 --> 01:15:12.358
And so what do you do about the kids who are leaving the church because they feel uncomfortable?
01:15:12.865 --> 01:15:14.067
Your heart goes out to them.
01:15:14.087 --> 01:15:16.309
You want to find a place for you.
01:15:16.328 --> 01:15:20.694
I serve as a patriarch in a young single adult state.
01:15:21.213 --> 01:15:23.275
So I talk to the state presidents about it.
01:15:24.176 --> 01:15:33.006
And I say, would you do anything to act against, take action against any gay people in your congregation?
01:15:33.065 --> 01:15:33.826
He says, of course not.
01:15:34.587 --> 01:15:35.207
Never mentioned.
01:15:35.948 --> 01:15:39.931
We accept them all on an equal basis.
01:15:41.153 --> 01:15:46.065
So which is stuck there and it's a very uncomfortable position.
01:15:47.047 --> 01:15:58.363
I'll tell you another group I'm very aware of because I'm reluctant to predict changes.
01:15:58.382 --> 01:16:11.481
There's a fairly large group of people who are gay who have knuckled under married and born children and they've done it because of the rules.
01:16:12.481 --> 01:16:24.359
And they do not like to hear that those rules will change because there are great sacrifices being made on the basis of gays not having a place at a temple marriage.
01:16:25.442 --> 01:16:27.564
So I don't want to hurt them.
01:16:27.585 --> 01:16:29.729
I think we're going to have to go slowly on this.
01:16:30.470 --> 01:16:31.851
We have to work our way through.
01:16:31.891 --> 01:16:35.556
And change will come.
01:16:35.877 --> 01:16:37.199
Change does, always comes.
01:16:38.001 --> 01:16:39.323
You know, these difficult issues.
01:16:40.185 --> 01:16:44.113
But right now, It's just a lot of pain, as far as I can tell.
01:16:44.154 --> 01:16:50.024
Thank you for
01:16:50.043 --> 01:16:50.224
that.
01:16:51.085 --> 01:16:51.666
Thank you, Richard.
01:16:53.668 --> 01:16:56.814
I had a couple of questions on the list, Richard, if I may.
01:16:57.175 --> 01:17:01.001
As you heard earlier, Jim and I served together.
01:17:01.041 --> 01:17:05.287
We weren't companions, but we served at the same time.
01:17:05.306 --> 01:17:06.789
I came out.
01:17:07.521 --> 01:17:11.987
I went to the Scotland Devon Mission in January, I think, or February 1987.
01:17:12.507 --> 01:17:14.430
Jim, you came out in September 87.
01:17:15.631 --> 01:17:16.832
You and I served together.
01:17:16.872 --> 01:17:23.880
We kind of attracted together and you've been north of Scotland where your grandfather, David O.
01:17:23.899 --> 01:17:25.442
McKay, served his mission.
01:17:28.244 --> 01:17:29.086
Great-grandfather.
01:17:29.145 --> 01:17:30.127
Sorry, great-grandfather.
01:17:30.207 --> 01:17:30.768
I apologize.
01:17:31.028 --> 01:17:34.471
We had an extraordinary time, a very challenging experience.
01:17:34.993 --> 01:17:35.873
But in July...
01:17:36.225 --> 01:17:45.796
Before you came out, Jim, in July 1987, Richard, Elder Ballard arrived and reorganized, restructured the Scotland Edinburgh Mission.
01:17:45.856 --> 01:17:51.903
This was the end of the three-year period from President Joe Dunn, Laurence C.
01:17:51.944 --> 01:17:52.583
Dunn's brother.
01:17:54.405 --> 01:18:01.033
And Elder Ballard was installing President Ben B.
01:18:01.073 --> 01:18:01.434
Banks.
01:18:02.354 --> 01:18:03.416
And this is July 87.
01:18:03.456 --> 01:18:04.296
It was the Edinburgh Chapel.
01:18:04.377 --> 01:18:04.818
I was there.
01:18:05.217 --> 01:18:06.819
The entire mission was there.
01:18:07.500 --> 01:18:11.704
And Elder Ballard presided over that reorganization, restructure.
01:18:11.744 --> 01:18:15.368
The state president at the time, Jim, was Richard Van Hagen, who was the Edinburgh state president.
01:18:15.469 --> 01:18:16.630
I remember him well.
01:18:16.911 --> 01:18:21.536
He passed away since he was an extraordinary, remarkable individual.
01:18:21.555 --> 01:18:27.402
I think Stephen Kerr, who was the state president in Area 3070, was Richard's counselor at the time.
01:18:28.302 --> 01:18:34.710
And so we had an extraordinary outpouring of the spirit, Richard, with the restructuring of the mission at that time with Elder Ballard.
01:18:35.297 --> 01:18:43.847
Elder Ballard talked about his mission, actually talked about tracting and standing on a box on Princess Street in Edinburgh when he was a missionary.
01:18:44.548 --> 01:18:47.993
He said 39 years ago, and he said that in 1987.
01:18:48.333 --> 01:18:49.796
I remember that distinctly.
01:18:51.537 --> 01:18:55.421
We had a session at the end of the meeting with Elder Ballard where the missionaries could ask questions.
01:18:56.764 --> 01:19:00.448
And I had a question about the geography of the Book of Mormon.
01:19:00.528 --> 01:19:04.203
And his response was, well, I don't want to get into that.
01:19:04.283 --> 01:19:09.510
I'm not interested in answering questions or discussing the geography of the Book of Mormon.
01:19:09.550 --> 01:19:12.833
It was an aspect of the Book of Mormon I was most interested in.
01:19:13.454 --> 01:19:19.560
And my question there, as you can see on that list that we sent, what are your thoughts on the geography of the Book of Mormon?
01:19:19.702 --> 01:19:21.444
And do you have a position on that?
01:19:23.805 --> 01:19:27.850
Well, this is one of my other suspended judgment cases.
01:19:29.752 --> 01:19:30.332
There's a...
01:19:31.362 --> 01:19:38.770
geography of the latter-day saints that has a section on the geographies of the Book of Mormon.
01:19:39.030 --> 01:19:44.717
There are 14 theories about where the Book of Mormon events took place.
01:19:45.378 --> 01:19:48.061
One of them is that they all took place in Malaysia.
01:19:49.103 --> 01:19:51.326
The Nephi never got to the Western Hemisphere.
01:19:52.266 --> 01:19:53.408
He landed in Malaysia.
01:19:54.029 --> 01:19:57.092
So a case can be made for every one of these.
01:19:58.395 --> 01:20:11.375
The big division now is between the homeland theories who believe Book of Mormon took place around the Great Lakes, and then the Central American theory who say they were in southern Mexico somehow.
01:20:11.395 --> 01:20:27.654
And though there are a lot of geographical details in the Book of Mormon, you know, about this city and that city and this sea and that sea and this river and that river, none of them quite fit perfectly.
01:20:28.515 --> 01:20:29.717
So there just is not...
01:20:30.658 --> 01:20:33.402
grounds for making a serious decision.
01:20:34.082 --> 01:20:40.650
I hate to say this, Ian, but I would have given the same answer to ask to talk about Book of Mormon Geography.
01:20:41.192 --> 01:20:48.981
It should have been a little more sympathetic to your curiosity, which was a good curiosity it's worth working on.
01:20:49.021 --> 01:20:59.551
Now, all I can say is I'm pretty good persuaded that it's not a large distance You've got all these stories of people moving around, how many days it took.
01:21:00.131 --> 01:21:06.199
So it probably was in an area about 500 miles or so.
01:21:06.900 --> 01:21:14.671
And I think it must have been in a moderate climate because there's no talk about winter storms or cold or heat.
01:21:15.332 --> 01:21:23.304
And that's about all the further I can go with that.
01:21:23.904 --> 01:21:24.605
Thank you.
01:21:24.898 --> 01:21:27.041
That rules out upstate New York, for sure.
01:21:27.822 --> 01:21:32.728
My struggle with it is, you know, there's frequent references to Zarahemla, this great city.
01:21:33.429 --> 01:21:34.350
You know, where is that?
01:21:34.569 --> 01:21:44.863
And then the final battles there in the Book of Mormon where I think, again, correct my information, it was incorrect, where there's a great battle with Moroni and Mormon.
01:21:46.125 --> 01:21:53.293
What I understood and always was led to believe that that occurred at the hill or in the area of the hill of Gomorrah.
01:21:54.497 --> 01:22:14.108
And the fact that no physical evidence has yet emerged, as far as I understand, in that area, these great battles with hundreds of thousands of individuals fighting, you know, swords or arrowheads or other physical evidence in the area of Hill Cumorah.
01:22:14.708 --> 01:22:24.259
And so I, you know, when I was studying the Book of Mormon at the Honors of the Young Missionary, these are the questions that I had, and that was, My goodness, I was going back 35 years or so as a human wish, right?
01:22:24.840 --> 01:22:26.442
I'm not the only one to ask these questions.
01:22:27.184 --> 01:22:32.792
And so I was just fascinated by, you know, these events and where they took place.
01:22:33.354 --> 01:22:36.840
Because to your point, there's some very specific references.
01:22:37.440 --> 01:22:41.287
You know, the narrow neck of the lands, Helmler, different cities.
01:22:41.787 --> 01:22:44.591
It goes into a little bit of information about that.
01:22:44.631 --> 01:22:47.117
And I was always fascinated because I always wanted to go, Richard.
01:22:47.176 --> 01:22:47.898
I thought...
01:22:48.097 --> 01:23:01.432
When I'm reading the Book of Mormon, and I'm into it, and I'm immersed, and these characters are so real, and I feel the spirit, and I remember sharing with my companions, I may have shared it with you as well, Jim, I said, after my mission, I want to go to Zarahemla.
01:23:03.033 --> 01:23:03.295
Okay?
01:23:03.494 --> 01:23:04.515
Where is this place?
01:23:04.576 --> 01:23:05.296
I looked on the map.
01:23:05.356 --> 01:23:06.717
There was no Zarahemla on the map.
01:23:07.238 --> 01:23:10.561
I know there's a Moroni on an island in the Pacific.
01:23:10.783 --> 01:23:14.407
The island's called Gomorrah or Gomorrah, if I pronounced that right.
01:23:14.947 --> 01:23:16.408
And then the city there is Moroni.
01:23:16.929 --> 01:23:17.250
But I...
01:23:17.793 --> 01:23:19.315
I just wanted to go to these places.
01:23:19.737 --> 01:23:27.427
And that was, I guess, partly the motivation behind me asking Elder Ballard this question.
01:23:28.850 --> 01:23:29.291
Good
01:23:29.430 --> 01:23:29.792
question.
01:23:30.311 --> 01:23:35.279
Well, if you went to Mexico, you could find a guide who would take you to Sarajevo.
01:23:35.319 --> 01:23:38.363
You know, there are all sorts of people down there who
01:23:39.024 --> 01:23:40.887
know how it all worked out.
01:23:41.849 --> 01:23:44.833
Well, just to that point very quickly.
01:23:45.377 --> 01:24:04.149
We went to the Chichen Itza over Christmas a couple of years ago, and when he found out, the tour guide that we just picked up while we were there, found out we were from Utah, he says, oh, let me show you the evidence that Jesus Christ visited here.
01:24:04.189 --> 01:24:13.963
Well, the Chichen Itza was built in, what, 1400 A.D., long after the events of the Book of Mormon.
01:24:14.344 --> 01:24:22.313
But yeah, you will find plenty of people down there that are going to be happy to tell you whatever it is you would like to hear in that regard.
01:24:22.332 --> 01:24:22.372
Go
01:24:24.555 --> 01:24:27.698
ahead, sorry, Rashid.
01:24:27.899 --> 01:24:28.439
Go ahead, you speak.
01:24:29.661 --> 01:24:38.331
I was just going to say that this homeland theory locates all these events around the Great Lakes because it gives them some water.
01:24:40.353 --> 01:24:40.913
But that's...
01:24:41.826 --> 01:24:46.069
become mixed up with a sort of politics.
01:24:47.051 --> 01:24:53.677
It's sort of right-wing political thinkers who have clustered into this homeland theory group.
01:24:54.298 --> 01:24:59.224
So it all gets kind of corrupted by other considerations.
01:25:00.926 --> 01:25:02.347
Real quickly, I remember going to...
01:25:02.368 --> 01:25:06.891
I was living in England at the time, and we flew over to do the pageant at Camorra.
01:25:06.912 --> 01:25:07.953
We went there twice, actually.
01:25:08.673 --> 01:25:11.157
And I was so excited to go to the pageants.
01:25:11.497 --> 01:25:19.188
And I was absolutely immersed in the idea, total believer that, you know, these great battles that happened at the Camorra.
01:25:19.228 --> 01:25:30.243
I mean, you know, why would I think anything else considering we, you know, the church had organized this big pageant that had been running for, you know, as long as anyone can remember, you know, at the actual site.
01:25:30.523 --> 01:25:38.394
I remember these very, at the time, this is, Jim, this is probably, could be before the internet emerged in 94, I think it was.
01:25:39.938 --> 01:25:44.606
And there was quite a lot of anti-Mormons that were shouting.
01:25:44.627 --> 01:25:46.649
They had these big, you know, I'm from England.
01:25:46.689 --> 01:25:48.073
This whole thing's a new experience for me.
01:25:48.113 --> 01:25:51.600
And there was a group of men and some women that were shouting.
01:25:51.640 --> 01:25:57.369
As you walked, you parked your car and you walked towards where the chairs were at the pageant there.
01:25:57.831 --> 01:26:06.877
And they were shouting all kinds of anti-Mormon stuff, including no evidence of these great battles at the Hill of Camorra.
01:26:06.896 --> 01:26:10.800
And I thought they were absolutely off the rocker, crazy people, anti-Mormon.
01:26:11.461 --> 01:26:13.882
And then I'll fast forward to where I am right now.
01:26:13.983 --> 01:26:21.551
I'm thinking, well, where is the evidence of these great battles at Camorra where the church had commissioned the pageant?
01:26:21.570 --> 01:26:29.497
I mean, for goodness sake, we wouldn't have the pageant there unless it was a site of significant historical significance, rather.
01:26:30.219 --> 01:26:34.399
So yeah, I've always been fascinated in that.
01:26:34.920 --> 01:26:42.090
I don't know if there's a book out there, a definitive book on the juggling of Pokemon, but if there isn't one, perhaps someone should write it.
01:26:42.130 --> 01:26:43.693
Maybe that's your next assignment, Richard.
01:26:45.756 --> 01:26:48.359
I'm afraid it's beyond me.
01:26:48.399 --> 01:26:53.567
The other question I've got, and again, we're so grateful.
01:26:53.606 --> 01:26:58.734
You've been incredibly patient with our questions, and you've been so gracious with your time, and we thank you so much.
01:26:59.296 --> 01:27:02.680
The other final question I've got, and you can certainly...
01:27:03.778 --> 01:27:21.498
after these questions, any of the comments or thoughts on any other item that you feel comfortably would want to add is some time ago, I don't know when, but a number of years ago, you had what seemed to be like a private or small meeting with a group of members of the church in a building, a church building or a state building.
01:27:21.979 --> 01:27:24.162
I don't know the background or context you could speak to that.
01:27:24.884 --> 01:27:30.590
And I think there was a question and answer piece to the meeting.
01:27:31.310 --> 01:27:33.293
And there was a number of questions that were being asked.
01:27:33.858 --> 01:27:35.539
perhaps surround some of the truth claims.
01:27:36.280 --> 01:27:51.443
And you were videoed a film saying that, and again, I don't want to misquote you, so please correct me, that the dominant church, sorry, the dominant narrative of the church is false or untrue.
01:27:51.502 --> 01:27:52.344
I'll repeat that.
01:27:52.925 --> 01:27:55.247
The dominant church, sorry, I'll get it right.
01:27:55.288 --> 01:27:58.653
The dominant narrative of the church is false or untrue.
01:27:59.213 --> 01:28:00.555
I hope I didn't misquote you there.
01:28:00.655 --> 01:28:01.717
If I did, please correct me.
01:28:02.145 --> 01:28:05.149
And would you like to respond to that?
01:28:05.350 --> 01:28:11.779
Maybe clarify, is there anything in that comment or statement you made that you'd like to update or change or amend?
01:28:13.362 --> 01:28:19.029
Well, the wrong word there is false or untrue.
01:28:19.050 --> 01:28:23.216
I think what I meant to say is it has errors in it.
01:28:24.417 --> 01:28:30.286
But what I was thinking when I gave this is I've already corrected it.
01:28:31.170 --> 01:28:36.576
They're in the book that tells the true narrative so far as I can understand it now.
01:28:37.256 --> 01:28:40.439
So, in a way, it was a plug for rough stone ruling.
01:28:44.824 --> 01:28:45.064
Okay.
01:28:49.069 --> 01:28:49.689
Well, thank you.
01:28:50.331 --> 01:28:51.231
Go ahead, Jim.
01:28:51.252 --> 01:28:52.313
Do you have a comment?
01:28:53.134 --> 01:28:56.917
Well, I just remember a lot of people who are critics of the church...
01:28:57.793 --> 01:28:59.256
have seized on that video.
01:28:59.817 --> 01:29:02.801
I think what you said, the dominant narrative, you didn't say it was false.
01:29:03.863 --> 01:29:06.648
You said something along the lines of it can't be sustained.
01:29:08.010 --> 01:29:24.054
And in that same talk, you also said something that you've said in our conversation here about the idea of grandmothers want this idealized version of Joseph Smith, but when we cater to them, we lose the future.
01:29:24.395 --> 01:29:30.726
We lose the children that are coming up who don't have a lot of patience for this kind of idealized...
01:29:31.929 --> 01:29:38.658
Again, it has errors in it.
01:29:39.037 --> 01:29:49.453
I thought it was very clear from the context that you were not saying what a lot of the critics were trying to pretend you were saying, which is that you were rejecting the church.
01:29:49.512 --> 01:29:51.255
You weren't rejecting the church.
01:29:51.354 --> 01:29:55.801
You were saying, we need to correct the errors that are in the dominant narrative.
01:29:56.514 --> 01:30:05.326
And the errors have been perpetuated to some degree because it makes the grandmothers feel good, even as it's driving the young people away.
01:30:05.345 --> 01:30:09.631
I mean, is that kind of an accurate assessment of what you were trying to say?
01:30:09.652 --> 01:30:11.594
Yeah, that's right on target.
01:30:12.295 --> 01:30:13.095
That was my aim.
01:30:14.217 --> 01:30:17.842
So, I mean, I thought that was very clear.
01:30:18.002 --> 01:30:50.220
And it's so wonderful, I think, to have voices like yours and to have your unique voice out there because I think you demonstrate that you can talk about difficult issues, talk about possible errors, talk about all of these kinds of things in a way that absolutely demonstrates that it's coming from a place of faith and coming from a place of belief.
01:30:51.402 --> 01:30:54.605
And that is just so refreshing and so rare.
01:30:55.457 --> 01:31:09.057
Because in a polarized environment, particularly with regard to religion, where people are leaving organized religion in such magnitude, to be able to say, okay, yeah, we can talk about these things.
01:31:09.097 --> 01:31:10.820
We can talk about these difficult issues.
01:31:11.641 --> 01:31:14.867
And we can do so with kindness and respect.
01:31:15.747 --> 01:31:21.837
We heard President Oaks in this latest conference reiterate President Nelson's idea of being a peacemaker.
01:31:22.689 --> 01:31:38.869
I think that your legacy is one of great scholarship, but also of great peacemaking, because you've been able to present these ideas in a way that shows respect and kindness for people on all sides of the issue.
01:31:39.170 --> 01:31:55.001
And I am just so grateful that you have had this career and that you have contributed so much, certainly to my own testimony, but I think to the testimony of countless thousands, if not millions, of other people.
01:31:56.042 --> 01:31:56.804
You want to hear my
01:31:56.863 --> 01:31:58.265
latest word on that subject?
01:31:58.867 --> 01:31:59.327
Sure.
01:32:00.288 --> 01:32:10.903
I was moved about a year ago to bear testimony in church, standard sacrament meeting, and my testimony is the tide is turning.
01:32:12.826 --> 01:32:13.987
It's turning gradually.
01:32:14.006 --> 01:32:36.956
It won't be highly noticeable, but there was a period when disbelief was on the standard when they were very militant atheists fighting against God and ridiculing a religion and really quite fiercely trying to tear it down.
01:32:37.497 --> 01:32:38.337
That's changed.
01:32:39.298 --> 01:32:57.399
At the level of the New York Times or Harvard University or Yale, the voices that are saying religion addresses serious issues We need to find a way to speak to these great questions of our lives.
01:32:58.440 --> 01:33:02.466
And we need to keep the religious dialogue going.
01:33:03.266 --> 01:33:10.333
We can't just dismiss it and march out of the churches and say, I want nothing more to do with them.
01:33:10.975 --> 01:33:14.359
And it'll take a long while for that change to occur.
01:33:15.139 --> 01:33:17.742
But I think it's coming.
01:33:18.802 --> 01:33:19.543
It will affect us.
01:33:20.244 --> 01:33:24.993
It will affect all religions, but we will be affected too.
01:33:26.855 --> 01:33:33.003
We're coming up to the end here, Richard, Jim, as you know, we've asked some questions.
01:33:33.083 --> 01:33:37.850
And Richard, thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to be with us today.
01:33:37.869 --> 01:33:41.635
In closing, I just want to add very briefly to what Jim was saying.
01:33:43.157 --> 01:33:54.038
You know, when I heard you say that, and I appreciate you correcting that, you know, what I was saying, it's important to get the accuracy around what he said at that meeting about the dominant church narrative.
01:33:54.600 --> 01:33:57.082
My take on that was actually quite positive.
01:33:57.363 --> 01:33:58.265
That might surprise you.
01:33:58.324 --> 01:34:08.899
I think some people saw that as being, ah, the church is not true in certain areas.
01:34:09.400 --> 01:34:11.222
And here we have Richard Bushman saying that.
01:34:11.524 --> 01:34:12.244
I didn't get that.
01:34:12.364 --> 01:34:12.685
I got...
01:34:13.953 --> 01:34:17.738
that there were aspects of the church that were more layered.
01:34:18.378 --> 01:34:21.362
There's complexity in the history.
01:34:21.402 --> 01:34:22.582
There's different colors.
01:34:22.863 --> 01:34:23.363
It's rich.
01:34:23.604 --> 01:34:27.528
It's not this or that, so to speak.
01:34:29.029 --> 01:34:32.393
There's so many different layers that we need to understand about the church.
01:34:32.872 --> 01:34:37.097
Like the first vision, there's not just one version of the first vision.
01:34:37.257 --> 01:35:06.751
There's nine versions of the first vision, and each one gives a different layer in regards to that experience which i thought was very positive so my interpretation from that was actually very positive and i thought well this is great this is somebody who was telling us uh the facts the truth you know the church is is not all um you know clean and straightforward uh it's complex there's problems uh there's issues and let's let's uh Let's talk about them.
01:35:06.872 --> 01:35:08.734
And so I was very grateful to hear that.
01:35:09.395 --> 01:35:15.604
And also very grateful to hear your insights in this conversation that the church, the tide is turning.
01:35:16.365 --> 01:35:19.090
And Jim and I, you know, I'm on the outside.
01:35:19.130 --> 01:35:20.072
Jim's on the inside.
01:35:20.551 --> 01:35:26.601
But even as someone on the outside, I have faith and confidence that the church will change over time.
01:35:27.042 --> 01:35:30.027
We'll continue to improve and get better, be more inclusive.
01:35:30.887 --> 01:35:33.752
And I feel that that will happen.
01:35:34.353 --> 01:35:39.020
So we're very grateful, Richard, for you being with us here today.
01:35:39.041 --> 01:35:52.622
Do you have any final comments or thoughts or insights or advice, direction for either Jim or I or any of our listeners that you would like to share before we close?
01:35:52.662 --> 01:35:54.625
I've done...
01:35:56.033 --> 01:35:57.034
Talk to myself, Al.
01:35:57.695 --> 01:36:14.059
But I really value the impulse behind your broadcast and effort to speak clearly and freely to bring up all the problems, but in good faith and brotherhood, kindness.
01:36:15.000 --> 01:36:26.435
And I think that your work is bound to sort of make the church itself a place that's more comfortable for more people.
01:36:27.096 --> 01:36:37.822
They'll feel a freedom and a willingness to latch on to the church to connect in ways that work for them.
01:36:38.864 --> 01:36:44.478
And we'll all be better off if we're open as you two are trying to be.
01:36:47.202 --> 01:36:50.167
So on that final note, Richard, we will close.
01:36:50.328 --> 01:36:52.891
Thank you again, Richard, for being here with us.
01:36:52.972 --> 01:36:55.938
Jim, thank you so much for your input and your insights as well.
01:36:56.118 --> 01:36:58.842
I thoroughly enjoyed learning so much.
01:36:58.863 --> 01:37:00.445
And of course, thank you to our listeners.
01:37:00.466 --> 01:37:08.822
We hope you'll join us on the next episode of Insider.
01:37:08.841 --> 01:37:09.021
Thank you.