Mormon Stories #1360: LDS Bishop Adam and Marlana Hughes - Leaving Mormonism in Tucson, Arizona

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dulin it's november 5th 2020 and we are super excited for our interview today on mormon stories podcast as those of you been following us for years will know that we have this open invitation to anyone who's ever served as a mormon bishop stake president mission president you know mormons pay attention to levels of leadership and so if you've served as a bishop or as the spouse of a bishop you get to come on mormon stories and recently uh i was grateful to have adam and marlena hughes reach out to me the basic kind of high level summary of this interview is that 12 years ago adam hughes was serving as a mormon bishop in northern arizona and marlena was a stay-at-home mother of four even as recently as last year adam and marlena hughes were still active believing orthodox mormons living in tucson arizona um only a few months ago in 2020 like months ago adam and marlena lost their faith in the mormon church completely and uh they did so while their son was preparing to leave on his mission and so we're gonna cover their story we're gonna try and do it in about three hours three and a half hours and and they've traveled here to salt lake city all the way from from tucson uh adam and marlena hughes welcome to mormon stories podcast thanks thank you john and even though they're in studio we're doing a coven friendly setup where we're in separate rooms so thanks for being good sports about that guys yeah of course all right so let's begin uh you guys know how we do this you know the drill and as we talked at lunch i know you guys were inspired by uh other people's faith crisis stories i know you were inspired by lila tuller's uh interview that's a that's a classic she's obviously the daughter of marion d hanks and you were inspired by the lusks uh the wonderful lusk family from i believe new mexico um so shout out to the lusk family but this this interview is very much in that tradition and um so adam and marlena where should we begin in your awesome story uh wherever you want john marlena tell us about your kind of mormon upbringing okay i grew up in illinois um i think it's about two hours away from nauvoo i like i think that's significant because we'd go there every summer for a week or two during the city of joseph pageant um i grew up with my dad was in the church you know huge pioneer background i think i've got um what's his name john though butler as a was a bodyguard of joseph smith my mom converted to the church when she was nine in pennsylvania missionaries knocked on her parents door um and she moved to utah you know i met my dad and they ended up back in illinois but um and i have five siblings so um a couple are out of the church well it's complicated you don't have to mention about that so okay so you guys were raised you were raised mostly in illinois right yes completely until i was 18 then i moved to utah so tell us how mormonism informed your kind of family life you're upbringing your childhood talk about that a bit um totally in did everything um all the the mormon things so we went to back to naval a little bit we went there every year for that um we i all you know mutual every sunday we're there um and in illinois everything's spread out so any time there's an activity going on like a fireside or anything um you went to it so you got to see all those people that were members that were in our ward i mean people are coming to our ward from far away and so um youth conferences road shows back in the day the sports basketball volleyball we were in like every thing growing up we did it so elena what brought your parents to illinois so my mom was from illinois and she went to utah married my dad and then they ended up back in illinois my dad worked for caterpillar and and they just ended up staying there okay how was your was your ward like it was it award was it a branch it was a ward and actually it was i thought it was a really big ward um growing up for being rural rural and people would come you know 20 minutes away to come to church but i still remember like during sports like basketball we were one of the bigger awards that we had have had to have two teams or you know and just things were bigger growing up and then it started to get smaller as i got older but it was pretty good size but like in my high school i went only had like three or four members in my high school that's pretty normal yeah okay so do you remember like how you felt about the church as a kid i love the church i loved everything about it um i think that's why i bring up navu navu was like my second home um i loved it we'd go there like you know during the summer and like christmas and we you know we'd go in the summer and camp um that's what would you do in navoo as a family so we'd camp for during the city of joseph paget now it's a different pageant but that was a huge part since we were i was little we would go and there'd be other ward members there and you'd always get together and you'd go to the pageant every night i mean every night we'd go watch the pageant and then we'd go to the homes in nauvoo and we used to joke that we um could take people on the tours because we'd been through the homes so many times which we'll get to that later when it comes to joseph smith how those affect each other um would you guys ever act in the pageant no we almost did a couple years but we ended up but you were in legacy oh yeah so my brother did go in the pageant but yeah i do forget we were in legacy when i was younger so the movie legacy that was in church your younger brother had a fairly large role yeah so yeah and that was all that's all culture that was a big deal and that's that's maybe a little bit lost you know it's kind of vanishing right right yeah yeah yeah so um okay so oh sorry you broke up for a second yeah sorry you broke up for a second um can you guys see me okay yeah okay so um yeah so okay so you would spend a lot of time in nauvoo you would watch the pageants um how did you enjoy going to church as a kid oh i loved it i wouldn't miss it i remember other kids that you know their parents wouldn't make up like my parents didn't make me i always felt like their would say their parents made them and i'm like my parents don't make me like i want to go like i loved going and i would go to mutual and i would you know i got my young women's medallion and i did all the things i mean i remember even during general conference we were lucky enough to get it on at home which is not normal in illinois and so my parents would stay there but i would go to the state center to watch it so probably because the missionaries were there but um i would go you know and just take notes and be there and i feel like that was extreme for me i guess instead of just wanting to stay home which i could have done so what were your favorite teachings about the church marlena um i loved families together forever that was huge and that was what i would love to share with other people um just yeah and the happiness and the yeah the family the the repentance the maybe not so much when i was younger you know you don't understand the teachings yeah i think the family one was huge for me was your family pretty close knit yes yeah yeah i think all of us even as we got older and got married all my siblings stayed around like my parents i was kind of like the only one that left i mean they would all kind of leave and go to college and then they all got married and came back so and it wasn't there so they were always super close i always felt like i was missing out so so super tight-knit family and would you say your upbringing in the church was pretty happy yeah yeah really happy so wow yeah talk talk about your testimony as a teenager did you have one what was it rooted in mostly yeah for sure i remember um i got my paratrooper blessing when i was 12 or 13. um i think it was it was everything to me the gospel growing up so i mean i grew up like i said in the community where there wasn't very many members i mean there's the talk of the god makers at the time i remember junior high specifically still people turn around and i turned around and this girl said how many moms do you have and you know shocked by that um but my testimony i mean i defended and stood up for what i believed and i felt like i was a huge example i mean i grew up with neighbors who wouldn't talk to us at all because we were mormon um and just my mom teaching us just to be nice and kind to them and i mean they wouldn't even look at us for years and then they finally moved but it was always just being that example and always being friends with everyone um yeah and living that testimony and that the love of the gospel so you basically had just a super i mean a non-utah and maybe in some ways that is ideal kind of a non-utah orthodox happy mormon family upbringing yeah what's not to love right right i thought it's pretty good i thought it made me stronger i always said when i get to adam when he was he grew up in utah i said i don't want to raise our kids in you i think it makes them stronger and not living in utah but that's i don't know if you want to expand on that now but when i moved to utah it was just a little bit different for me the perspective that people have on the church than i had growing up where there wasn't very many members yeah okay anything else you wanna anything else you wanna share about your childhood or adolescence before we we turn it over to adam especially you know anything about your teen years or any big events that were church or faith related that uh play into your story later um i grew up with a cousin who was uh gay and died of aids and then i had an aunt who um was a lesbian you know that was a huge impact on me that they were just people and that i think has a huge effect when it comes to the honor code and things in the church with that later that they're people and we love them and they're not different than everybody else what what what were you taught about uh being gay or lesbian as a mormon growing up and then how did that how did that relate to how did you reconcile that with with the family members you knew who were gay or lesbian um at the time at the time like growing up um i don't think i don't remember being taught about it in church and i don't i i don't remember any of that specifically at church and my parents i don't know if they said anything specifically except that i mean we just accepted those people and my aunt and my parents had some friends in like their garden club or this hosta group they were part of we just accepted them as who they were there was no difference in who they were compared to anybody else and i same with friends they didn't they didn't have to be mormon or to be friends with them like there was no distinguish you can only be friends with the mormon kids or you can't and then so later on i mean i've just never had that thought that i would treat anybody with that was gay or lesbian different than in that category so like oh i was taught the gays are bad in church and so i've got to be distant or like your parents saying stay away from the aunt or the uncle you know like don't get touched or any of that kind of stuff no no no she was very involved because we were very close family they came over for holidays and no not at all it was i didn't know we didn't even talk about that and how it was definitely never anything negative so sorry that's nice yeah it was good it was good healthy perspective i didn't know again i didn't remember hearing anything at church at that time back in the 80s 90s that any of that was bad i don't remember being taught any of that so it was good that was good it sounds like and i don't want to project or like fill in the blanks here but it sounds like your family was marlena was kind of living the best of mormonism and avoiding a lot of the negative stuff about mormonism yeah i think so i think um yeah i think it was good being in in illinois again not i don't know not being where it was so concentrated it made my testimony stronger and we had to stand up for that and you just and then you were kinder to everyone i mean there was no judgment if they were there was no judgment no labeling at least in my family so we were kind and loving to everyone and which you know rolls over to how i raised my kids i'm like some of my really good friends were not lds and they had the same standards and sometimes better than the kids but also not putting the lgbt stuff aside just not a lot of negativity you know pressure stress you know harshness some people grow up with the kind of the harsh stressful guilt-ridden shameful kind of family environment and that doesn't sound like it was yours no no not at all excellent all right well that's a good background for you marlena thanks for sharing yeah um adam tell us tell us the same kind of background for you okay so i grew up in lehigh utah and a little background on my family so on my mom's side they were all mormon pioneers some outstanding people that had just phenomenal amounts of faith in the church and um but once they settled in utah you know they slowly started to slip away each generation so by the time it got down to my mom and uh and her family uh they were semi-active mostly inactive my grandparents did end up getting sealed right at the end of their lives so so my mom was was kind of in the church kind of not in the church my uncle her her brothers my uncles that i knew growing up were all very much inactive and and my mom ended up going she went this is important to the story here but um she ended up going uh she wasn't too nervous when she was a kid and so she ended up going to los angeles when she became an adult met my dad there he was he was not a member and they got married and had two children and my dad still struggled with a lot of issues from his own childhood ended up taking his own life when i was four so my mom raised us from that point on by herself and growing up in lehi utah in the 1980s i felt very different than most of the people at church so we i was from a single parent household i just had the one brother and he was five years older than me and my mom took the church with a grain of salt um i would say that she believed she was 100 believed but she wasn't all about following all the all the checklists and all the performances and she'd go to sacramento meeting a lot of times and then and then go home um she definitely said state conference was completely optional and a lot of times wouldn't go and [Music] and i think part of the reason was maybe i was seeking to be accepted by my community i was seeking to be um yeah i maybe i wanted to be a little different than my family and um and and i wanted to stand out i wanted to be exceptional in the church and i think that might have pushed me a little bit to really internalize a lot of it it didn't come from my mom so much but i myself internalized the teachings of the church and and i think i naturally craved that security and that stability and so i i mean i really ate it up and i was pretty studious as a kid and and just really read everything i could get my hands on um even from a young age um when i started seminary when i was 14 i loved it and i just consumed the book of mormon and just absolutely loved it and i think i think part of it was stabilizing in my life but part of it was uh now that i look back maybe a little unhealthy too in that i was looking for the church to to kind of fill some holes maybe in my life at the time and um and so i clung pretty hard to it and i mean i took it so literally and i was so devoted i remember even as a teen coming home from tithing settlement that i went to by myself and convincing my mom that maybe she should start paying tithing because it would be the right thing to do and so um that's part of my story is that i really adhered to it and i had a lot of leaders that really gave me a lot of affirmation and validation because of that because i was so committed and and that was even more reinforcing because i would get that positive reinforcement that positive validation and and so suffice it to say i was all in um that all the way through even leaving on a mission and going to mexico and serving there completely 100 in did you um adam well one thing one thing that just jumps out at me is whenever someone loses a parent young and we've had several guests on hormone stories that lost a parent young it's very common for the church to be a really to be extra meaningful to them because it's the way you get to see dad again right i very much believed in in that um the church was a very much a stabilizing influence in my life uh when i was young so um and it provided all the answers and it provided a lot of comfort uh with that idea like you're saying that i'd get to see both my parents uh you know at the end of my life and and i really um i mean it's not a bad thing but i really felt um even from a young age like a real connection to god and i felt and that was completely intertwined with church and with um you know there was no separation between just me and my communion with god and the church that was all one and the same yeah and i i also um you know my mom was a single mom for for some time as we were mormons when my parents got divorced and like you say the church can be such a stabilizing influence especially an incredible support to a single-parent family after divorce i'm sure i'm sure i i can only imagine a widow raising young kids would just find so much value in having other leaders helping potential material support or emotional support or moral support there's just all sorts of ways the community that a church can just mean so much to a to a single-parent family right and and actually too um there was a lot of really great men in the ward that i grew up in that i can't say enough good things about that kind of took me under their wing you know would take me um fishing or would uh you know whenever there's a father's and sons camp out they would always reach out and say hey why don't you come along with us so that i wasn't left out and i sometimes actually feel lucky that uh it was i felt like i didn't have just one father but i had many men in the board that i grew up in that that reached out and provided that kind of support and assistance and and even to this day i'm very grateful for that and that the selfless service that they did give to my family so another aspect though is you're asking marlena a question it made me realize though and i've just now begun to realize that another component that really bound me to the church was you know as a as a teen uh as a young man you know you begin you hit puberty and there's a very natural uh evolution of um you know and now i can look back now though and see that well there was a great quote i found yeah you can broke up you broke up a tiny bit can you repeat that when you're saying the hormones and everything leads to what what i was saying uh le i'll just i'll just summarize it by this i found uh there's a religious trauma institute and they talk about how a lot of times religion ends up being you know they're offering you the solution and the the healing medicine and yet at the same time they're the ones causing the harm and i can look back now and see that you know i was very concerned about my my my spiritual welfare and at the same time the church is saying you're just normal um growing up things you know exploration and coming of age you know as a young man just normal things that young men do the church completely shames that and the church completely tries to shut that down and creates a lot of guilt and shame around anything uh normal as far as uh you know growing up as a young man and and those those hormones that start raging after puberty and so um i can see now looking back too that was another thing that bound me to the church because i thought that i needed heavy serious repentance for very minor things you know um that i experienced as a young young man and we're you know we're often uh afraid or conditioned not to talk about it but i'm guessing you're talking about masturbation and just normal sexuality stuff normal yes yes um you you like 99 of all young boys and most girls as well had sexual passions and had to figure out how your body worked and what didn't didn't feel good all that normal stuff right yes i think we're so recent out it's still almost uh difficult to talk about but yes that um you know i remember being maybe 14 and figuring out i connected the act to the actual word masturbation and realized oh wow that's what that is and then feeling just an enormous amount of shame and guilt and you know i knew enough by that point to know by by the strength of the uh for the strength to use pamphlet that i was supposed to go talk to my bishop and confess and i'm thinking to myself as a 14 year old boy i wonder if they're gonna throw me out of the church you know i wonder if i'm gonna get excommunicated i mean maybe i take things too literally but i was i was so black and white and i just really believed every word that they put in on in print or the leaders of the church spoke that i'm i'm internalizing all of this and felt enormous amounts of shame and i think that really reinforced it and really again forced me to say oh i need this i need the church because i've got these defects that i've got to overcome and if i don't stick with this and if i don't cling to this then i'm going to lose my soul so and i don't think that was healthy now that i look back it was very unhealthy for me right so it's mixed what's so hard about it is that it's mixed it's that the church is absolutely good and healthy in in some ways and absolutely harmful and difficult in other ways and it's both that's what's so hard about it right i mean both of you just got through describing all the good things right yeah so and and the truth is everything has good and bad so that makes it even more complicated is there's no such thing as organization with only good or only bad and so it's so confusing really quickly adam talk about your religiosity um you know in terms of like your your theo theology theology your doctrine your testimony did you have a you know did you feel like you had a solid testimony as a teenager before your mission did you have that moment where you wanted to get the testimony and read the book of mormon and follow moroni's promise and all that or or not or did you just always believe talk about your faith okay so probably the best example would be i remember i remember praying a couple of times and and again i had a very strong faith well i remember getting my my patriarchal blessing and that's an interesting story in and of itself because it really impacted me and i felt like it truly was god speaking to me and yet now that i look back it took me a long time as i went through my faith crisis and as i started to deconstruct uh now looking back i can see okay well i studied for like three months before i went and got my patriarchal blessing i went to the lehigh library and read every enzyme or new era article i could find because i wanted to know everything there was and be totally prepared for my patriarchal blessing and [Music] the entire time and knew my family knew me he was my fourth grade teacher i got my patriarchal blessing only four years after i'd been in his class as a fourth grader okay you broke up you broke up for a second so your patriarch was what he was my fourth grade teacher in elementary school in elementary school yeah was he oh mid-50s or later 50s okay cool yeah and so a bit of a younger a bit of a younger patriarch than is often normal yeah yeah usually it's a grandpa who's kind of in their 70s uh no he was younger and i was one of his first um blessings that he ever gave and but but he you know just four years young four years earlier he'd had me for an entire year in fourth grade and so now i can look back and see that uh you know between me uh anticipating this and building up to this and and being so excited to get it and having studied so much and him knowing me that you know maybe maybe there's some explanations there for why it impacted me so hard um another no now my now my mind went blank i was going to share another story but oh you asked about my testimony and i i did pray i tried moroni's promise a couple times never really felt anything but i remember going to a fireside again by myself because i was so uh into all of this by just on my own uh i remember going and the person giving the fireside said if you've ever read the book of mormon and just felt a good peaceful feeling well that's god telling you it's true that's the holy ghost telling you it's true and it just hit me right then i thought oh well i have a testimony and i don't i don't even need to pray because wow god's been trying to trying to tell me the whole time that this is true because because when i read from the scriptures it feels good and and i was completely convinced that that's how god worked was just by giving us nice pleasant feelings and so i was all in i completely believed that i had just an unshakable testimony in the church you know i don't think that point can ever be emphasized enough and we've we've touched on it you know throughout the past 15 years but you know i can't tell you how many people i've had on mormon stories that that that followed moroni's promise moroni 10 4 where they read the book of mormon and prayed about it and didn't get an answer um but then they were taught that if you just feel joy and peace and warmth and emotion in a church context that that that means that the church is true it doesn't mean that someone said something touching or someone said something meaningful or someone got emotional that that narrative that we learned from the church which is that if you know when they say the holy ghost of joy peace comfort you know love charity kindness warmth you know if you're in the church long enough you're going to feel those feelings because you're you're with humans who are sharing things and helping each other and trying to do good you're going to feel those feelings and then if you're conditioned to connect those feelings with oh well that means you must interpret it then that the church is true then everyone's gonna have a testimony but it's really just rooted in normal human emotions that every human feels right and that's that's so difficult because then you go on and make all these huge decisions and you you act as though you know the church is true now and you go on a mission and you tell everybody what you know when really the basis of all that was just you felt some really good feelings and you were taught to interpret that as the church being true isn't that isn't that interesting and not only that but now i see that the church co-ops all of life's most important events i mean being ordained as a deacon is is kind of a coming-of-age ceremony for mormons um and then every two years after that you know you would keep advance and and baptism is a kind of a coming-of-age ceremony for kids um going to the temple is kind of the beginning of adulthood uh for young men and young women and so all of that completely is intertwined with the church and its doctrine and its teachings and including family and what we do on sundays and how we spend our free time so it's almost completely impossible as a kid or as a teen and even as an adult to untangle that and decide when i feel good is it because of all of this built association that i have uh with family and and these ceremonies and performances friends and leaders and youth and you know music right exactly marlena did you want to add something i want to get you in here just because this is a topic that probably touches you too we don't want to jump ahead in the timeline but as you're thinking about your youth in adolescence anything you wanted to add yeah it just made me think um because when you're asking me before i didn't think yeah i did all that i prayed and i i had early one year i had perfect attendance which was a huge deal for me um you had a paper out and i gave to go did you say you had early morning seminary yes yeah and i had a paper out growing up so i had got up at like five o'clock every morning and did my paper out and then i go to seminary and so i did and i only went to seminary for three years because i graduated high school a year early um so i didn't officially complete seminary but to me at the time i didn't care because i was like i went to three years of high school this three years of seminaries is good but yeah i was reading my scriptures and praying and doing all that but with our patriarchal blessings i think we even though i'm a little bit more gray than adam i took it pretty literally i mean it said i should um serve a mission you know later on and you're reading these things and reading it and they tell your mindset to read over and over and all those things and you know there's things in there maybe if you don't follow i didn't go on a mission so um it's just it's an interesting concept when you get on the patriarchal blessing thing also but yes all the rest i was still doing reading the scriptures every day and doing those things but the feelings were still there i felt like i never got the answer either and i was just like well i just take things for how they are and i don't really need to know the in-depth and true answer because yeah the feelings felt good right okay a couple quick things uh just really quickly um i have to give a shout out uh to lila tuller lila's joined us um you know lila i don't know if you heard when we started but you were an important influence on the hughes so lila thanks for your story hughes as you can tell lila thanks as well thank you thank you i want to say i just i met her dad a couple times he came to our youth conference and then after listening to her the podcast with her i'm like he was there and it made me happy but on the other hand i remember talking that it was taking him away from his family so it's kind of uh you're happy that you get to meet those those you know general authorities and different things but then it was interesting to see the other side of the story that thank you for sharing your dad with us at the time um i mean he sat right next to me at this youth conference we got to have a talk and and just he was a great guy so and thanks for sharing your story lila yours was the first mormon stories episode that i listened to uh all the way through and uh had a big impact on me thanks for having the courage to share that huge yeah and of course lyla's dad was hartmann rector jr and that's uh one of the one of the really awesome mormon stories interviews this year and and of all time so shout out to lila i also want to shout out to kristen gluth cranny uh she she had the comment that's the covenant path and i think she's talking about how feeling those emotions and getting emotional and then connecting it to the gospel kind of really is the covenant path and that's part of the plan and i should just add um it's i don't think it's nefarious i don't think the leaders are saying how do we manipulate people and how do we deceive people i think that's what they were taught it that's what their parents were taught and their grandparents were taught and uh you know here we are just all down the line influenced by decisions that were made really early on right yep okay so i went i went to mexico i went to monterey mexico on my mission and i was just given a little bit of background that um i i was really excited to go it was it took some faith and some trust to be able to go because my mom was a little older and and i had been a big support system to her and i was having to leave her behind i went the first few months were very difficult when i got to mexico because i didn't speak the language but eventually i learned to speak the language and i absolutely loved it and you know i'm just going to be honest that now that i look back again after my faith crisis started i realized that and as i started reading reading about religious trauma and i started reading about how people are pulled into religion and why they're so bound to the religion i realized that i may have had a little bit of what i would call martyr syndrome that i liked the feeling of sacrificing to the extreme for god and for the church and that i was working my way back to heaven and and i was doing that with my acts of being out there and sacrificing and being on the mission for two years and walking into the dusty streets of mexico and going hungry and going without uh heating in my home and and being cold and and all of that sacrifice um actually was kind of spoke to me and i had a really great time on my mission and i really loved it i again i look back now with the perspective that i have which might be a little healthier than this perspective i had then and i i think that maybe i had that a little bit of i felt like a martyr for the church and and maybe not in a healthy way so i wanted to stay forever and i had a hard time when i came home uh with again waking up from dreams and and wishing i was back as a missionary because life had been simple and i felt so committed to god during that time um so i served in guatemala i'm just curious you know in my mission they had this problem of baptizing people that shouldn't have been baptized you know super high pressure sales techniques baptizing people way too fast way too young and then super low retention rates did you experience any of that on your mission in latin america uh you nailed it i mean uh there may be a couple of people that we baptized that are still active um one young man in particular is still active we reactivated him he was a teen at the time and um but other than that i don't think there's many people that are still active and it was very much about the numbers it was very much high pressure we were under a lot of pressure to have certain numbers as companionship and zones and as a mission every month and that was relentless that never let up um how was that for you as a missionary i mean i learned to deal with it um but you know i learned pretty quickly um maybe not really um that wasn't didn't come naturally to me sales doesn't come naturally to me um pressuring people or figuring out ways to get people to say yes under pressure was not didn't come naturally but i learned very quickly from some of my first companions um how to say things right how to frame questions right so that people didn't have a way to say no you know saying things like you know wouldn't you want to be with god wouldn't you want to please god and and um in leading i mean the missionaries themselves joked that it wasn't the commitment pattern we called it the manipulation pattern um and we said that with with love you know because we we hardly believe that this was the lord's way of bringing people into his church was was maybe to use a little bit of high pressure cells and manipulation to get them to eventually say yes because obviously it's for their own good right yeah and gerardo's asking that was the monterey mission right monterey south 97 to 99. okay and again it's tricky because i i can't say that the church was bad for the guatemalans that i served like there were so many it provided community meaning purpose all sorts of good things and so it's both it's that there's a lot of manipulation and coercion and uh you know undue influence and a lot of these people uh were their lives were really improved or were really improved for for a time because they were in the church and so again it's always mixed isn't it i absolutely agree and that actually was hard for me to understand at first because as i went public just a month ago very public on facebook about me stepping back i had some missionary companions and actually this young man that we reactivated who's now serving as a bishop in mexico that reached out and they had some pointed words for me and and it took me a little bit to think about the fact that you know maybe for some of these folks that i taught or that i served with you know the church did lift them up to a degree and maybe gave them that community or a little bit solid more solid foundation than what they had had and you know without jumping too far ahead um maybe um i mean i just feel like maybe for me now though having been in so long that i was slowly starting to see there's maybe a little bit of a toxic side or a little bit of a dark underbelly to the way the church approaches things yeah we'll get to that for sure yeah daniel daniel adds that uh that that the church provides education and resources to those in latin america and not just latin america all over the world and that's an important point daniel um totally true okay so marlena did you consider a mission at all or was that not in your plans i did but it was because of my parentarical blessing i think mostly because it said if you have a desire to serve a mission you will be called to the work um and so of course i'm reading this over and over and you know at the time i think it was still 20 21 and you know but i was living in utah at this point and i'm just looking to get married that sounds horrible but i thought if i went on a mission then i'd miss the opportunity to find the one and i didn't love the idea of getting up at 6 a.m to be honest this is what i think i actually got my papers to put them in to go on a mission um because i think i kind of had that guilt like from my paratrooper blessing that this is what you need to go do and but i didn't even fill out those papers so i never never went yeah and and you would have gone prior to the time where all basically all mormon young women were encouraged to serve missions back i'm guessing that back in your time it was still like all men need to go women only go if you can't find a husband right you know or you just really really really really must go but if you if you go you have to wait two years because women have to be older you know there's that whole deal right it was less common back then for sure right and i yeah you're kind of odd i feel like if you waited i mean you know back of that time if you win i was 21 right yeah like you couldn't get into it until 20 years you get married or you weren't doing something else then okay i guess i'll go on a mission so yeah yeah okay okay but you want to marry a missionary right i did i did i i i guess i should give that background a little bit people watching that know me um maybe if they i liked the missionaries from my time i was three on like i think i had a crush on a missionary from then and had a thing for missionaries i had a thing for missionaries and which i always said saved you know my parents were probably grateful because it saved me from i didn't kiss anyone until i was 21 which i was not going to say on here but at the time i was proud of that because john by the way had come out with this like you know some poem about kissing and the more each dollar is printed the less each one is worth and so it is with kissing i've given since my birthday i remember like i memorized that my mom had given me a book called it was is kissing sinful you read that book it's horrible i threw it away a few years ago after having my own teenagers you know definitely no kissing no french kissing none of this saved my parents probably a lot of crazy heartache because once i kiss people 21 it's kind of downhill from there but um anyway it's kind of oh yeah off the street i haven't heard that that's pretty intense and you feel like that was harmful to you how is that harmful to you at the time don't jump ahead in the timeline but why do you think now looking back that might have been harmful to you um so you're when i was 21 or back like when i read that book i mean you say you threw it away which means you think that wasn't a good book right he lived it so what what what looking back why do you think that wasn't good uh looking back um oh i don't know if or was it bad was it good for you it was probably good for me i think it was good for me people could first of all people couldn't believe that i hadn't kissed people so it actually became kind of cooler to tell a story that i hadn't and to not it's not that i didn't have the opportunity and have the opportunity but because i was a little bit crazier and you know party social whatever i don't know how to explain that but um when people started to not believe that i hadn't kissed anybody by the time i was 21 then it became cooler to say i hadn't and so i stuck with that so then i always said oh it was better for my parents because then if i didn't kiss anybody then it didn't lead to anything else and i was you know i didn't go down that path that my i had to worry about my parents had to worry about um so i in the aspect of the church i think it was being raised in the church and it was maybe helpful but then i look back and that was harmful i guess having teenagers and realizing that that's the time that maybe you should have i don't know maybe if you're going to make mistakes you should make them while you're at home maybe instead of waiting have those experiences yeah before and while you're at home and not wait till i don't know i don't know if i'm explaining that correctly or no and you guys i'm really new but you you guys are kind of newer to being out you know losing your faith or whatever but you know as a parent myself you know kids are having sex these days and they're having sex young and and it's just you know i i realized how profoundly unhelpful i was to my own children in all sorts of regards but including dating and sexuality and even experiments experimentation with drugs and alcohol that's what mormon kids are doing so of course some mormon kids are doing that and and uh yeah so if you're bringing that purity culture and that perfectionism culture and that kind of sex negative culture into parenting now in 2020 it's problematic because you know it's it's you're going to be having some of those expectations you're going to be putting some of those expectations on your kids in a world that's very different and they may not even be healthy because like you said part of adolescence and and young adulthood is experimenting and trying and finding out who you're attracted to what you're attracted to what you like what you don't like because the last thing you want to do is be rushing into a long-term married marriage commitment and then find out later you were incompatible for whatever reason right so there's all sorts of reasons why some of this purity culture causes a lot of dysfunction later i think yes absolutely and i think even for us i think we can say you know just even as we began to date and as we got engaged you know that's to keep uh you know the church has an unbending standard that you're not going to have any type of uh you know uh mishaps or sexual relations besides maybe just holding hands and and and unpassionate kissing and so anything beyond that um wow what what an enormous amount of guilt and shame and uh just um a stress and grief as you're trying to figure out if this is um the appropriate person that you want to spend the rest of your life with and build a life with and yet um you're struggling with even just dealing with you know your um your own emotions and and your attraction and figuring that out and and it just doesn't i mean it creates a lot of unhealthy um feelings and and shame and um yeah you can say it but you can almost say it better than we can john but oh it's great some fun comments so um let's see uh kelby writes adam i grew up in tucson arizona and served in the monterey mexico north mission finishing up around the time you were entering the south mission really appreciate your perspectives adam and marlena congrats on uh they're saying congrats to you um carrie kerry writes i remember that poem i had that book so that john by the way book you weren't the only one marlena carey carrie's a good friend of ours yeah shout out to the team larryn laron writes i was my husband's first kiss he was a good good mormon boy that's laryn ben writes met my wife at 23 first everything with her laryn also writes sounds like my husband sounds like my husband he was such a good boy he took a different girl to every high school dance never held hands never kissed never got serious and that's an interesting thing about utah utah there's this cultural thing where a high school kid can't ask the same girl if the girl can't go with the same boy to more than one formal dance like homecoming or sadie hawkins or whatever they call it prom you have to always pick someone different because you never get serious and you can't research yeah yeah i'd heard that we tried it we we thought we would try it didn't work so and then matthew says guess i missed out on all the weirdness as a kid i am a convert so matthew there's probably good and bad to that as well um all right so so let's jump back to your story um oh tracy wants to give us some data tracy says today teens are statistically just as active i'm guessing tracy means sexually active just as active as in the 70s 80s and 90s teens making out is not new to any culture i'm sure it's as old as time yeah thank you for that just one thing i would say still is once i started to have teenagers and kids i threw the book away before we were out of the church as we had teenagers and it was completely different than how we grew up and i think and obviously more open we are super open with our kids and they're super open with us um anyway and we'll get to that and even more so now that we're out of the church but um yeah it just creates this i don't know where i was going um no it's hard it just be yeah it just was ridiculous once i started to have teenagers that were kind of squashing that i mean yeah they were just completely different than i was growing up i think just the timing the the time of it and the it's also it's also a combination of how pervasive porn is now people are sexualized much younger and the church is always talking about porn and masturbation so kids just have no hope to develop a curiosity they're gonna develop massive curiosities of it more now than back then because it's so pervasive and the church can't stop talking about it right right and there's a great quote from dr i think it's finlays and fife i hope i said the name right um where she says that our attempts to squelch human sexuality actually drive our obsession with it yeah and and i've uh natasha helfer um that you've had on mormon stories uh numerous times and that has her own podcast i think it's a mormon sex info she talks at length and does an outstanding job of explaining how as we try and keep a lid on it and especially as the church teaches that there is no gray it's either you're perfect you you adhere to these standards perfectly or else um or else you need to go talk with your bishop because you're committing sins that are in that category of you know murder then we try and keep a lid on it and we try and keep it lit on it and that actually just re-emphasizes all of that and drives our obsession with it and and i would say definitely as a teen and even as an adult you know um you know that's been in ever constant my my uh you know our human sexuality isn't going away and our sex drive isn't going away and instead of accepting that as part of our nature the church actually creates this really unhealthy narrative around just normative human sexuality and and um and completely creates these scenarios where people believe that they're sex addicts or that they're addicted to pornography when all they're doing is trying to deal with their own normal human sexuality yeah so true got to get james's comment in here and then we'll go on with your story james writes i was gay so it made my life easier to fake being straight it set me up for the perfect storm later and that's uh yeah the casualties of lgbtq mormons is uh something that's its own thing um and uh all right so let's jump back to your story now so uh anything else about either of your adolescents or young adulthood before you we we get to the point where you guys meet anything else you guys want to share about your mormon your mormon stories i think i covered it mostly so where did so where did you guys how did you guys meet i was going to byu i had only been home for my mission for about nine months and i was living in apartments there right off campus at byu and marlena was living there while she was going to uh hair school at the time higher school ivan curtis and uh we met and she pretty much um um well yeah we have to stop him just kidding he moved it in january so it was like new you know new guys moving in so everyone in our our apartment was like okay who's the new guy going to move in we're we're all over that so that's it was a fight fresh meat fresh meat you know yeah yeah just i met marlena and uh she was the most fun person i'd ever met and even though she was not quite as serious as i was or as you could say about i don't want to be to be rude but you know marlene has always been great like she said and she grew up in a family that you can see that they they took things um they lived their religion but at the same time they weren't fanatical about it if that's hopefully i'm not being offensive um and i was more along those lines of there is no gray and so when we met it we were a little bit like oil and water when it came to how we interpreted the church and its teachings and all that um but there was some type of magnetism that's unexplainable that we just couldn't we just i was a breath of fresh air for you yeah that's right we just said we couldn't stay apart yeah i love it yeah doing anything marlena i was just gonna say he says um when he was deciding if we if he should marry me or not he'd just talk to a friend that said what you get with marlena or what you see with marlene is what you get so i've always been pretty open and honest and he felt like that was a lot different to girls that he had dated or met in utah that yeah very much more of a facade being put on then yeah and i had nothing to hide so exactly and actually that was extremely refreshing is that she just is who she is unapologetically and that's always been one of her most attractive qualities and and was it was a breath of fresh air compared to you know in the dating scene a lot of it is about creating a facade because you're trying to attract someone and and even part of that facade is creating a an image of you know this is who my this is my family and and we've we've you know we go way back in the church or or whatever it might be you know they're trying to create that perfect mormon persona um and anyway we both just kind of um found each other and don't worry about the facades and it just it just worked out so i think i just started school actually and that's when it happens when you're not looking so and then again back to my pair charcoal blessing and said i'd marry someone that was humble and actually adam was quite humble so it just worked and it worked really quickly so i'll give the timeline we met in january beginning of january by the end of february it's almost embarrassing now we are engaged we're engaged by the end of february and then married in june we didn't rush into anything at all well were you were you taught by your parents or by your mission president to get married as soon as possible oh yeah that was our last my last interview the night before going home from my mission the mission president said you just go home uh don't make a list of 20 things that you're looking for make a list of five things that you're looking for uh but but keep it basic you know so that you're you're not setting your standards so high you can't find someone and then uh when you find that person just do it don't think about it twice just do it just jump in so you guys did it yeah it was me it was meeting to marriage and how much time six months yeah that's so fast really quickly a listener um rights i i think i may have said the wrong general authority so lila is the daughter of hermann rector jr not marion d hanks i may have said the wrong general authority so thanks to verbation vibration for that clarification i love that my listeners and viewers keep me keep me honest and uh accurate because my brain doesn't always do that um okay so six months so what do you guys want to say about anything about your courtship anything you want to say about like what the agreement was what was the contract for your marriage in terms of like what you were building it on and what the understanding was how mormonism was interwoven into your marriage and then we could talk about the wedding and and even you're going through the temple and what that was like but talk about that so we can understand kind of what the agreement was and how sometimes we get set up for a lot of difficulty because of the way the church gets baked into the marriage contract does that make sense yeah yeah so i don't know if we actually talked about that now that i think about it yeah no no i don't mean formal i don't mean there's a formal written contract maybe like what was what was the expectation if not the understanding what were you both expecting your mormon life to kind of be like you know what i mean yeah i think well i wanted to say that he asked and i said yes and that was kind of it so um he um i think we were in fact when we got after we got married his mom i go back and look at on our video that you can't get adam and i to stop talking to each other especially when we were first married that we talked so much about everything that i think we were we're actually a lot alike even though we're very different so we were pretty much on the same page pretty much on every single thing except for when to have children and that was a big um i was going to mention that yeah that was a big thing in our marriage before trying to figure out like you know talking about when do we want to have kids we're not um the other thing is i was like absolutely i do not want to move back to illinois i'll move anywhere you want to but as soon as i had kids you know i wanted to move back to illinois but um the back to wanting kids is we had to talk about that and of course i'm still we're talking about it and he wants to have kids right away because he thinks that's the way it's supposed to be and i said and he only has one brother i had five siblings growing up and a foster brother and i'm like no we let's wait i don't i don't want to have kids right away i didn't know it was coming he didn't know it was coming and i was trying to warn him um what was coming so it was kind of contentious and then i would talk to my mom you know just to get her opinion still and um that kind of was a little bit yeah it was it was hard because again i took things so literally and i've got all these quotes in my head you know spencer w kimball saying just let the children come naturally and don't don't prevent them and and that's our responsibility as parents and i believe there's a talk too where they talk about it doesn't matter whether you're in school and in college and dirt poor um this is the lord's plan you've gotta you've gotta do your duty and just you just start having kids like right away so it was a little bit of a point of a contention uh we came to see eye to eye and really actually you just came around to my point i think i drowned you into that church i'm like no actually i remember going actually to the doctor to get like birth control or something and um he's like what you went to the doctor and you didn't you know so then still continuing the discussions but i'm like you gotta get on this soon enough before you get married but anyway yeah and then just kept yeah we worked through it yeah came to a kind of agreement how was the um any any of you guys have any with the temple positive experience or struggles with the temple ceremony any of that no so we went through the april before so we were getting married june 10th and we my brother was going on a mission actually to guatemala also and he went through in april so i was like oh it'd be cool if we went through together and we went went to salt lake temple and i back when we were thinking about my youth and i didn't want to give too much information um i think that's one thing i was excited for the most so i prepared even when i was way young i was super excited to you know get married go to the temple i want to get married in the salt lake temple where my parents had and i would watch film strips um of they had in pictures of the inside of the temples i think that's maybe the only place at the time you could see those so i would watch those sometimes just in my room i would i read the what's the temple book by boyd k pacquiao the holy temple just trying to get ready for it so i didn't it didn't seem weird or odd to me when i first went yeah me neither now that i think about it um you know i went through when i was 19 and um it didn't it didn't strike me as too odd um uh looking back now you know i'm not sure how it didn't but you know then again i mean i i knew that my mom went to the temple frequently i knew everyone i knew goes to the temple and everyone talked about how beautiful it is and sacred and special and so you just i took it at face value that this was god's way of teaching us and and um and that this was all super important so you were part of the club you know once you went to the temple once you got to where the garments like that's you you know you'd reach the next level and that's where you wanted to go and i was just thinking i it wasn't so shocking my parents kind of you know they had their suitcases or their typicals and they kind of talk about it i don't remember them showing them to me and but i remember like when my grandma and grandpa died and they had their clothes on their temple clothes um and they buried them so it wasn't so shocking to me as it could have maybe been yeah yeah what about the keeping the law of chastity before you get married kind of struggle was that hard were you guys just naturals at that no that was hard that was hard yeah and we had an awesome bishop to be honest at the time so um we went in and talked to our bishop once obviously because it was we were struggling with that he just had us meet with him every week and said this is you know he basically he was cool he said this is normal um just come meet with me talked and he you know he was not reprimanded reprimanded um it was just cool rubbermandic thank you of it and was awesome about it and you know didn't have us go into super detail and it was a good good it was okay but i mean there was still i mean i know for myself you know you just we had guilt there was a lot of guilt he would bring up stuff and i'm like don't talk about that yeah well even after we were married after we were married hey remember that one time i mean we didn't go all the way but you know you you know there was some uh you know you can say that levi you push it you know and and um you push it about as far as you can because because you're normal you're 21 and 22 you want to know we're 23 22 and 23 yeah 22 and 23. so you know that's that's a struggle like even six months and um and and even after we got married even many years after we got married i'd be like hey remember that one time i'm really gonna be like no no i don't talk about because i i still feel bad about that but it was good it was good yeah i guess it sounds like it sounds adam like you had a little bit of scrupulosity have you heard that term before i have and i think so maybe i'm i maybe i don't want to admit that i had it but i i i'm starting to come around to the idea that i had a little bit of scrupulosity yeah yeah and it's nothing to be ashamed of it just it's just hyper conscientiousness right it's just it's basically obsessive compulsive disorder high anxiety in a religious context and so it sounds like yeah like rumination fear guilt shame a lot of purity a real purity mindset where if you messed up it wasn't just like oh well i'll try and do better you would kind of beat yourself up oh yeah even even as a missionary remember i was thinking about this the other day that we gave a blessing to someone and like a week prior to this you know um you know i'd had what the church would call you know an inappropriate thought you see some girl on the street i don't know what she was wearing i have no idea i what i remember is i remember having a thought that i was not happy about uh you know i felt guilty about this thought and even a week later i'm helping give a blessing to someone thinking i i really hope that god's forgiven me at this point because now i don't want to ruin this person's chance of getting blessed and obviously you know we have to be these perfectly pure conduits of priesthood power or else this person's not going to get their blessing or or pro or all get punished in the next life for it so uh that's probably the definition of scrupulosity right there uh but yeah that's how i understood life yeah that makes sense all right well i'm just gonna note that up until your marriage your story is remarkably positive and i don't mean that in any not trying to say anything good or bad about the church or anything but a lot of times a lot of the people that come on more stories probably have more trauma some abuse some really bad experiences with church leaders or really harsh parents or you know some and and this is great uh what i'm hearing is you guys had kind of like ideal mormon upbringings adjusted for a lot of the other problems that we often see are you guys comfortable saying your your mormon upbringings up to marriage was kind of ideal i i had some issues with some bishops i had some issues with some leaders growing up but nothing i'm pretty chill and i was pretty go with it and it wasn't anything that disrupted my testimony or disrupted my yeah so i i guess yeah when you point it out maybe yeah i think i think you're accurate um up to the point where just i can see now how um i wanted to be so much like the people i was surrounded with you know i wanted to be uh i just wish that my family could be like like the stake president's family because uh they were they were well off um everyone's in the family seems super you know high functioning and and successful and driven and um and they just seem to have this perfect uh beautiful family life and i i was i guess you could say envious of that or that's where i i wanted that so badly that it uh even at the time i might have been able to admit that that was unhealthy for me um but there was some um yeah there was some facade there i see it now as facade you know there's no perfect families and there's nobody that's you know we all we all have struggles every single human being does no matter how perfect we look from the outside but i always felt very odd in my ward i felt odd growing up i wish that i i always wanted to feel more like everybody else um maybe it didn't help that my mom was was politically leaning she was liberal um and she was very outspoken about that and and i you know absorbed her same way of seeing the world politically and in terms of u.s partisan politics and that really um again was another way in which i felt very different from everybody around me uh growing up in the high utah in the 1980s so so i don't know if that answered your question or not but yeah i mean i wasn't trying to say marlena that you had perfect experiences but nothing super traumatizing at least as you processed it as the at the time right right i mean yeah definitely my family wasn't perfect growing up and there was issues but yeah yeah it was overall it's pretty good so what do you guys want to share about from your marriage to where the faith crisis started to happen anything about your story that you guys feel is is really important so it could include uh good things about your marriage and family hard things about your marriage and family good or hard things about your church experiences little cracks that may have developed before the real cracks and problems started to happen tell us whatever you want to about your marriage and your lives before things start unraveling if that makes sense yeah you want to go first that's a span of 20 years so yeah yeah i would start when you're a bishop but what where would you start um you could start before okay i'll try and not talk too long but uh and interrupt me merlin if you want but so yeah we were all in um right away like marlena said you know she was a little more gray than i was and said well you know we don't need to do family home evening when it's just the two of us and we don't have kids and that to me was like oh but the prophet said even you'd be blessed even if it's just the two of you um so i was still struggling with that not like a formal lesson we were hanging out but you had to do a formal lesson oh yeah no i wanted to like kneel down and say prayer and all that stuff and having him and marlene was like yeah i'm not because it was a start of a family you didn't really maybe have that growing up yeah i just i was still kind of dealing with that and and and i i can honestly say it it took a long time decades for um for marlena to help me to to kind of unwind a little bit and even when we first got married i would credit her with helping me to unwind because i was a little tightly wound um in terms of all aspects of life and and to just take life a little less um seriously and and go with the flow um but yeah we we had children right away uh let me explain that really quick though is once i we did decide to wait at least six months we compromised in the middle um just for those people that feel like they need to have kids right away um i would i definitely recommend now that you wait some time but once we got married then i was like what we can have kids so we did go off the birth control and i thought it was gonna be six months by everything we'd read but we got pregnant within like two months and i had our first kid he was he was blessed his baby he was one week old and got blessed on our one year anniversary so we went in and then we said we might as well have these kids really quickly and it's been great and then we had three more kids all two years apart so we have four children other all two years apart and got done with school i went to byu graduated from byu that was that was difficult i graduated in civil engineering and that was extremely difficult uh it's a very competitive place to go to school and very demanding yeah and i had two kids by the time i was done because of spencer w kimball and we um it was just very stressful it was very trying time um i left actually with i did not like my experience at byu it didn't resonate with me um they put a lot of demands on their students telling you well you need to start your food storage you need to have a calling you need to pay your own way so you're not taking you know loans or government assistance you need to get good grades you need to get out in less than four years so that more students can get in faster i can go on and on but they put a lot of demands on you and i at the time i could see that i was unhealthy and toxic and i i even despite my own scoop velocity if you will i finally figured out like i can't do all this i'm gonna have to ignore the majority of what they're saying because i'm just trying to survive financially and academically but we survived and we made it out even with two kids and started working and i joined the us public health service it's a i work for the federal government i'll just leave it there uh but my first assignment with the public health service was on the navajo reservation in northern arizona and that's what took us to this little remote community on the navajo reservation and um and we we'd been there two years and that's when i was called as bishop after being there for two years before we jump into that marlena were you going to say something and i was going to ask you about how you experience being a young mom and a mom with lots of kids really young you know because we always end up talking about kind of women in the church and and authority and their role and even feminism a little bit and opportunities anything you want to say about being a young mother to lots of kids before we jump into kind of the faith crisis stuff yeah i should because i i wasn't planning on getting pregnant so fast all the books we read said oh it's going to take at least six months it was like a month and i was in hair school at the time i had taken a little break to get married and then i went but then i got pregnant and i was so sick i couldn't go half the time and then adam was in school and i said okay i'll just go and work and support you so then i ended up dropping out of school and going back to work to support him to finish school and i think i even had started some school at the time it was uvsc because i dropped out of hair school i'm like i'll just take a class at a time so i can you know work on my degree and things and that didn't work out i can't remember why if i was because i was sick or different things but i was 23 24 maybe when i had our first kid and i don't know how people do it even younger i was tired it's exhausting yeah we didn't have any money i mean it was great i loved it i wouldn't i probably wouldn't do it i don't know i don't know if i would change that again no i would wait um i would wait i have more time together um a little bit cause we even look back now and say we could have both one of us could have been psycho you know we didn't even get to know each other before that and then we're throwing kids into the mix which is a whole different level and then your focus kind of goes off your spouse unfortunately and onto those those kids and then each kid just progressively came you know two years apart and there's really no time in between that so um yeah and it's hard to get your degree while you've got all those kids so and but do it while you're younger because it gets harder i think actually when they're teenagers which i thought would be different but it's not yeah and and again it sounds like you know motherhood is i think it's the hardest it's the hardest job i've ever seen motherhood of young kids in my life and i've you know been around a bit and um and it sounds like as far as adjusting for a hard motherhood is again you had a relatively good experience where the rubber meets the road i'll just interject this is when a couple has a faith crisis and they end up divorced and then now marlena marlena can you imagine having 10 having four kids no edging no formal education you know no no bachelor's degree no career experience and all of a sudden your husband leaves your income split and you're trying to figure out what job you're going to take now that you know now that you have to have a career you know in mid-life like that's that's where you guys maybe are lucky and other people really have it rough meet women in a very vulnerable place and i can't help but say that's maybe by design uh because it it forces you to stay together it forces women to stay even if the relationship is abusive it forces you to lean on the church and i can give some examples of that with some friends but i don't know if you want me to address that now or later we can talk about that later okay because it does come up actually later a little bit okay so is it is it time to talk about uh the calling as bishop adam yeah sure okay so you were how old i was 26 no you're 28 i was 28. you're 28 years old three kids at the time three kids at the time mm-hmm why you was bishop yeah and newer newer to your career right yeah yeah all right and did you always want to be a bishop so tell us all about that i mean i wasn't opposed to the idea but i never expected that to happen when i was so young and i felt very unprepared for it um like marlena was she might tell the story but we were they just changed the word boundaries there was two wards in this town we were of course we're living on the the native american navajo indian reservation and um so we were very much in the minority uh but we were attending our ward we'd been there two years and they changed the boundaries and we kind of just wanted to keep going to the ward where we knew people we had friends um and so we kept going for i don't know a couple of months maybe to the board we were we were we were going to the wrong ward now because the boundaries changed and we were in the new ward and we got a call to go in and meet with the stake president and we both thought for sure the state president was going to say hey you need to go to the correct war this isn't right you know uh and uh and they completely blindsided us and said we'd like to call you as the bishop and um you started crying i started crying because i'm just like and i was in shock like i'm not ready for that responsibility and and i don't feel i don't feel ready for it and of course they use the example joseph smith and said well he was 14 when he was called so um you know you can do this you're uh you're double his age you're 28. and [Laughter] and so of course i mean um again leaning heavily on my patriarchal blessing my patriarchal blessing said to accept every calling and not only to accept every calling but to accept every calling but joyfully and to do it joyfully so um is i mean which yeah then again maybe not the most healthiest um uh advice for me in terms of my own autonomy and my own personal health and in being a complete and whole adult and being being able to make my own decisions um now thinking that god has commanded me that i have to do everything the church tells me my patriarchal blessing even says um to follow the advice and counsel of my leaders in anything they call me to do so i took that very literally again and so of course i i said okay i'll do it if you really need me to do it and so my very first sunday in the board that i was being called bishop to was my first sunday attending that ward and we maybe knew a few people in that ward because it was a smaller town but it was very weird sitting in sacred meeting that day not knowing anybody and the state president stands up and says okay well brother hughes is being called as the new bishop and everyone turns to look at me and it's like well who's this guy so that was odd and you know i don't know if i'd if i'd say too much about that experience i served for two years we loved the people the people were outstanding and uh actually i really loved serving there um we have a lot of navajo friends and um still maintain contact with them on facebook and um just outstanding people and i love being able to be of service uh is to the extent that i was able to um now with that being said it was very challenging because um the activity rates there just i'm going to be completely blunt the activity rates there are kind of like what you'd find in in guatemala so the ward that i was in had 1100 members and we had maybe 90 people attending sacramento meeting there was a lot of financial need and i was completely overwhelmed with requests for financial help assistance through the church fast offerings assistance and um i was just completely overwhelmed the the priesthood is not deep and the the church says you've got to have priesthood run the church that's just the way they've you know that's the way that it's been created and and it's it was really challenging from a staffing point of view from an organizational point of view and and there just wasn't a lot of support from the state presidency our state covered a very wide area a large area on the navajo nation and um i mean without being disrespectful um it's it's not too far off to say that i felt like they handed me the handbook set me apart and said good luck we'll talk to you soon and and i was just up it was up to me to figure it out from that point on um most of the bishops who served in that ward before me i think the three bishops prior all served for two years and got burned out to the point where they they they were out and and i couldn't say the same it took about two years and i was i was exhausted and um you should say we moved so we it's a hard area to live and our friends were moving and we ended up moving to alaska from there it's extremely remote extremely remote and that was a hardship from day one marlena asked me every single day when we lived there when can we leave and the public health service that i work for is a uniform service i won't go into that too many details but as a you as a uniformed officer of the government they can kind of move me when they want but um after having been there for a couple of years and after being bishop for a couple years i i asked and applied for it and and was seeking to get out and and part of that was because i was exhausted and i was overwhelmed in my current calling and and then when i did leave well okay one story wait wait wait wait wait before we talk about leaving i want to talk about you being bishop is that okay yeah yeah go ahead okay so first of all those of you who are my age i'm 51 it's 20 20. when i was growing up uh spence w kimball was the prophet of the church and anyone who knows spencer kimball every prophet's kind of got their hammer that they pound the membership with and the main hammer that spencer kimball hammered the membership with was with was with the lamanites right it was the native americans how you know the main purpose of the church is to you know lift the lamanites to make them blossom as a rose to to help them become white and delightsome and strong and healthy and and that's all rooted in the book of mormon if you read the title page of the book of mormon joseph smith said that the book of mormon was written primarily for the lamanites and when i say lamanites for those who aren't mormon i mean native americans the idea was that the that the native americans were the pure blood of israel because lehi and nephi came over on the boat from israel came to america brought the pure blood of israel with them built up these populations the the dark lamanites the bad dark lamanites you know were cursed with dark skin because of their wickedness they killed off the light white nate you know um nephites and then they fell into savagery and of course that's all problematic because it was based on the mound builder myths of the 19th century that was all over new york and joseph smith just sort of absorbed that into the book of mormon but aside from the fact that that was super racist and totally false but it's in the book of mormon and that's how we all grew up and so with spencer to be kimball hammering on that lamanites were super special super important and this so in the 60s 70s 80s you would have this lamanite placement program where where the church would take lamanite children lamanite children out of their homes with their families out of the reservation place them into adoption into white utah in arizona mormon homes idaho raise those kids with whiteness you know take them away from their culture teach them good good english teach them uh how to be refined teach them good morality teach them the white american ways that are the true mormon good ways and in that way we were going to help lift up these royal blood of israel people and have them reach their full potential and that was just like such a huge focus in the 60s 70s and 80s byu had the laymanite generation which was like the young ambassadors but it was lamanites and you know the hawaii cultural center polynesian cultural center you know it was just like we love lamanites rah-rah-rah laminites and somehow at some point that all died and so i give that as a history just for those who don't know about that history and of course many now view that whole program as cultural genocide there's a lot of abuse that went on ripping people from their families stripping them of their culture all the cultural imperialism all sorts of problems with that i give that background because now i want to ask you adam how much of that did you know when you were being called to be bishop over you know a ward that or a branch that covered a reservation and and whether or not you knew anything about that talk to us about your ideas about the book of mormon and about dark skin and about laymanites and native americans and how that informed how you approached being a bishop yeah so um i mean i i maybe the summary would be to say that i i just adopted the church's position on all of that so i mean i i believe that the the navajo were um were of the lamanites and i actually though i had read a book that was done by an anthropologist that claimed that well the navajo their language is similar to the athabascan tribes of alaska and that most likely in the navajo are recent newcomers i think historians and anthropologists would say they've only been in the region in the the four corners region of utah arizona colorado and new mexico for maybe 400 years whereas like the hopi which are in that same vicinity they've been there for 2000 years and have some of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the united states um so so it was interesting because um i remember asking navajo members of my ward um what is your take on this are you lamanites are you really actually related to the mongolians and to the athabascans of alaska and you and you migrated down only 400 years ago what's your take on it and they i mean they all really firmly believed that they were lamanites i didn't meet a single one who who had agreed that they were really athabascans or or uh you know used to be part of mongolia five 600 years ago or however long it was um they all very much believe that and and we're very proud to be lamanites because the promises of the book of mormon are to them uh the promises in the book of mormon even state that you know if the gentiles which is supposedly you know the the non-natives that came here to this land if if the gentiles don't accept the gospel and live it and become christian then the lamanites are going to go through and tear them apart and this will this will be their land forever and no one's going to come on it so so they were very proud of that and very much believed it and took it to heart and it was because of the indian i didn't know much about the indian placement program before i was bishop um but then after i was there i kind of learned more about it kind of learned how it worked um you know there's all the members that i knew that went on it spoke highly of it none of them none of them regretted having done it but um it is because of the indian placement program that tuba city had two boards this is the city that we lived in it's called tuba city and so there was two boards of 1100 people 2200 people and yet about 180 active members it was because so many teens had been put on on indian on this indian placement program and that but it didn't stick for whatever reason and so now you've got these massive wards we really only had enough active members to be one ward but it was unmanageable to have 2200 members in one ward so so it had been split we had two boards two bishops uh but they were very strong the boards struggled because of their their size yeah so um [Music] so lots of comments from listeners uh cal tingey writes my uncle dale tingey was a mission president for the navajo mission and then went on to run the american indian services at byu thanks for uh tuning in cal sounds like you probably got some stories as well um several people are asking what city you lived in again or what city was the ward in tuba city it's a city t-u-b-a yeah t-u-b-a and it was actually originally a mormon settlement so before i don't remember the date i think it was maybe in the early 1900s uh the federal government extended the navajo reservation boundaries uh but cuba city was originally a mormon settlement there's still a little mormon graveyard in the vicinity and uh and when the federal government extended the reservation boundaries then i i don't remember if they bought out the mormon settlers or not but uh the mormon settlers were pushed out and went elsewhere uh but there's some there's some deep history there if you ever read the the biography of jacob hamblin uh he came through the area and and i believe he started the original settlement there jacob hamlin was a kind of more of a famous mormon pioneer um so yeah there's some deep mormon history there and and there's a lot of pride among the members of their heritage and and of that mormon heritage in the area cal also asks if you had ever heard of george p lee while you were there and if so what what you had heard about him okay so george p lee uh i don't know a lot about him he was a general authority now if i remember right he was native american correct yeah yeah for sure okay so uh navajo i'm gonna google it keep talking yeah i believe he was navajo so i had a co-worker who i became really close friends with was navajo um and this guy said oh john p lee or yeah john p lee right i get the name right he was my george p lee excuse me george p lee so george he says oh george was my high school principal and he said that guy had some amazing talents he was an amazing uh public speaker uh he was motivational and he didn't have he had a lot of great things to say about uh george b lee but this guy also knew that he'd been high up in the mormon church and then i believe excommunicated um i want to say it was maybe under um uh allegations of abuse maybe yeah that's right yeah so but people didn't talk about him i after i heard the story from my co-worker i asked around to some of the old-time members and said what do you know about uh george p lee and and if i remember correctly now this is 12 13 years ago but if i remember correctly one people didn't want to talk about it two people said well george p lee was just an outstanding guy and it was it's really sad what happened to him so almost as if it wasn't his fault um or maybe some disbelief that that that the allegations were true because they'd known him and it sounds like he was very charismatic leader and maybe there was a lot of hopes placed on him as the first native american general authority yeah and i'm just i'm going to read just a tiny bit from his bio because i it's a story that we don't know um and you know we shouldn't forget stuff like this so just a couple things about him he uh um graduated from high school was a navajo served as a missionary to the navajo nation um it was called the southwest indian mission at the time he came called as a general authority uh on october 3rd 1975. he was 32 years old at the time so i'm super young and uh he was the first native american general authority and he was a general authority for many from 1975 to 1989 so that's 14 years that's a long time to be a general authority and uh it says here on september 1st 1989 so that's the same year he was released he was excommunicated it says for for apostasy and other conduct on becoming a member of the church he was the first general authority to be excommunicated since richard lyman in 1943 which we talked about uh during my shannon uh caldwell montez interview about the um bh robert stuff but first general authority since the 1943 to be excommunicated um and uh you know some say it had to do with abuse um some say it had to do with with uh abuse of a of a of a young girl [Music] you know so so it's kind of always weird when somebody called as a as a high level ranking general authority or a bishop or stake president or whatever you find out they were child molester that's not a good thing and he it sounds like he admitted it but it's also true that he lost his faith so you know it's kind of interesting whenever a mormon general authority or top leader loses their faith you wonder how that can happen but i guess even the very elect shall be deceived right yeah right we've heard that one recently [Laughter] so anyway that's george p lee um really really quickly as you were as you were working and you know your faith crisis came a lot later as you were working with these navajo members did you ever hear about the dna problems of the book of mormon the anachronisms you know just the bearing straight you know did you have any doubts about whether these these people were were truly lamanites um i never heard of any of the issues well i will mention uh it was while i was in tuba city that i'd heard first heard of simon sotherton he's the geneticist that was mormon from australia that published the book and i remember reading a news article somewhere i saw a news article that he'd been excommunicated and uh that actually really bothered me as i read that was probably the first doctrinal issue in my entire life that had ever bothered me was reading simon sutherton's uh and i just read a news article about it i didn't read his book by just reading this mormon geneticist had come to the conclusion that there was no way the book of mormon uh could have happened because the dna science just absolutely does not back any of it up and he's been on mormon stories i listened to that i think he did like a panel with simon and and he talked at length about that and does a a good job of laying out the science of why uh there's just no way that um that the genetic variety that we see today could have come from a handful of people only 2 000 years ago yeah okay so that was maybe a little crack that developed for you yeah but i mean that just came from reading the news that didn't come from um serving at the time but what about that guy that lived that told you the hopies had the same that was kind of one for me i started to think like yeah you can explain it um okay so so our ward had a few hopi members in uh in our ward even though it was mostly navajo the hopi reservation is just right to the south of where we were living and the hopis have a lot of oral traditions that somewhat match up with uh book of mormon stories and so without going into too much detail um i to me that was very confirming at the time it was faith promoting it was very faith promoting for the the hopi members of our board um now that i've learned uh you know it was only through this faith crisis as i started research that i realized that um a lot of those oral traditions go they predate joseph smith um i thought that i was stumbling onto uh things that very few people in the world would even know about and didn't realize that some of these oral traditions about um um you know a great war or about you know light-skinned dark-skinned natives um fighting against each other i didn't i didn't realize that some of those stories might might predate joseph smith himself yeah for sure so overall how how were the lamanites blossoming while you were working with them were they blossoming as a rose were they growing white and delightsome as had been prophesied was the church was it a vibrant ward was super faithful because the truth is kimball died and when kimball died the church's focus on the lamanites seems to have also died so what was the status of the of the blossoming as a rose and the white and delightsome you know evolving native americans by the time you are working with them yeah i mean at the risk of offending my my native american friends i mean and i hope i don't do that but the church still very much struggles uh on the reservations and um it's just a difficult environment um and and some of that is of no fault of their own some of that is um because i've worked with native american tribes for 20 years or 16 years now excuse me um part of the the reservation system that the federal government set up uh just is dysfunctional it doesn't work well uh for the natives themselves and part of that forces a lot of uh native americans to leave um that leaves uh a lot of the the leadership positions unfilled that uh forces a continual uh revolving door with people leaving people coming back home people leaving again um either looking for opportunities uh better opportunities off the reservation or coming back home later in life to take care of their parents um there's it creates a lot of instability and so i would definitely not say that the church is is thriving or blossoming as a rose and you know the light-skinned stuff about becoming white and delightsome um i mean it's almost it almost seems disrespectful to even talk about that because it's such a ridiculous theory that people are gonna their skin color is gonna turn white uh but i mean that is what it is um people's skin color is what it is and so um i'm not even sure how to answer that one but um i mean well was their skin turning white and delightsome well i would say no because you know their their genetic makeup is what it is and and so their skin color is what it is and and um i would say no i think it's hard for them though as native americans and being mormon ah just between their culture and mormonism um you could see the struggle between the the two um staying in their culture but staying in morsmanism if that makes sense it was completely different and again no disrespect to um members who are native american or our friends that still live there but it's very similar to what i experienced in mexico um you know a lot of members low activity rate and even the people who do um join the church in mexico have a very hard time separating the catholicism and the um you know it's almost a mystical um version of catholicism that's mixed in with native traditions and and it's hard to ever get them uh to fully abandon that because it is ingrained it's been there it's probably been their religion and their way of thinking for so many years you know the version of guadalupe in mexico and and and from for navajos it's the same way it's hard to to let go of that so a lot of them still have one foot in in in mormonism and one foot in the native traditions and the ceremonies and um and beliefs that they had and that their family still has so yeah it's difficult for them to leave yeah yeah and really that's one of the hardest things is that i've been reading about this this mound builder myth that emerged in the 1600s 1700s purely because we were we were killing we were committing genocide on native americans and stealing their land so we had to dehumanize them because you can't commit genocide on the people that you think are people you have to make them sub-human but then they would find all these ruins and all these beautiful mounds and all this art and they're like well certainly these savages couldn't have created all this great stuff so there must have been a white race that created all this stuff that got killed off by these savages and those who are listening i'm i'm saying savages and air quotes because i know that's an offensive term um and so we go on to steal their land displace them kill them uh kill millions of them just by the germs we brought over and isolate them and push them away and demonize them and that type you know before we came on this land they were these thriving advanced civilizations they had better agriculture than europe did and but a lot of better art and just really advanced civilizations they had written language they had calendars not every white civilization had you know calendars and written languages by the time you know the mayans or aztecs did so these were advanced civilizations but we decimated them and and left them as as they are oftentimes now and they're just reeling from the years and years and years of multi-generational trauma but then you've got the church that's this white you know constitution loving flag-waving american church and they're angry at america and they were mistreated by european white europeans and yet the church is like rah-rah constitution america whiteness yay darkness no come be like us and so i can only imagine the cognitive dissonance again just like latin americans of like well they can provide community they can provide structure maybe they can provide provide resource resources or support or meaning or education and it's a super racist church that is part of this whole cultural imperialism that's wrecked us so how in the world is that going to end up good for for them you know in the long run right right and i would agree with everything you just said yeah at the time i didn't see it but now i see it that um yeah that imperialism has not been good for them uh um and it's it's sad that the church comes in and tells them this is your true identity and your true culture is what's in the book of mormon and yet um as well you know so we can talk about later um you know the book of mormon itself doesn't stand up to any type of um uh investigation you know or factual investigation so it's it's really um a crime to come in and tell them your your culture is is invalid your culture is not good it's actually bad for you and you've got to leave it behind and adopt this culture that was written by some guy joseph smith author and proprietor um book of mormon from from the americas and you got to try and be more like the the white folk so that's sad yeah a couple comments that are really important the first one mgmilw writes i am a first nations person i should probably be saying first nations and not native americans so there's one one mistake i'm making thank you mg for educating me even though that's not your job but mg goes on to write your comments and laughter are making me uneasy just the way racism makes me when white people denigrate us and i'm i'm thank you for that feedback i'm so sorry if you're talking to me uh we don't i we mean no disrespect in fact the opposite what we're intending to say is that we have done so many bad things as white european you know americans to your people and i am so mad uh and uneasy with mormon racism and mormon teachings about skin color in the book of mormon and all these teachings from spence w kimball and the lamanite displacement you know laminate placement program and all that stuff so i laugh at tragedy it's a weird unhealthy uh tendency of mine and i do not mean it um at your expense mg so thank you for writing in and sharing that with us um i'll just add a couple other perspectives cal writes laymanites have a difficult they have the native american culture so that's the culture they come from the white man's culture when they go to work and then all the lds cultures so they're having to navigate you know three different at least three different cultures and that's that's super hard as well um so uh also heather wright's my grew up in flagstaff arizona my dad always had sort of an obsession fascination with the navajo and hopi indians being lamanites and studied their symbols and stories of their gods uh thank you for sharing that heather as well okay um any so so this was all just to say the church is way too racist it still is too racist the book of mormon is racist mormon history is racist and the indian placement program was racist and uh just way too much racism blah blah blah it's awful and you were swimming in the middle of all that anything else you want to say about you know being being in that mission being a bishop over a navajo award um that you think is important here i just want to reiterate what i started out with and and again the only thing that the only time so far that i've started to get choked up is talking about the friendships that we formed there and how much we absolutely love the people marlena served uh in various callings in in the ward while we were there during that four years and created some very strong friendships with people uh from their teens all the way up into their 80s that kept in communication with us and still do communicate with us and we absolutely love the navajo people um and the help of people and the hopi people they took us in as family because not all white people are accepted and we were part of their family when we left and that's what i think i didn't want to i hope we're not being um insensitive to that either because that's what i'm saying it's hard for them and it's hard to watch that when they're trying to live this culture of the lds culture white culture and then they're still trying to be involved in their culture um the native american culture which they should um and i want to say elder holland came i mean they're still receiving that message um he came and spoke to them in 2008. he did a special and very much still saying you're the lame knights you're the chosen people yeah telling that there would be a temple built in their midst soon which was built up maybe unrealistic expectations i mean considering how strong the church is at now or not strong that telling them the temple was going to be built soon in their midst was maybe setting up people for uh disappointment but but again i think it was based on their faithfulness i'm sure yeah that he said so but yeah i just wanted to reiterate uh how much we love them and and i actually was a little concerned about this portion of the interview and how to explain that because i don't want to come off as disrespectful or anything i'm trying to be realistic about how my experience was there but at the same time honoring the friendships that we had and and the amazing people that we met while we were there so really quickly two things i want to just make it really clear for those who don't know the the part about the book of mormon that says that that current native americans are descendants of you know lehigh and nephi and layman and lemuel who come from israel that has all been proven scientifically to be 100 false native americans came to north south and central america through the bering strait from asia and and dna evidence cultural evidence anthropological evidence linguistic evidence all of it proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt that's why the church had to change the title page of the book of mormon that's why the church changed the name of lamanite generation to something else uh that's why the church ultimately has abandoned their support of the lamanites and tries not to talk about it anymore at least publicly because a a core fundamental premise of the mormon church in the book of mormon has scientifically been proven to be bankrupt and completely false so i just want to make sure we say that uh and so that's a big problem and so the church tries to ignore it but the other thing i want to do is just ask you guys to say what you loved about these people so each of you take because we've talked about the tragedy we've talked about the hardship but you guys are getting emotional can each of you just describe three to five traits or experiences or characteristics of these people where you learned where you were inspired where you were humbled or taught or you experienced amazing joy and and uh and humanity i i think for me it was just their warmth that these are very warm people and um you know once they get to know you they will wrap their arms around you and make you part of their community and and that's the best way i can explain it just very great down-to-earth people um they're trying their hardest to live their best lives and um and they they just love people they um yeah we just felt completely accepted there yeah as i was gonna say totally accepted um are our children are accepted so accepted um i mean i think there was i don't know how to say it other except my son is very white very blonde haired um but he would tell kids that his dad was navajo because he wanted to be part of the culture he went to school there that's where he started school um but he had not everyone has a great experience with kids and going to school there and and in the community but those people accepted us for whatever reason and became our family um when we did move away i was taken back by um oh yeah the outpouring of uh support that they showed how much when we were going to leave how much they were going to miss us and we were going to miss them and um yeah it was like leaving we became so close to those people i think it's because of where we're the location and the people and we relied on each other so much and yeah the love and friendship i mean there was nothing they wouldn't do for us and then we wouldn't do for them so okay thank you for that really quickly uh this is a comment question for you uh marlena christina writes i've always been surprised at how willing wives are to support their husbands being a bishop when they have young families when we had young kids my husband worked full-time and was in school full-time i was alone with the kids a lot i remember telling him that if he were to be called as a bishop or any calling that took a lot of time away i absolutely would not support it it never happened thankfully but i wouldn't have been okay with it i know that's against everything the church teaches marlena what's that like to have your husband super busy not just as a bishop but in a super high demanding ward with really challenging economic and social kind of challenges was that a burden on you was that healthy and happy for you um not so bad no that was definitely hard he was again like adam said he'll i'm gonna get emotional i don't know why um adam will do anything and he will serve those people and be in his callings um and he'll give 110 and um i'm a selfish wife also i wanted even when it would come to general conference and priesthood session you know when we were first married i'm like i don't need to go just stay home with me kind of stuff so i supported them as best i could there was definitely hard days um i remember sitting in sacrament i think we only had three kids and i don't know if i was pregnant at the time with her fourth breaking down you know he's up on the stand and i just started bawling probably because i couldn't handle all the kids at once but again speaking of you know a lady and liz came up and helped me you know and and took over um but the hardest thing was adam was either marrying someone every saturday or doing a funeral for someone so not only was he gone every sunday he was pretty much gone every saturday doing that and again not every saturday but a lot of saturdays so he was serving those people and helping them um and it was hard because he wasn't always there and the kids were young and um yeah it was really there were some hard times there was some really hard times and again maybe it's wife i was like we got to get out of here because i can't take anymore um and i felt selfish about that but yeah but again you're telling yourself we're getting blessings for this and that's what he's supposed to do and we're gonna you know we're gonna do it so that's what we did that's a good segue john into one thing i wanted to mention uh was it was hard we had such little kids and i could see how much marlena struggled with uh juggling all those demands because i was gone almost all day sunday like she said i was gone a lot of saturdays and um you know when we take the youth to the temple the temple was in snowflake arizona which is like what three hours maybe one way so that's an all-day trip on a saturday to take the youth to the temple and i could see how much she was struggling and she would be vocal about it and say hey this is hard can you maybe like not go to their bishopric training do you really need to go to that it's just an hour meeting they're not going to miss you there's you know there's other bishops there they won't even notice you're not there and and so she'd say you know hey i'm really struggling tonight can you just help stay home and help me and um i could feel that tension and so when i was leaving um they also they were also replacing the stake president at the time and there was 270 uh general authorities who came around to interview and i said well i'm i'm leaving i've already got you know government paperwork to move to my next location so there's no reason to interview me but they said no we still want to interview you so that these 270s sat me down in a room in the church and we talked for just a few minutes and and i let him know right up front while i'm leaving so i'm really not under consideration here and they said yeah we know that but we wanted to ask how your experience was being called as a young bishop and i don't know if i was just on one that day because i'm i'm usually not very confrontational or what but i just told them straight to their faces that i said well a lot of days it felt like a negative in my life um but i said but then i i i put the caveat in and said well but i'm sure looking back on this it'll be a good experience and and you know i got blessings for doing it but uh the looks on their faces when i said that one i don't think they were expecting that and uh and two they just didn't look very pleased so uh the meeting ended very quickly and they said okay you're you can go and that was it but um but i told marlena you know from that time on maybe i just felt guilt of having left without doing the full five years that's expected or you know kind of unwritten expectation um or or if it was because i felt guilty about you know not being grateful for this opportunity and not being joyous about it that i felt like i was under a little bit of a black cloud it was probably just all imagined but um i felt funny the way i left and because it was hard and i was honest about that i knew it was hard and i know it was hard on marlena and i felt bad for being honest about it but at the same time i didn't want to lie to him about it so i guess that's that is what it is but one last question then i want to get to your kind of faith crisis stuff um mormons believe that their bishops really are god's representative in in their congregation and they assume that bishops when they make a calling that the calling is inspired of god that when they give counsel you know the church teaches whether it's by you know god's voice or by the voice of his servants meaning the bishops or the stake presidents or the general authorities it's the same in other words bishops speak for god and not every mormon believes this but there are a lot that that sort of do believe that that if a bishop tells you to do something if if a bishop makes a calling you say yes like you said um marlena you say yes because the bishop is speaking for god kind of thing once you're sitting in the bishop's seat uh adam is it different and were you disappointed or surprised or did it all work as you expected i think for me it wasn't too shocking because i'd been a missionary i'd been in other uh leadership callings even you know all the way down to deacon scoring president and so uh it was no different than being deacon's corn president i remember being deacon's corn president and getting down on my knees and and being told well you got to find two counselors uh pray about it make sure you get a confirmation and getting down on my knees as a 12 year old and praying about it and just not feeling anything and and you just eventually got to make a decision because the bishop's going to want to know on sunday who you're going to call in and it was the same you know again no disrespect but it was the same as being a bishop brand new bishop you got lots you got a bunch of callings to fill and you can get down on your knees and start praying even about who's who your counselors are gonna be and 20 minutes into it you know praying you're just like uh the lord's not making this obvious to me so i guess he just wants me to use my best judgment so you just use your best judgment and you know i was just just recently released as executive secretary and my most recent calling and that's the same way it was in this current ward so i don't think i was any different than any other bishop that you've got a lot of stuff to do and you don't have time to to go out in the woods and pray like enos did for an entire day to try and get your confirmation on every single calling so by and large 99 of the time the bishops just making rapid fire decisions based on gut intuition or based on well i'm pretty sure that person is going to do okay in that calling or or can deal with the workload at that time in their life so a lot of it's just common sense and intuition and and um i mean i'm sure most bishops pray about these callings but again it boils down to um maybe people are way more spiritual than i am and get spiritual confirmations but now for the most part it's just um you just gotta make a decision and move on but this was a big part for me i think what's when my i don't know if i had a shelf i was putting stuff on because i just took everything for what it was but i we lived in flagstaff before we moved to actually to tuba city and i had been asked to be released from a calling in nursery i had little kids it was hard i didn't want to be there i had some surgeries different things um and adam didn't love that i asked to be released and i'm like you want me to come to church or do you want me to you know be happy here or not it was not fulfilling so i asked were you released i didn't think that was a bad thing so when he became bishop and i saw how it kind of worked a little bit in fact at one point i was young women's president well he was bishop we had little kids at home he would end up staying home on wednesday night so i could go to the church and be with the youth so he could stay home with our kids or sometimes we'd go together um and it was fine and it worked out at the time but it just made me realize like okay this isn't exactly how it works they're just putting people sometimes i mean and maybe you prayed about the bigger callings like really study president and different things um but then i yeah that was a big one for me that i'm like oh these are not because they'll use that line of where this is where god wants you and it'll help you grow and you just realize like no that's not always true so it's a lot of just you've got a need who who doesn't have a calling right now okay put that person in that calling solved move on and then i asked to be released from a few callings later and after that years a couple of years later that weren't working out um yeah okay well um okay and so but it's safe to say that adam you you weren't channeling god uh as a bishop you were just coming up with the best ideas and suggestions you could right yeah very much so i mean there's times when you're talking with someone i always i like talking with people one-on-one there's times when you're talking with people and the words just seem like they're flowing out of your mouth and i thought i completely ascribed all that to god and thought okay well this is the holy ghost or god speaking through me to this person and um you know what's interesting just even in general terms about stepping back from the churches you realize that none of that went away you know you can you can walk away from all of it and god's blessings don't stop pouring into your life and your talent your natural talents and abilities don't go away so um i i now see that you know maybe a lot of that i ascribe to god was just me connecting with another human being and having a good conversation with them right yeah okay and this is a question that that maybe some will find odd um but but i have to ask it uh i talked to sam young about this when he was bishop bishops are in the position of enforcing the law of chastity and enforcing things like you know porn and masturbation on on the youth and on the adults but i imagine bishops are human too right absolutely and and so anything you want to either directly or indirectly say about that so that we can understand that these people who sit as judges uh and and even deciding the fate of whether someone goes on a mission or whether they get married in the temple or whether they get a temple recommend have their own secrets and their own sins that that they're holding and hiding but also you know uh being in the position of judging others and enforcing rules you know what i'm asking i understand exactly what you're asking so you know um i'm just gonna be really blunt and and let you know that um you know what i said about trying to trying to deal you know with just normal human sexuality that never i i've said it earlier in the interview that never goes away and um you know even as a bishop you're still dealing with that in your own life and um it's been so therapeutic to listen to some of your episodes and natasha helfer's episodes um you know to learn that that you know we're not broken just because um we still experience human sexuality and um i guess the best way to answer your question is just directly and say that yeah that was that was still a struggle for me it's been a struggle on and off on and off throughout my whole entire life and and now i guess the gift is i don't even see that as a struggle i see that as a normal human experience too to masturbate to um to have an erotic side of your life and whether you're you're um you're sharing that eroticism with your significant other or whether you're saying that by yourself you know so that was that was um that was an interesting experience and i think i was very lenient on the folks who came in and talked to me about pornography and masturbation because i had i mean this was an ongoing thing in my entire life you know for my entire life and um there was something i had written down i can't remember it now because i i thought of a good way to explain this but you know i think i think most men now there's a spectrum you know some people don't have as much of a drive some people have more of a drive so maybe not every single bishop struggles with it but i would say on average most most bishops are going to struggle with it too because they are also human they also have um a you know a part a component of their soul that that that desires uh human connection and sexuality and eroticism and um and at the time that was that was difficult to deal with in my own mind of how to process that and without feeling just overwhelming amounts of guilt and shame because of my own um normal feelings um i don't know yeah yeah and i don't i don't bring it up to be scandalous it's just that so many youth and adults are spiritually and psychologically terrorized kept from missions kept from the temple kept from taking the sacrament all sorts of super shaming and embarrassing things and so we just have to call it out that their being often times restricted and judged and punished by men who are who have got their own problems with the exact same thing i just i have to call that out and just and just to touch on that again you know i think that was an item on my shelf because my entire life um you know this was something that i was grappling with and trying to understand now now something that helped me along the way was a brigham young quote who said if you if you sit in public then confess in public and if you seen him private then confess in private um but at the same time i still had um waves or episodes throughout my life of shame and guilt surrounding what would be normal considered normal human behavior and um you know regarding uh masturbation and and pornography or eroticism and um let me see if i can explain this it that um there's real damage that's done to human beings because of that and i just didn't realize how damaging it was to me psychologically and emotionally to constantly be told by the church that you're broken that this is not normal that you um you you know that the church is telling you you know um yeah no one talks about it no one knows that every other adult struggles with this you feel alone in this uh or i mean at least most adults you know are going to fill this and so um there was some low points in my life and like i said ebbs and flows and then there's times when um it's not that much part of your life and there's other times that it is and and uh and sorry if i'm talking cryptically but no that's good i'm just saying that um there was some low points for me where i felt completely worthless to be honest uh despite all of the things i'd done and all the callings and all the service that i felt completely worthless as a human being um because this was an ongoing struggle and i guess even while you're a bishop even while i was bishop yeah the higher calling didn't give you any more grasp over that thank you thank you yeah it didn't it didn't improve things at all and um which made the deal even worse yeah so you're spot on john thank you thanks for the perception thanks for taking a hard question and being direct we've got a lot of great um comments coming in i'm just gonna run over them all really quickly we don't have time to really answer them all darren just talking about the sacrifice of a bishop darren writes of course it's a sacrifice hard days do come in my experience serving in the church made our family stronger thank you for serving them yeah there are lots of benefits that come from service darren and it's it's good and bad like everything and and i'm glad you had that experience um craig writes long before my faith crisis i've been bugged at the time bishops take away from their families bishops become so addicted to feeling important that can definitely be be um a problem um another comment that's really uh worth sharing kristen writes my husband was called one year ago to serve as bishop our stake president was aware of my faith crisis he told us the calling was from god and looked me in the eye and told me satan was working on women in the church to destroy families i knew this calling was not from god after a traumatic weekend my husband called the stake president to tell him we could not accept that was a pivotal moment for me in my faith crisis um thank you so much for sharing kristin i'm so happy for you and your husband yeah craig writes john i think you can have an entire episode about bishops and the craziness of time spent people putting so much trust in him while not utilizing the relief society president or the elders quorum president um yeah thanks for the idea craig josh writes oh yeah coming to the conclusion that callings were just popularity based or random or i'll say or just arbitrary was a shelf item for me that's what josh says um donna writes this is donna berry shout out to donna hey donna hello knight uh we love donna she writes that is the most shocking thing that they just fill a spot i always thought it was by prayer and i think she means by direct revelation she says it kind of pisses her off now um sorry donna um i think you're doing better though now that's my that's my gut um a couple other comments that are really really good here and then we'll get to the faith crisis larry rights we are military family and during one of my husband's appointments while i was still fully active in the church a pre-deployment training class discussed how to keep the home fires burning it was shocking and enlightening and terrifying i think we all know what is meant by that um and yeah it's just also kind of twisted sometimes um let's see i think that's all i'm gonna share for now let's now jump to how how does a bishop and uh you know the wife of a bishop or a a strong faithful devout orthodox mormon mom how does that turn into you know leaving the church and losing your faith how can the elect become deceived how does that happen where does it begin okay well you want me to start i'll start yeah so for me uh you know that was 12 years ago that i that i served and and even after that we continued to be you know totally believing mormons for um for a long time and i went on you know we moved to alaska for a short period time we moved back to arizona um back in arizona i served uh on a high council um we moved to tucson eventually and throughout this time completely all in completely faithful but but things did start to build up on my shelf so so to use that terminology you know when people have doubts or something that that concerns them you can liken it metaphorically to putting an item a heavy item up on a shelf and eventually that shelf breaks and cracks and and everything comes crashing down your testimony comes crashing down so for me um you know just some things that started to get put on my shelf um why there's so many but i don't even know if i can remember them all but you know there was there was prop 8. we lived in alaska during the time of prop 8. and i didn't even know much about it it wasn't much in my awareness but i had a co-worker come up to me who said you know i know i know you're mormon and i know you're like you're conspicuously a mormon uh proud of it and and i just don't we were close we were actually pretty good friends and he said you know i just don't understand how you can belong to a church that just seems so hateful and i was like i felt attacked i'm like what are you talking about you know our church is not hateful um but that was a little shelf item for me you know and thinking boy that seemed like maybe a pr blunder on the point on the on the part of the church um there was um oh boy i'm gonna have to just jump all over the place maybe not chronologically go ahead jump all over i want to say really quick though is we had we were talking about this earlier the prop 8 is we had four young kids still which and you're so involved in the church you don't have time i didn't agree with prop 8 but i didn't even know much about it because you're so busy raising all those kids that they want you to have right away and in all your church things that sometimes you don't even delve into those subjects for us anyway as much as we should have at the time so um thanks that gave me a moment to think so chronologically the next really big one for me um was in 2015 i was reading in the deseret news of all places it's a church-owned newspaper and they were covering the mormon leagues uh that that there had been leaked videos of private meetings that the quorum of the 12 were having and that they were being briefed by a state senator from oregon i believe his name's steve smith if i remember right that's the u.s senator i think u.s senator oh state center he was u.s senator okay i think it was gordon smith okay and he's excited maybe so so he was being briefed and i thought well okay you know it's kind of underhanded that someone's took these videos and posted them online but but the deseret news it's owned by the church they're posting a link to them i'm gonna check them out see what's going on and um and in the in the one episode i watched and i don't remember how much i even watched but but there comes a point where this senator is briefing them on politics and he makes a really callous joke about democrats and again i've been either moderate or democrat leaning my entire life and that has been hard for me i've had a lot of people throughout the years as a teen and throughout my entire life say well you can't really be a good mormon and be a democrat right i mean like how can you how can you make those two things work they just can't work there's no way you can do it um i mean i've had people joke about me like well it must be hard to get a temple recommend right because you associate with a an apostate group um you affiliate or support this platform the the democratic platform and that's got to be that's apostate right um and and not not not realizing you know that there are good things about both platforms or acknowledging that there might be legitimate reasons why a member of the church aligns politically with with the democrats so my point is is that the quorum the 12 laughed there was a lot of laughter in the room on this leaked video uh that's i i assume it's still available on the mormon links website um where the senator said that that you could classify democrats as feminist environmentals and and other miscellaneous miscreants so i had to look up the word miscreants it means reprobates or low lifes or criminals and and it hit me so hard because my entire life i've been trying to convince people that yes you can be both the brethren constantly say every election that you need to vote your conscience the church doesn't align with one political party um and the amount of laughter in the room when that joke was said made me realize that again maybe that's a facade maybe that's just what has to be said so that the church can keep its tax-exempt status but really it's funny to them um the thought that the democrats are really just a group of misfits that are kind of weirdos and it stung it really stung and i i sat down i penned a little thing about my thoughts because i was so angry um i wanted to clean it up and send it to the corpsman twelve i never did but just asking for an apology because i i thought it was so atrocious um and i understand it wasn't ever meant to be leaked it was in a private meeting uh but the truth was it was leaked and the truth is is that they should have apologized um for uh demeaning uh probably a quarter of the membership of the church in one in one senseless little joke okay yeah that's a big one so that was a big one for me maybe not for anybody else but that was a big one for me um jumping around you know there was the changes to the temple ceremony in 2019 which again wait back up to the 2015. oh that would be there's the 2015 exclusion policy that which today today is the five-year anniversary of that infamous awful policy today is november 5th 2020. yeah and again i at that time was fairly aligned with the church's position on all that but again i felt like that was unnecessary it felt like a pr blunder on the church's part and it felt a little reactionary because it was only days after the supreme court had legalized same-sex marriage across the country um and um and i'll come back to that here in a moment when the policy was reversed um the religious freedom stuff bothered me because i remember maybe 2012 through 2020 you know the church was really pushing the religious freedom stuff and wanted us all to get on that bandwagon they even set up a website i can't remember what was called bridges versus freedom.org or something and i remember going on and i tried to understand it but to me it just it felt baseless it felt like uh scare tactics that um you know i think it was i understand how it was well settled in case law that that no church was going to be forced to perform gay marriages if it was against their their um conscience but the church was really pushing this narrative that if if we don't band together as church members and stomp this out you know the legalization of gay marriage that we'll have to be performing gay marriages in our temples and you'll lose the right to even be able to speak your beliefs in public because it'll be termed hate speech and and i i see now that uh well i read a great book one of the first books i read after my faith crisis started called gay marriage in the mormon church uh intended actions unintended consequences and they did a great job of laying out greg prince's book yes they did a really outstanding job of laying out that there was already settled case law that would have protected the church and so it really was fear-mongering and and maybe i'm patting myself on the back a little bit but i could sense at the time that it was overblown and that here we've got prophets and apostles that are kind of trying to stir up emotions and uh and stir up these feelings of being attacked when really the church was not being attacked and that really we were maybe the the oppressors of trying to hold down this minority population um with the resources that the church had um boy i could keep going but yeah i'm not to my faith crisis yet you keep going so just a couple other really quick things that bothered me i mentioned the 2019 temple changes um i remember thinking at the time that well i mean it's a great step towards a better equal you know so requires equality where the women no longer have to um pledge to follow their husbands and they're a little more on equal footing as far as how the temple treats or the temple ceremony how it treats women and men so it's a step in the right direction but at the same time for someone who understands the words of the prophets or you know alleged prophets uh literally i'm thinking to myself well the ceremony hadn't been given word for word to joseph smith right like someone's got it written down somewhere and how can the church just go about it felt willy-nilly to me like the church was caving to social pressure because of all the kate kelly stuff and all of the pressure they'd been getting from from from the women's rights groups uh and so to me i'm thinking again this is a big item on my shelf because i'm thinking well if it's truth and if that's the way the temple ceremony has been for oh well over 100 years why are we ashamed about that why aren't we just courageously standing up and saying well this is the way god works and this is how the ceremony was given to adam and eve in the garden of eden and and and if you don't like it then don't be a part of our church but um to me it was odd that that it was changed to meet social pressures and i mean those kind of things start to form little cracks where you start to wonder um is there anything really truly sacred or or will would everything be up for negotiation depending on the politics and the social pressures that is put on the church and and that thought was important later on um because as things come around and and as the church does start to change on things like reversing the 2015 exclusion policy and as the church does start to begin to change um i it was just a recurring theme to me wondering um are we really as resolute as we think we are or do does the church really bend uh to social pressures you know even just changing the design of the garments i think it was also 2019 that women's garments changed and the shoulder cap got shorter and i think the legs got a little shorter and the styles got a little bit better to accommodate modern clothing styles and again as a literally all the changes over all the years too yeah well well once i started to study yeah then it really started to come out i really started to see how the church completely keeps moving the bar and moving the line and moving things to where you know if brigham young came back to the church today he'd think we were all apostates all the way up the line to wrestle on nelson because well now you well anyway i i'll i'll stop there but but those were just all things on my shelf and um just really quickly we had an issue um in spring of 2019 with our daughter our teen daughter who was about to go to girls camp and um i mean actually this might be better explained from your viewpoint but there were some things there with the girls being shamed and told well before that was the honor code at byu oh yeah the undercoat things at byu so the stuff at the byu started to happen the honor code um and with the gay rights and all those things that were happening tell the listeners what that just summarize that for our listeners who don't know i'm gonna let adam summarize that because he better and then i'll talk about it so so that was also spring of 2019 there was there was like oh 19. yeah there's nothing on the shelf in 2019 so um so again i never really had super warm feelings about byu anyway um and didn't love my experience there but but then seeing on instagram about how it was being exposed that byu's honor code was so linked to their academic standards and that if someone had a violation of a religious um tenant like you know trying tea you're trying alcohol or trying tobacco again probably pretty typical things that college students are going to experiment with that i could you know you could be a week away from graduation and you could get reported to the honor code office and byu can hold your diploma that you've earned academically earned and not give that to you until you've met any demands that they've made and then it just started to come to light because of the information age and social media that the honor code office was abusing this so even after folks had repented through their ecclesiastical leaders through the bishop that the honor code office was still saying not good enough we want you to repeat a semester we want you to come and meet with us for six months even after graduation we want you to write endless essays uh really groveling and explaining how horribly sad you are that you messed up in some minor way and we will not give you your diploma until you it's how you beat our demands and then i believe their police department i don't even yeah the byu police department which is uh not should not be integrated with the honor code office um you know that well okay there's there's still a couple other things about it the the police department was found out that they were sharing information to the honor code office which was not okay i believe they're still under investigation um about losing their i don't know what you'd call it like accreditation uh to be state um law and peacekeeper or not peacekeeper what do you call them peace officers uh because that was a violation of trust of sharing information from the byu police department to the honor code office and then there's the byu title ix office which i don't know all the the details but i know that it's federally mandated that schools take seriously allegations of sexual abuse or rape and that the honor code office would immediately i mean the the title ix office was immediately kicking people back to the honor code office so that you know if if someone was just sexually assaulted and gets up the courage to come in and report it then they were being kicked over to the honor code office and the honor code office was saying um you know was there alcohol at that apartment or was there you know were you doing something that any little thing that they could after hours you know exactly you know were you in uh someone's dorm that was on the opposite sex was there something that you were doing that led to this and and totally disregarding the absolute trauma and terror of having been sexually abused and instead saying well we're going to report you to your bishop and you maybe get kicked out of the university and we may take away your diploma and um and and you got to write now endless essays for why you're sorry for having stepped out of line well that's when it really started with instagram when they created an account started cut you off as the they just had people start sending in all their stories and honor code stories honor code stories and how disturbing those stories were and how people um hundreds of stories were being treated and kicked out and made you know they became suicidal and there's people that were you know they'd have sex and then there's the story i think it's on the believer that um imagine dragons did where he's going to byu and he had sex and um got kicked out i think he's self-reported and then they kicked him out for five years then he committed suicide like this kind of stuff should not be happening and there was just and how they make you repeat the story over and over if you're you know rape victims and it was appalling it was appalling and i was i think we'd already convinced our kids not to go to byu at that point but for sure kids shouldn't be going to college and having normal human experiences and messing up and then being shamed on top of it from the church and then on top of it from the university and i felt for those kids those people the kids going there that were gonna plan to go there and at the time i spoke out about that quite a bit i mean i wanted to go right down to byu and make t-shirts and like you know be whatever part of that i could um but that was a huge huge one for me and it was sad to see that the church did as absolutely little as they could to address it um there was no apologies for the abuses that the honorable code office and they were obvious abuses overstepping their bounds overstepping their authority and harming people um no apology there was a lot of students and leaders of the movement who wrote to ruslan nelson who's the uh what is he the uh the trustee of the the board for byu um just no no statement from church headquarters at all there was rearrangement of the honor code office but it just makes you begin to realize that um that maybe there's parts of our organization our church and these church schools that's toxic and that's not healthy and that maybe the love that we purport to share for all human beings maybe is a little pharisaical at times that we're more worried about rules and adherences to rules and performances than we are about the human and in their spirit well it's about making byu look good and they don't want to look bad so gerardo is asking me to ask you the question what about the argument that you knew what you're getting into when you when you signed the honor code you knew what you were getting into when you applied to byu byu is subsidized lots of people want to get there there's a limited number of seats you can go to a state school so you knew what you were signing up for when you signed up and if you don't like it you can leave so obey or leave what's wrong with that approach gerardo wants to know gerardo having been to byu idaho himself and and uh had his own story there i have my thing is that a lot of these stories people had repented already with their bishopric their bishop and were cleared of that but the honor code office so they'd taken care of it and thought that they had taken care of it but byu was taking it way farther and putting on way more guilt when they had already cleared themselves through their bishop so it was just and yeah i mean i had the same questions they know what they're getting themselves into but again i think if you have your own children you're sending them to college i don't know what kid does not have there's not a perfect person out there so you are having an issue with something i'm sure i don't know but i for me i didn't think it was fair to those kids or want my own kids to go there thinking they have the guilt already that they messed up and then they have the extra guilt that and fear that they could be kicked out of the university that they just spent time money and energy to get a degree in and they could lose all of that when they already repented with their bishop so my perspective is no one goes to byu saying i want to go and smoke and drink and try and get myself kicked out so these are honest mistakes and i think students understand i mean i went to byu myself and i i always assumed that the honor code office was there to help me and that they would be benevolent and that they would you know just work with me between me and my bishop i mean i never had to use the honor code office uh or was called in while i was there um but the level of tactics that they were going to it just honestly felt like they were trying to destroy people's lives it felt like um unreasonable levels of punishment um i so i think if if you know if they were honest and upfront about it and said hey listen if you end up getting raped we're gonna look for any you know if if this was on their promotional paperwork that they send to prospective students and say we'd love to have you come here but if you end up getting raped and you report it we will look for any possible reason we can to to pin it back on you uh we'll send you home we might not let you come back to the university and guess what because we're a religious school uh private religious school a lot of your credits might not be transferable to another university so good luck um i mean if they want to be upfront and honest about it then great but i don't think most students realize that the honor code office was going to be so aggressive at going after them with such vindictiveness based on the stories that we were reading from all these uh self-reported stories at honor code stories on instagram they were hurting more people than they were helping and you know if even if you knew what you're getting yourself into um i have a story of someone that i know closely that had a full race scholarship went there um you know messed up once but it causes them to the way the grilling process they put you through is not something anybody should go through no matter if you knew what you're getting into or not so they're just pushing people out right okay so it sounds like over the past five years and maybe the past five to ten years you guys have been noticing some problems noticing some issues and putting on the shelf as you say trying to talk about it trying to deal with it maybe trying to resolve it but then put it on the shelf but this whole time you're conceptualizing yourselves as orthodox active faithful mormons right absolutely yeah yeah so how do you do that how do you how do i know how because i did it forever but how did you do it how like what kept you from like the first problem or two like well this isn't true i'm out of here how did you keep going why did you keep going in spite of all the problems you're noticing and how did you how did you kind of reconcile all that um you know with your faith john i think that's i think it's okay it's okay just ignore it okay um i we just kept doing it i don't know well for me i think um you know it comes down to those feelings that you think you know you say well okay the church might have some problems might have some issues but i felt you know that this is true and i can think back to all these experiences where i felt good and i mean not to make light of that um you know if people are watching that that still have a testimony of the church but but honestly you know um the church teaches that those those good feelings trump everything and that if you've had good feelings about the book of mormon and the prophet and joseph smith then then you have a testimony and that that should matter more than any other you know little little thing that seems out of whack so you just keep on going you keep on believing because if it's always felt right so i think you said it once when we were in tuba city he was talking to a co-worker that said i've had his friend asked if he could ever deny the church and he said i've had too many experiences to deny that it was true so when this faith crisis started to happen i mean and i think that answers that like we just had too many experience in our in our life to go there to even you know that there's some issues or you know that there's um you know they say what's that saying the church is perfect and the people aren't and different things that happen in it and but part of that is you just kind of push it to the side still and just keep going because that's the way back to the kingdom part of that is is the control that we're under as members of the church and if i can speak a little freely here um you know that the church uses some tactics that might not be completely um ethical in the way that they they teach us to deal with our emotions the way that they teach us how to interpret our feelings um the thought control and information control that we're under and um and so a lot of that you know you stop those thoughts pretty quickly because you're told never to go there um there's a lot of us versus them thinking um that well i don't want to ever end up like an unbeliever you know because my life would probably just unravel and um and i'd end up you know living in the gutter as a drug addict because the church is the only thing keeping me as a as a good person and so there's a lot wrapped up in it that you don't feel like you can let go you hold on really tightly because because of all the indoctrination and the um the mind control i mean i i hate to use that kind of a term um but there's there's a lot of it's the indoctrination there's a lot of indoctrination that i mean i'm talking about like going back to maybe 2005 or so when i read about simon sutherton in his book and the dna studies and and being shocked that what dna evidence does in genetics does not prove the book of mormon and yet you just shut it down as quickly as you can because it's uncomfortable it's it's cognitive dissonance when you've got two competing ideas that both can't possibly be right and and it's just was where church members were taught to to say well but but i felt good when when i went to seminary i felt good on my you know i felt something that i thought was god speaking to me so so i just gonna put all that away for now yeah yeah they they really do with all these thought-stopping techniques with all this conditioning uh with all the family connections the fear you know you could have all sorts of problems and none of it has anything to do with whether the church is true or not you don't even let yourself go there you just keep having problems put it on the shelf maybe you're happy maybe you're super unhappy you put that on the shelf and you're just on the train and getting off the train just is never an option right right exactly all right oh go ahead please marlon please not even an option to slow the train down really you know to even you know question anything that you know they might have got this wrong or they might have got that wrong but you know as a whole it's doing good for me and so i'm not going to question the bigger stuff so so tell us when things started really getting serious and when you actually there's always that moment you know this is kind of like so many people i talk to there's this moment where you like things get so hard that you're like wait a minute is it possible the church isn't true is it the church isn't what it claims to be and you can go 20 40 a year 50 70 years and you never allow yourself to actually ask that question but for so many people things build and build and build to the point where you like all of a sudden one day it's like wait a minute there's one option that explains all this stuff there's one answer there's one question that that if answered in the negative explains everything on that shelf whereas if i try and actually maintain the belief that the church is true and have all those things on my shelf i'm twisting myself in complete pretzels so uh which of you was the first to ask that question and what what were the circumstances that led to that moment okay so um i would say for me my mine was the first my cr my shelf cracked first and um and so again just a little a little just a real quick background um through 2019 like i said that was a rough year there was a lot of things heavy items going on on my shelf and one of those was my daughter going to girls camp and my wife went to the the pre-camp meeting and started my daughter and they left and they were quite angry in fact marlena walked out of the meeting um so not to tell her story but um there was a lot of questions at my house that sunday about well why why can't why can't girls just wear leggings to girls camp we're just going to be around girls what does it matter why can't i wear uh shorter shorts or why can't why is there such a strict dress code at girls camp this is this is ridiculous what was the dress code um oh jeez they couldn't um oh i can't remember you couldn't wear leggings you couldn't wear flip-flops you couldn't wear the shorts i think if you're standing up i think it was hand width from the shorts to your knee um and they were like and the camp was three hours away and if you didn't if they showed up with that kind of stuff they were gonna make you come get your daughter no matter what um just and then everything like don't bring cards don't bring your playing cards don't bring your phones don't bring i mean they were telling us all sorts of minutes every little detail of what they could and could not bring um and i'd asked some questions and i mean it was just ridiculous stuff so i got up and walked out um because this is not the first year she's gone i mean it just kind of gets worse so i walked right to where they were having the boys meeting and just kind of started venting because we have one daughter and three boys and um i could see it and my daughter could see it that they the boys have no rules they can wear whatever they want they're not told what to wear boys at boys camp they can bring playing cards they can there they can do whatever they want basically and my we saw the difference in that but there and you know so i called the person in charge of camp and i i talked about that but there's just i don't think it's just there either it's kind of everywhere there's issues and i don't know it's just a culture of the church um but they they won't be sent away in our ward they won't be sent away if they show up in shorts that are too short from like volleyball practice or something on a tuesday night on a tuesday night but they'll but they have all these rules where they're not near boys or what you know because they're always explaining it's around the boys and the priesthood holders but i mean i'd get answers that they're still priesthood holders up there because they still have two adult men come walking up around for safety again these girls should be able to not worry about what they're wearing and have a good time in a spiritual time or whatever while they're at girls camp so that and then yeah leads into a discussion at our home of the unfairness of yeah i mean our daughter's more feminist a more feminist as a raise a daughter and become older and realize that how they are treated in the church it goes yeah two different ways there's two different a double standard for boys and girls we're getting some a rapid fire of comments melissa writes i'm so glad i had all boys rina writes good for you mom and josh says yeah it's a boy's church so lots of feelings about about uh girls and boys and men and women in the church yeah yeah so so there was some discussions at our home about okay well why can't we wear that what's modest what's not and i'd already kind of been thinking about a lot of these things over the years i remember my mom saying that when she went to byu like i think in the 60s maybe early 70s that they had to wear skirts women couldn't wear them were allowed to wear pants at byu back then and i'd kind of already figured out that you know the the modesty standard is a moving goal post and and that the church really doesn't want us looking like the amish which is why well i mean no no offense to thomas but um you know there's a reason why they don't want us dressing like pioneers um they want us to look like we're part of society but at the same time they don't want us looking edgy and so that's why there's no double piercings for women and and um and you know colored hair no colored hair and this way we're supposed to look very conservative and corporate almost um because the church where where are the representatives for the church where the we're the walking billboard for the church and it kind of made sense to me but but as we get into this and and we're and again all these changes are swirling around in my mind about um you know some recent changes to the female temple garments and and recent changes to the temple ceremony and i'm thinking about how the church just constantly moves the goal posts on on what it means to be modest depending on on what area area you live in um so all of this is in my mind over the summer and um i was on the church's website one night and there was an article about modesty on their main web page and it was i think it was just three paragraphs there was no author it was just some simple little uh article and i think it was probably intended for teens but i read it and i just thought it kind of doesn't make sense you know it sounds so trite that oh vermont well i don't remember what it said but it was just you know very trite about oh for modest then we're gonna be safe and if we're modest then then um you know what you name it you know all of our dreams while the streams are gonna come true or whatever you know um not to make light of it but but it just didn't sit well with me and i thought this didn't explain anything i mean i'm actually wondering you know what is the why i need to be able to explain this to my own kids and even for my own self you know what is the why behind these standards and so i started to dig a little deeper as soon as i'd read that and i wasn't finding much on the church's website so i just started to google you know like societal standards for modesty and what is modesty and i really quickly found a blog post that was on rational face i think it's rational face.com uh which is a mormon uh blogging platform and this article was written by a mom with with uh daughters of her own and she talked about how the churches and you could tell she was she was a totally believing mormon um but she just talked honestly and said that she wishes the church would change the way it approaches modesty because by focusing so much on hemlines and and where the caps sleeve comes down to and um and exactly what we look like that we're we're hyper sexualizing our youth our and especially the girls and and she did a really good job of linking um this to to basically an unhealthy attitude towards our own bodies and and i jumped from there quickly into a couple other articles that i found and just within the span of an hour or so i found some really great articles that that helped me to see that this hyper focus on modesty actually fuels rape culture and and maybe that sounds shy what do you mean people don't understand that term rape culture explain how that's rape culture what you mean when you say rape culture okay and hopefully i'm using it the way that other people would use it no no no you are okay so so in my mind what that means is this idea that um that young men maybe aren't always in control of themselves and that maybe they aren't oh should oh they maybe they shouldn't always be held totally responsible if they act sexually aggressive towards women um and and uh even to the point you know of rape or forcing themselves on on a woman because maybe the woman was inviting it by the way she was dressed or maybe the young girl um you know was being provocative and and so that gave him license and and it made me realize really quickly i was able to connect the dots just in this hour of reading that we focus so much you know well there's there was quotes from the leaders over the years that were going through my mind at the time um i believe there's a quote from elder oaks who says that young women be careful about the way you dress because if you dress too provocatively you're becoming pornography to the young men who see you there's other quotes now my mind went blank but that one in particular stands out that he's that the leaders of the church have placed this responsibility on the shoulders of the women and and the youth the young women that it's their responsibility to dress in a way so that men's thoughts don't go places that they shouldn't go and so if you really break that down we're saying that men are incapable of controlling themselves and that it's women's jobs to to um to get uh it's women's jobs to help men control themselves and so one it invalidates men's agency it no longer puts us in the driver's seat over our emotions and our thoughts and our actions because we are so weak that a young woman or a woman could dress so provocatively that we're not in control and that's i realized very quickly this these these mormon mom bloggers did such a great job of laying out that that is so unhealthy because we should be putting the responsibility back squarely on the men i mean christ himself said that if your eye offends pluck it out he in the new testament he didn't say if you can't control your gaze go go shame the woman that that caught your attention and they caught your eye he doesn't put it back on the women so so they did a good job of explaining this and in an instant it made me realize that the church is invalidating its own principle doctrinal principle of agency that i'm responsible for me and you're responsible for you and i should have control over myself and if every single woman on the earth took off their clothes and walked around naked it shouldn't change how i act at all and that you're actually taking the responsibility off the shoulders of the young men and the and the adult men and putting them on the women and it's not healthy it's actually toxic and that's what i mean by referring to uh that this id idea fuels rape culture and and where i'm really going with this is just to explain that in that instant it was like a lightning bolt hit me and i realized that one the quorum of the twelve and the first presidency that pushed these ideas don't have a clue what they're talking about that good social science actually would say the opposite that we should tell young men that they need to control themselves that they always need to get consent before they touch someone um before they expect anything to go anywhere sexually with a woman or a young woman that's their responsibility and it shouldn't matter what the young woman does they need to be in control themselves and it just made me realize that they didn't they didn't have a clue that this was toxic and harmful and and that i've been perpetuating these teachings onto my boys and my daughter and and it made me a little bit upset that i'd bought into this and not realized that uh just how toxic that that was and that it invalidates the agency it invalidates the agency of the young men and it invalidates the agency of the young women by making them responsible for something that they aren't responsible for and and in that instant then the thought goes to my mind well if this is messed up and if they don't know what they're talking about on this topic and if they can be so far off course and actually teaching harmful and toxic things what else you know what what else is that out there that good social science or psychology or policy would say you know that's not healthy and and i say that at that point my testimony was still intact it was still really i had a strong testimony but there had been a crack opened up in my mind that made me want to investigate and investigate in a way that i didn't already have a precon concluded outcome where i had already determined that okay the church has to be true so all the puzzle pieces have to line up to create a picture of the church being true so i decided i'm going to look at the puzzle pieces and see where they go and what the puzzle actually looks like when you put the puzzle pieces together just the way they naturally fit and and i i hate to say it but it it only took nine ten months of me studying um for things to continually start to fall um and i won't jump ahead here but just just saying that that was the difference when my shelf broke was that i decided to actually investigate and see where the truth led without a pre predetermined outcome shawna yost shares the quote women get what they dress for by elder tad callister so that's i don't know the origin of that quote but that that sort of idea that if a woman if a girl you know if a boy if a girl doesn't dress the way the church says very conservatively and a boy has a bad thought or even does a bad thing that it's the girl's fault right right yeah okay so that that was that was where the crack the big crack first started for you uh adam yeah okay and when was that about august 1st of 2019. so that was just a little over a year ago yeah 15 months ago okay and but was that was that when you asked the question what if the church isn't true or not not quite yet um you know the crazy thing is is that the thought didn't go through my mind what if the church wasn't true the thought went through my mind the church isn't entirely true okay because here's a subject where they're talking that doesn't make logical sense and is harmful to people so it can't all be a hundred percent true anymore and this process of uh one of the members of the relationship starting to lose their faith is like a super big deal in the mormon world it causes so much stress and distress and like you guys said at the very beginning it often wrecks marriages so marlena as adam had that first lightning bolt shattering thought and and his his shelf start to crack did he come tell you did you have any idea or were you totally oblivious to all this no he he was out of town actually at the time that happened and um yeah i think i sent him something else i think we we are very open like really open and i'm sure there's some things that maybe we're a little scared to like talk about um but we're we tell each other everything and so i had sent him just something funny that somebody else had posted but it was a little bit metta harrison's 72 ways to well some 73 ways to be a good mormon foreign but it's kind of making fun of stuff by metta harrison and someone else um i posted it i sent it to him and he realized okay i can talk to her about it this morning i woke up the next morning to a text and it's marlena sending me a facebook post that was a funny article 73 easy ways to be a mormon good you know a good mormon and it instantly made me realize that she was a safe space and i knew she probably was but um it's a hard subject to start yeah questioning i mean i just had this like profound experience the night before i could barely sleep because my mind was just going in circles um and that was the first thing i wanted to do was wake up and talk to her about it but i wasn't sure where to start and when she sent me that i was like oh okay i i can be upfront about this and he worries too much i never worry about what he's talking to me about but um yeah so we just talked about it i think and he was driving home from san diego we just talked about the whole thing and i'm again i'm really gray in my thoughts of the church and he is more black and white so i can t and really open-minded so i just listen to him as and he can tell more of his story because he goes on i think to further investigate more things um and i just i listened to him but it got to a point where i didn't want to hear very much about it uh we're still going to what we're still going to church you had a couple items on your shelf though leading up to 2018 please remind me what um your friend that had posted from from mrs oh yeah so i had okay this was actually back in 2018. thank you um a friend who posted some stuff on instagram and i think it was from mist in sunday school and it was one at least was about sam young i had to go back and look at her pages and different things and i read them and then i would go ask adam because he remembers all this and those church history and different things to go on with the church and and we looked it up and yeah it was true so it's just like oh kind of you know question it but kind of put it that was true what was true um i think it was about sam young and what about sam young the abuse in the church and he was i think he'd been excommunicated because he was trying to open that bring awareness bring awareness thank you to that and i was like really like been talking about how the church was covering that up and i was like well i haven't heard any of this and can this really be true and when we looked it up you know you start to find all this stuff that is true and she had posted a few other things and i thought i can't go down that road so i shut it down really quickly and actually unfriended her um since then i've reached out to her and say thank told her thank you and she was the start of it um next it was um um oh lifestyle after mormonism on instagram requested to follow me and um i looked at their posts that people that who had left the church and they were just talking about the reasons maybe not even so much i think why but then what triggered in my mind is they were happy and happier they sounded happier than what i was in the church and as they tell us that we can't be happy you know in without the gospel and and being in the church um it was intriguing and i couldn't put my finger on it until just a few weeks ago of why i think it's the authenticity that we could get and um freedom of leaving the church that's how after mormonism is because a lot of people don't know uh lifestyle for mormonism and i hope i get it right is they just feature people who've left the church and kind of explain their stories and why they left and i think kind of yeah like where it's kind of led them and then their happiness and their there's these beautiful photos right of people happy and healthy family or couples um yeah that and they're inspiring and moving stories about how they've found higher levels of authenticity and happiness and you know that they can love everyone they don't have to create artificial labels onto people about well you know you're lgbt i can't accept your lifestyle you can just love everybody and it sounds like marlena even showed me she's like look at this account that followed me or requested to follow me on instagram and read some of their stories tell me what you think and i read them and i'm like well that's kind of interesting because that doesn't fit the church narrative that that if you leave you're going to experience profound sadness and loss of happiness and you're going to have despair and and uh and it was a little unsettling to hear all these beautiful families saying we left and we were thriving and happier than we've ever been and we were completely in and i just remember saying to him saying i want i want that so it's almost like the same as you know you hear these stories in the people in the church but i wanted they had a higher happiness than what i thought i was having that was summer of 2019 last summer and again i just put it off another shelf item for both of us really so mine really didn't start to happen until january of 2020 when adam was going down and reading all sorts of different things and i'll let him go back to that um so you knew he was struggling but you just put you just put that on your shelf and you're like i don't want to deal with this yeah and he would talk to me at some point maybe i was getting ready to go to nursing school full time it was um uh intense program where you go monday through friday eight to five um and then you still have to study and do that and i still have four kids at home and i was like and he's still like hey why don't you listen to this um or read this or do that and i'm like nope not right now i don't wanna i don't wanna go there like i'm good i'll talk to you in fact i don't even think i was talking with him about it because i didn't even wanna really hear it i was good he was exploring i never probably thought that he would be like i don't think it's true and you know completely you're more supportive than you remember to be honest yeah i don't remember much because i again was preparing and testing to get in school and go um and he finally got to a point i think in december it was just like i'm gonna have to go see a counselor if we can't if i can't talk more openly or we talk more because i think i shut it down a little bit harder going preparing to go to nursing school well then as it got more real and she realized that oh like he's serious really serious like he doesn't know if he believes this anymore like kind of scary serious then she was like well this like i'm okay with gray but i'm not okay without okay if you find some bad things and we can deal with that yeah but yeah and and i was going through quite a bit of just emotional and psychological turmoil um as anyone knows who's gone through this it's it's absolutely heart-wrenching or gut-wrenching to go through this and you know because you lose your entire worldview it's like yeah having the rug pulled out from underneath you suddenly and uh you don't know which direction is up in which directions down and um yeah i i was yeah it was mainly i started saying i might need to go see and get some counseling just be able to talk about this and and then she said okay um yeah i'm not gonna let that happen like you can't talk to me like yeah you should be able to talk to me so fine i'll i'll open up a little bit and and listen a little bit better to what you're saying yeah yeah so okay yeah so uh so it sounds like at that point marlene is focusing on being a mom on going to nursing school and on just trying to keep the train running so to speak to a kid today for and then adam's really struggling and thinking you might need to see somebody to get help because you can't talk to marlena so yeah adam tell us about your descent or your ascent uh down into or up into the different sources of learning like books was it books was it podcasts was it websites and what were the issues you started learning about when you started going up or down the rabbit hole so to speak okay so um very i i just kind of started looking for more stuff i don't really remember exactly how it happened but um pretty quickly i found an article i think on the salt lake tribune that was um talking about uh jana reese's uh new book called the next mormons and so i downloaded that i listened to that on audiobook and was astounded it astounded at the wide variety of mormons out there and and how people interpret the gospel and live it and um and as i just kept researching things um i pretty quickly jumped to three topics quickly uh garments tithing and blacks in the priesthood and uh and started finding a lot of literature a lot you know there's been a lot written about those three topics and and about um uh well especially about blacks in the priesthood i found a 2012 church new church newsroom statement that was again just a couple of paragraphs long where they they said that the theories advanced in the past for for the reasons for why blacks couldn't enter the temple be married in the temple or hold the priesthood um that those were just theories uh made in the absence of direct revelation and they were they were theories of men and and that we now disavow those theories and pretty quickly i found on instagram um a bunch of different accounts like missed in sunday school that compares leaders quotes from then and now or leaders quotes with with current doctrine and how they've shifted quite a bit and um found i don't know just various articles um online talking about how um you know that showcase how you know saying that they were just personal statements that the the ban against blacks being able to be endowed be sealed or receive the priesthood um you know saying now that those were just personal statements really that my testimony went from you know 99 down to 70 almost instantaneously because you begin to see as you read the quotes from the leaders uh for a hundred plus years that you know this is doctrine this is absolute uh brigham young said that blacks wouldn't get the priesthood or the temple blessings until the millennium until every single white person had had a chance to get it you read these kind of statements they're just absolute saying that this is doctrine and it's never going to change and and then realizing that the church did change again due to social pressure um and i won't go into that but but it's it's well documented that the church changed because of social pressure and um and and now they're throwing all those profits under the bus i think it's 11 profits in a row that they now just say well they were speaking as men and and not as profits and it just makes you realize i i mean it's like a game of jenga and you're down to that last uh cube of of wood and if you pull it out the whole thing crumbles and as soon as you say that um what was church doctrine for a hundred and whatever it was 30 or 40 years um was just a big huge mistake it was big oops and but we're not going to apologize for it we're just going to quietly let it go and disavow those whole teachings or just quietly quit talking about it um it just again my testimony took a huge blow and i was already in that mindset of questioning and being able to to let my mind open up and say i'm gonna let the pieces of the puzzle and the facts go where they go and see what this looks like and pretty quickly realize that um just because a prophet talks and stands up there and says that they will never say anything that's not true doesn't make that true they say a lot of stuff that they later disavow and then if if you can't trust what the prophet said back then it you you immediately draw the connected auth and you say well how do i know i can trust what they're saying now about women about lgbt people about the book of mormon about everything right exactly and not to jump too far ahead chronologically but our state president and bishop just came and met with us a couple of days ago at our house and that was a point i was able to get them to concede on um because they were downplaying as we talked about some of our concerns and why we've left um i brought this up and said you know that's that's pretty damning for the church to now say that 11 prophets in a row couldn't get it right they were just guessing and we disavow what they said and and you know the stake president said that well you know they were imperfect man and i've i've heard so many people say this so many of my close friends who are still in the church and and completely 100 believing say we just got acknowledged that they were men and and there's biblical precedent for prophets making mistakes and god lets them muddle their way through life just like us and they're not perfect and we can't expect perfection out of them and and i completely reject that um for the exact reason that you just said and i was able to get the state president to acknowledge that if the prophets were able to get something that seriously wrong about denying that really the privileges of the gospel and its rights and blessings to an entire race for over a hundred years if they could get that wrong then there's the chance that they're saying stuff to us today that they were late they will later have to disavow and try and make it go away quietly and and luckily the state president had the integrity to acknowledge that yeah that's completely within the realm of possibilities so so and i wish i would have drove the point home war with him in the moment i let the i let it stand for a minute and we just sat there in silence for a moment after he said that but i wish i would have drove home the point that then then there is no foundation if we can't trust that what the prophet says today is doctrinal and isn't going to change um and then where do we stand um and i know the church response is well everyone needs to go get their own testimony of what the prophet says but that's also technically not what the church says the church has said in the past that our church leaders have said that when the prophet speaks the speaks the thinking is done and that we just need to fall in line and follow the prophet i mean we have a primary song where we can't follow the prophet so um so it's it's so extremely disingenuous um of the church to just say yeah we disavow what they what they say but but please you know you need to keep believing us today because what we say today is absolute truth that comes straight from god and you should build your entire life around this and and devote your entire life to it because we speak for god himself that's disingenuous and dishonest yeah and not only is it true today but if you defy what they're saying today you can get punished or excommunicated and you know the stakes are very severe right exactly yeah okay so you start uh struggling with these issues um a lot of people at that point start worrying is my wife going to divorce me you know do i tell her what about my parents what about my in-laws what about my kids what about my siblings uh what about my ward members what about my job like there are all sorts of really severe and traumatic reverberations that happen when someone starts going down the rabbit hole is that right adam that's right yeah should we skip forward to like january-ish yeah so about january we're gonna skip forward to about january i started school and he's and we're i can't remember at one point i told adam though that i would choose him over the you know whatever path he's going to go i'm going to choose him and not the church i'm not going to choose the church over my own okay i got to pause you there marlena and we want to hear a lot from you but that's a super rare comment because most people that i've experienced and maybe it's just as it's selection bias of who comes to me maybe the people who have a good uh believing spouse good reaction don't need to come to me but for all the people coming to me it's like oh no no no no this was our agreement it's the church this is why we got married this is where we built our whole life and if if it's not the church i i may be out of here how did you so you for me your reaction especially for orthodox mormon is very unique and so i'm wondering if you have a sense for where that came from and how that developed in you when so many when so many believing mormons can't say those words to their spouse i choose you over the church um i'd seen it with other couples i'd seen it just break up marriages i saw people that were going to choose the church over their spouse i thought that was super sad um and maybe that maybe there's more to it for them but i love him enough and i love i guess to give up those things you know i love him enough in my family that i think the worst thing i could do is get divorced over this and break up my family because of that um was i happy about it no um at the beginning i think i said that and i at the time i remember it being nice um but it wasn't easy we still went down a path of i mean as we go into january sorry i'm trying to get my thoughts of where i want to go with this um well there was definitely i definitely felt some anger coming my way i mean she we didn't we weren't talking about getting divorced but there was some serious no as soon as he finally got to the point of where he said he didn't believe the church was true i think this was before this happened i said i'm going to choose you know you know over the church i'm not going to go that direction and i think that's where i started to open up and he said just listen to this podcast you know he found mormon stories by this point and that's when we listened to lila tour sorry to this um podcast and that was a big one for me i listened to it on the way to school and at home again because i had met her dad i held him at a high steam it was interesting to process those things and general authorities family they can leave and those different things on that end of it and things started to slowly go for me i started to ask more questions um to adam and what else and i wanted to know more um but back to that as soon as he opened up and said he didn't think the church was true i was like well i never thought we'd be here in a million years so once he said that i was like my mind went straight to divorce like what that means then we could get divorced i never thought we could get divorced so like ever like nothing would break that up so even though i said i would stay with him and choose him over the church my mind went straight to well then we could get divorced and and i don't know if i can keep it all straight but your mind goes everywhere at that point so i mean i had thoughts of um because it's a breach of trust yeah like this is not what i'm signed up for this is not who i married this is you know and i had to process all those things of um yeah and pro i guess just process that he may be because i i think i started to think he changed or he was going to change because he had made this choice and then that's where i'm like oh well maybe then we could get divorced because he's changing yeah if that makes sense so so you were just you were kind of terrified right you were kind of afraid yes yeah yeah and so adam you experienced that from her as anger is that right uh yeah she was she was pretty upset at me at you know just you know why am i why did i have to put the family through this basically you know because because this wasn't yeah this wasn't very fair to them um i felt like i kept saying you've pulled a rug out from under us like even though we were talking about this i didn't think this was going to happen or we were going to go this far so i can handle most of it but yeah it was a little touch and go there for a while that it was a little sensitive and there was there was days when she would say i can't talk about this and i don't want to hear about it there was others days that she would say you know tell me every mormon stories podcast that that you liked because i want to go listen to them and try and understand so it kind of just depended on the day or the week and i was already cracking like some of the stuff you would say a big one for me was the um first vision the first vision so yeah so i'd go down this the rabbit hole and i'd be like yeah it's not true and this isn't true and i i don't like this what i'm hearing um like on the first vision again was i had never heard that even reading the gospel topic essays when it says the four or five different versions and and that was almost enough for me right there because i was just like our whole church is you know they teach that our whole church has he had the first vision and it the movie the movie is really good at creating those feelings that he prayed and he went back and told his mom that he saw god and how he felt and then he created you know organize the church well when you find out that's not how it went that was um yeah that was enough but i kind of kept going back and forth of saying well it's fine it's fine there's still lots of good and there's still lots of other things in the church marlene i was going to say sorry marlene i was going to say that that stuff about joseph smith touches on your experiences growing up in illinois right yeah definitely yes because we are there yeah and that was a hard one for me because i think as we're going through this and it's covered i mean we can get back to that oh there's nights we stayed up all night there are some big fights we had there's i mean we're going down this crazy path so um yeah the first vision was a huge one for me to learn that out learn that because i've been to nauvoo i've been to carthage jail a million times these places um a big i guess yeah the first vision was huge but i was listening to i think it was tom phillips or the other 70 that talked about saying joseph smith would did not go to carthage jail as a martyr and he talked about the navitu oh my word exposed big yeah um and that he had the printing press destroyed because they were printing about his polygamy that floored me floored me because that's not the picture you're getting when you go to nauvoo or to carthage jail that's not the pretty video that they're giving you up front um that was a absolutely huge one for me because i thought okay all the other stuff might not be true but then there's still joseph smith and he had a huge place in my heart i felt like i knew him because you go and walk on the land he walked on and you're there and you felt i felt like i knew that history i thought i knew all the stuff there was to know and when you find out this it rips your world apart so so you're saying in all that time hanging out in nauvoo they never taught you about the naval expositor i'd heard it but i didn't really know that's what it that what happened i mean when they talk about even joe smith running to iowa like running away they just always said i mean and i knew about his polygamy growing up but they just said that was the age of the girls at the time i knew he had married 15 year olds growing up and young girls but they just put it off at that was the time that's how things were and then when that he was being um persecuted it's because he was going around telling the first vision story well no it wasn't you know he was being persecuted because the treasure digging and the you know later the polygamy and then he again i always remember the one where he you know ran away to was it iowa yeah you know he's just running from the law for things that he was doing illegally not because he was really being persecuted but that's what they're teaching you that's what they're telling me so that yeah that was a huge one that they lied to us about and i didn't like it and that was really enough for me to say okay i you know but i again i still processed and you know go the indoctrination is huge so you can't just go with that and say yeah i'm done for me i had to keep exploring right so so how did things progress where so for me yeah it i kind of say that for me it was fairly linear um that i just slowly kept reading and investigating and my testimony just kind of kept taking hits and it just kept declining and at this point we're doing it more together though we're like listen to this podcast let's listen to it together at the same time when we're going wherever we're going so we can talk about it tonight or let's read this together and i was reading stuff with them before i oh and at this point i've dropped out of nursing school a month in just because of that was crazy and this this was going to come to a crazy head you know with covet it got intense our relationship and all the church stuff so but yeah we i just kept researching and every time i thought i had something that would never fall you know it it fell um i listened to joseph smith russ stone rolling on on audiotape and and that her audiobook and you know that was eye opening um i started reading on the mormon think website they do an outstanding job there of answering um questions deep questions about the anachronisms in the book of mormon and um you know one of the biggest ones for me that um really was probably the final nail in the coffin of my testimony was reading grant palmer's book in insider's view of mormon origins i started on a saturday morning i think i was the first one awake it was like six in the morning i started it i could not put it down i think i finished it in five hours and um it was i was like marlena said absolutely floored to find out that there were books in circulation at the time of joseph smith that bear remarkable resemblance in themes in language and story lines to the book of mormon and that maybe maybe joseph smith had just was a master a remix artist where he had he could take books that he'd read and and spend new stories based on uh facts and and language from all sorts of different books uh like the late war and the view of the hebrews um and james adair um i think it's called the history of the american indians and uh and then the most crazy one was uh grant palmer documents a story called the golden pot uh in his book i think it's the last chapter and this book again was in circulation at the time of joseph smith and and is remarkably similar to joseph smith's own story about a young man who's supposed to get buried treasure out of a hill and who has to go back in and meet an angel every year on the fall equinox september 22nd and even has to bring his uh fiancee to uh at one point and grant palmer you know was still in the church he was still a believing member when he wrote the book he said he wasn't trying to take away people's faith and as you know you've interviewed him he was never excommunicated from the church he was just trying to document what he'd found through all his years he was a longtime ces institute instructor and he was trying to document these things that he found and possible story lines that matched up maybe where joseph smith got some of his story lines and and it was just uh absolutely damning to my testimony to see that you know i i just i always felt like the book of mormon was too complex that it couldn't ever have been written and then when you start to see the similarities between that and and these other books you begin to see well okay yeah people were pretty eloquent at that time and you know this book the late war um sounds a lot like king james it's a history but it sounds a lot like king james english and as you just begin to read these things and read about how there's there's uh anomalies and even in the king james version are the verses of the of the book of mormon that are taken from supposedly you know that are similar to the bible um but there's king james errors in the book of mormon so it used to it just all starts to build on itself and and as it kept building and building in my testimony kept shrinking and shrinking um i guess i guess it came to a point where in february i was serving as the executive secretary and it came to a point in february where i i texted the bishop and said i i'd really just prefer to be released um and that never went anywhere and and i had to i had to finally send an email in may uh i sent an email to the bishop and said i can't continue on and i finally admitted at that point that i'd had a faith crisis because i'd researched and i i couldn't in good faith continue to serve in my calling and asked but you were serving up to that point yeah i was serving up until yeah until the end of may of 2020. yeah i tried to be cautious about it i was i was i was researching it and i didn't want to do anything drastic and and out myself because i thought well if i change my mind or if i find something that convinces me that this is all true you know i don't want to go public or make a lot of noise about it i just wanted the time on my own to research it and and that's what i did and maybe it blindsided some people when i finally came out and said i don't believe anymore and i'd like to be released and and i can't even in good conscience continue to you know to pay my tithing or or even wear my garments because i just don't see this as is true the whole entire narrative just doesn't make any sense um and despite the feelings and all the good feelings i'd had over the years and what i would call a testimony or witnesses of the spirit you know emotions i came to realize are you know can be easily manipulated based on the music we listen to or the propaganda that we are exposed to whether that's in print or or audio or visual um you know i i you can feel all range of emotions you know you go to the movie theater and you can feel great empathy for people and great compassion or excitement or anger because those you know movies and media have such a great power to make you feel things and it finally just dawned on me that i needed to trust facts over feelings and that no matter how good the church felt that if the underlying facts don't make any sense and in fact if the pieces of the puzzle don't make a complete picture of the church being true but instead actually the puzzle pieces finally line up and point to this having been invented by joseph smith then then i've got to follow the facts i can't i can't just blindly follow my feelings anymore yeah beautiful that was a great summary thank you for sharing how is it for you marlena i just want to go back my biggest thing was how um so we were talking all the way through march and listening to the mormon stories which were so helpful because you kind of get dragged back into well maybe we should stay what if it's really true what are we doing um a big thing for me was i'd be out probably you know just with the joseph thing and be completely out just for adam and i but i was like what about the kids that was huge what am i gonna do with the kids how am i gonna raise them like i can't i don't you know because the church gives you this good plan and you you know you follow it if you follow it you know where your kids are going so um you take that away and you're just you know lost so in march i think we had talked a lot and i finally kind of left kind of left me alone a little bit and so on my own i wanted to to research so i started to listen to podcasts on my own i reached out to um some people that had come out that i in our stake they were in the ward next to us um carried aubrey and i i contacted them i knew of them and we had talked but i didn't really know them and i said can i just meet with you guys so i met with them and this is um the day of we were thinking i needed to take a break from the church i said let's just take a break and see how we feel um and even up to this point i guess i should address that i had a real issue with um president nelson i did not sustain him at the last word conference before this all happened even before any of this faith crisis stuff i just i had no issues with um president monson or hinckley but as soon as he was called i don't know i just had some uneasy feelings something felt off felt off for me and i couldn't get on board i couldn't i couldn't get on board with that but at the same time i'm like okay it's just the profit i'm gonna go you know i didn't even question that um sorry about the side note so i'm going i'm great that's rare where somebody just doesn't feel good about the prophet but i'm sure it happens well you know like changing like saying we can't we can't say mormons it just felt oh i think i don't think i liked all the changes i don't like that the boy scouts was taken away yeah that was huge for me too both of our older boys are eagle scouts and we still have a i think yeah i have a lot to say about that because i don't think so far i mean with kova we haven't seen how the youth program is going to be but it's not giving them the skills that the boy scouts gave to my tool they're boys that the younger people equivalent to what the scouts provided it definitely is not it's pretty sad i i i think he tried to come in and change up things that and i didn't appreciate that i guess to be honest i don't think that it was uh trying to make it better or different or that switching up would keep people in or bring people in and i uh i have my theories of people our age i think it's pushing them away by all the changes and i don't know so there's that thing with the prophet and i didn't think much about it just that i just get i don't know i want to say creepy vibes i didn't like it which is horrible to say but i never anyway um so i started researching on my own and doing those things and met with these people these ladies that had left in our ward or steak and i just needed to know how i need reassurance how it's going to be moving forward you know maybe for me but also for their kids i'm like how were your kids how did they survive because up to this point we hadn't told our kids that we were even questioning they probably heard us talking but we hadn't we didn't want to say anything to anybody until we knew we were sure so this is still like march and again our son i should say our oldest son is preparing for a mission saving up his money i think his paperwork actually was put in in february so he was supposed to receive his call um by the end of march so we're both questioning this and i'm starting to question more on my own even though i mean i'm believing all the stuff he said but i'm like do we still stay in is this how you know how do we navigate this hard to navigate and i think the biggest thing i don't feel like a lot of people maybe stress or i didn't get is the emotional rollercoaster you know the sheer terror and emotions that this puts you on it's rocky i mean i'm we probably are painting a pretty picture but it's not a pretty picture going through this so um i mean you can ask our kids like we don't usually argue or fight i think we have some big blow-ups and um i i you know about the church and where this is gonna go and what's gonna do and we weren't talking for a couple days or i'd just take off in the car and he'd have to come find me and it actually kind of led to almost i don't want to say suicidal but just where's my life going and it's out of control and different things of how am i going to handle moving forward without this road map i've had my whole life i don't think i've cried that much in forever and the unsettled subtleness that it leaves you so it was tough it was really tough and so and you're still researching and you're still going back and forth saying is this really what if we're making a huge mistake what if you know and what if we're messing up our kids lives and and so you're still graveling with that because i mean that's what you've been taught so um it's hard to process let me share a comment from laryn she writes i'm going to be very very vulnerable here but when i was really teetering on unbelief i seriously considered quote taking myself out of the equation close quote so that my husband and children could stay and not have the baggage of an unbelieving mom and wife thank you so much laryn for sharing that and tell me marlena and or adam if either of you kind of had any of those types of thoughts so i guess i should just own up to it more so because i don't like to admit to that um yeah i don't even it was in march i think this we went through a three-day really hard period of i started to think because i wasn't i didn't know if i wanted to go that route and again adam being awesome that he is said if you want to stay in if that's what you want to do we will do the church 100 we won't go this direction so even though he knew it wasn't true and he you know he wasn't completely i don't think 100 at this point but he said if that's what you want to do if you want to stand i'll stay in with you so we you know we're choosing each other but it got to a point where i felt like i wasn't what he wanted um you know because i wasn't maybe going that direction i don't know if i'm ex you correct me yeah no keep going i mean i was just like you know and then i felt like i should give him an out i said if you want to divorce me then i'm giving you permission to do that if i'm not going to go the direction that you want me to go and you need more freedom in this you know and of course we don't want to do that with the kids and you know i didn't mean it but i did you know i did i was allowing him to grow in in who he was and and i think there was a lot of miscommunication too which caused anger and you know and different things but there was a point where i didn't i don't know what exactly caused it but i did i had a lot of emotions i think i didn't i think the future was unforeseeable at this point there wasn't that nice pretty road map of where we were going so i did take the car and i left and and i think i had texted them after crying and screaming and yelling in the car and in anger and frustration and now the emotions are going to come because makes me want to swear at the church because i guess that's what makes me s so mad is them they make you choose either your spouse or the church and i hate that that breaks up families and i wasn't gonna let that happen to us i didn't want it to happen to us and so i think i think i was at that point even though he was choosing to go that way and i knew it wasn't true not completely but i wanted him to be able to live his best life also and so i don't know i don't know what caused the i did have thoughts where i did text him and i didn't even i wasn't serious you know i think these thoughts like okay life would be better without me but i'm not that crazy i'm not gonna do it but i remember turning off my location device so he couldn't find me but he already knew where i was at and he came right to where i was at to make sure it was okay but um it puts you through a painful reality and you of where you have to navigate what you're going to choose and what you're going to do and it shouldn't be like that and i think that's what pushes me to and again i'm jumping ahead a little bit but to be vocal because they've heard enough people in the church with gay guilt and shame and trying to live a perfect life and everybody puts on this facade um of their perfect life which is literally it kills people i think you know spiritually or physically or however you know mentally psychologically psychologically thank you yes um i just notice how real i i talk about my kids and real and i just realize other people don't want to talk about the real and how you know life isn't perfect and so yeah where was i going um it just it it really became emotional at that point of are we going to really do this and where is it going to lead and um and then it then we i you know he was ready to yeah talk to the you'd already wanted to be released and then i said okay we need to again if it was just me and him i probably wouldn't find and been like let's let's go i'm done i can i'll follow you completely and let's just do it now but the kids were there so i said okay if you're gonna really do this and let's talk you need to talk to the kids and tell them what you kind of discovered and how you feel and because i always blame it on him he started it so if it's wrong if he's wrong then we're blaming it all at him so um yeah and then it kind of went to finally well i guess sorry i'm getting ahead of myself our son had had his mission call and then we talked to the kids so i was just gonna jump in and my apologies if i'm taking a lot of the time up but to just to explain you know that you know i sit here and think to myself wow what a jerk i was you know like to put my wife through that and my kids but um you know through this whole journey i i see you know as i deconstructed from the church and it's in indoctrination um i was one i was mad as well because you begin to realize that the church hasn't been honest and i've devoted so much time and and money and given so much and and they they did it under uh false pretenses you know without being honest um so there's all that and there's the doctrine but then there was the other side was slowly beginning to realize you know i couldn't even go to sacred meeting without hearing the you know quotes from the leaders and and you hear those little tinges of manipulation in their quotes and and you see the things they're doing that are that are not okay um i mean i could go on about that but but you know the the conference talks and there's just so much um pressure that they put on people and it's so toxic the way that they talk to us um right after my faith crisis started let me just segue or not segway but let me just get off track one second here um it was like two weeks after and i was debating whether whether to go to priesthood or not or just because i was the executive secretary and i could make myself busy look busy and not have to go to priesthood for the second hour but i decided to go because i thought well i need some extra help so i'm going to go and we studied at conference talk by elder holland and it was just horrible you know i think i'm sure everyone in the room thought oh what a great talk because he talked about being a parent but all i heard him say the the quote that i remember from that was and the whole talk was horrible but this part was the worst he said that the biggest determinant of where an arrow is going to land is the skill of the one holding the bow shooting the arrow so he was talking to parents saying that we need to live the gospel conspicuously in our lives that if we don't our kids are going to go astray and that's back on us that's on our shoulders because we didn't shoot a straight arrow and like i say i was probably the only one in the room that's had an issue with that but i felt so incredibly shamed and i was so angry um you know and going to priesthood that day didn't help me it actually pushed me out faster because again i'm seeing this unhealthy narrative that that i'm responsible for someone else's actions i'm responsible for my kids and and no acknowledgement that you know supposedly in mormon doctrine even one out of every three of of god's children didn't decide to follow him um and come to earth um and but you know and we're not claiming he's a horrible parent but but boy elder holland in this talk sure laid it on thick and really made everyone in that room feel super inadequate as a parent and so i'm seeing this toxicity and i i i just couldn't stay in it's like seeing the other side of a coin you know and i couldn't unsee it and i couldn't keep going along pretending now i was willing to go but i couldn't do it as a believing member i was going to have to own where i was at and just be honest about it and as i'm not only am i leaving behind toxicity of what the church is telling me but my mind is expanding and i'm finding healthier ways of living i'm finding that i was becoming more honest because there was less of a need to create a facade that everything was okay and i could just be honest and say no everything's not okay i was finding greater levels of honesty with with my wife and talking about things that i never wanted to talk about because i thought they were embarrassing or i thought she would judge me for it or i thought that that should be upset because you know maybe they you know i'm admitting the things that i had done over the years that that i hadn't been perfect in my um how i lived the gospel or whatever um you know so i'm finding health and i was finding a voice that i hadn't had before because the church teaches us to kind of live small you know i have to i have to my patriotical blessing says i always have to say yes to a calling and do it uh joyfully and it says that i shouldn't um you know that i have to do everything they call on me to do and that's so invalidating as a human being that that i'm not in charge of myself i'm not in charge of my time as executive secretary i was spending 10 to 20 hours a week and and there's no question of whether can you do this do you have the time are you emotionally ready it's just you know what you we're calling you to do this and and we're telling you to do it and it doesn't matter whether or not you're free but you know the bishop's free on on sunday until 6 p.m so we're going to expect you to stay until 6 p.m and and as i stepped away from all that i began to find much much healthier levels of autonomy personal autonomy and responsibility for myself and it's hard for me to even explain it in words i'm not doing it justice but there was a growth that i found that allowed me to decide i am a complete human being in and of myself i don't need a priesthood leader to tell me that i'm worthy i don't need the church to tell me that i'm worthy i don't need the church to tell me that i have value i don't need i don't need that i am valuable and whole in and of myself and i am divine as a creation in and of myself and as i began to step away from the toxicity i'm finding all this greater happiness and peace of mind and um and so even though i could see the trauma that it was causing marlena i just kept being hopeful that she would eventually be able to find the same things that i was finding so sorry to be so long-winded john no that was beautiful that was not long-winded at all and uh you guys are given some really powerful kind of highlights uh in this segment so uh that was so beautifully expressed adam marlena do you want to now jump to your process back to your process a bit or you're talking about carson yeah i'll just give a little bit we kind of were on this he was a little bit ahead of me on this whole faith journey but i agreed with pretty much everything and what took me out i mean you know explored all the same things he did and and you know the lack of yeah different but the stakes were higher for you because you i have co-workers i go to work every day of leaving leaving for you is leaving behind your entire community and support system i think i was okay leaving yeah let me start back here in february i remember going to church still and remembering i can't listen to all the people in church it's true so sorry about messing up the timeline a little bit because i can't remember myself so i was pretty much i was probably already mentally out i had read enough once he read grant palmer's book i'd read it i read a little bit of the cs letter but again the podcasts were huge for me and the things that were coming um out of them as far as the gospel doctrine and also people going through the same thing and feeling exactly the same thing um was helpful for me so i'm like okay we're gonna survive this we're gonna get through again it's still those shadow you know those doubts of are we doing the right thing or do we just stay in and or do we just get out but i couldn't handle being in church either listening and just knowing that they're just saying such things so march you know coveted came we were going to take a break and luckily coveted the day that they came out to their counseling church it was awesome to see how we're going to do without church how are we gonna feel so it's pushing me forward because i think i'm about four months behind how where adam was and again i was researching and then i needed to feel um know where the kids felt um because you know what are we going to do with them how do they feel because some of our kids were in more than the other kids were spiritually mentally so and again i started to say this earlier we had a son who was preparing for a mission had saved all this money for his mission had submitted his paperwork and had received his call at the end of march to go um of 20 march of we received this call march 24th of 2020 and was supposed to go report june 2nd so um we kind of just sat and down the kids and kind of vaguely gave them um and i don't know if i'm john if i'm skipping too far ahead if you want me to talk more about what led me more out i mean it's still a process i think i'm still processing it but um or if you want me to go into more doctrinal detail if you just want me to keep going yeah just just kind of you know in a few minutes give the highlights um okay it went with as soon as i heard the first vision i thought how could they even start the church without with you know joseph smith not writing down the first vision for 12 years and what they portrayed in the good feeling movie of the first vision is not how it went um so again i think i was pretty good saying yeah if that wasn't true then okay yeah i probably believe half the other stuff isn't true so the next one i think adam had mentioned this he's like i'm holding on to the truth of joseph smith and when that fell and crumbled with all the polygamy and polyandry and um different things it went to the book of mormon and then once that was destroyed for me there was um with all the things adam mentioned i mean i think the super computer thing and how they kind of ran it through there and and see how it's taken on from all these other books and and different things i mean the information that's out there that's the truth is astounding um of how much they're whitewashing and hiding from us that um yeah i'll get to more of that how it's pushed me to want to share that but um back to our kids is um well no i want to go back to where that is gut wrenching and um i i never saw that in anybody else's faith crisis of how painfully hard it is to go through something like this your whole community that was hard for me because i had a lot of community people friends in the church i liked the activities i liked you know doing those things some of those things um i was involved and so that and i had a community outside but not as big as i did in the church and most of my friends um from growing up you know you kind of navigate towards those people that think and do the same as you so um i think that was harder for me to process dealing with that um and leaving the church than it was i'd already come to terms with all the doctrine and then i was gonna have to process telling my parents and my siblings which did not happen until just recently so um so we yeah at this point we're out we're out and we're telling the kids and um do you want me to go into the story then of our kids and yeah a lot of people are like how do you tell the kids yeah especially if you've got a son about to go on a mission he's already received his call right right yes so he'd receive his call to guatemala he's going to go it's going to be at this point they've already announced i think that it's going to be the or soon to announce that it's going to be the online mtc i don't think we knew what was happening with covet and where it was going to lead so um we they kind of already knew we'd kind of questioned we kind of said some things so they weren't completely shocked do you remember more of how it went i just remember we sat down and we talked to him um our our oldest son i think was a little surprised our two middle children uh were frankly a little relieved um because they both pretty quickly expressed oh yeah we've been having doubts for a long time and then they were 17 and 15. isn't it fascinating that your kids are having their own processes and you're loving parents but they're still afraid yeah yeah to tell you oh and and that just continues to compound even today wait let me go backwards let me go backwards is that our son started to have some questions about his own patriarchal blessings and blessing and some other like word of wisdom and just different things that should have opened our eyes more than they did but it was questions sometimes questions we couldn't even answer for them at the time that these kids these days can they could see that bs a little bit i want to say these two kids can see it and at the church where they're trying to shove you into this one line and you need to be friends with all these people just because you have this one thing in common even though maybe you don't get along with those people um but yeah they start to open your eyes for you your kids yeah they had a lot especially our 17 year old had a lot of hard questions for us over the last couple years and deep questions deep my saying is that i don't know how well the church is going to survive the information age because the information that's available at their fingertips is astounding i mean it's the same thing that we're discovering is that the information's out there like it's never been before the publicly available information that that's really uh difficult for the church to explain away and that in prior decades they you know they were able to not ex share that or keep it suppressed but with the information age and the ability to share information so readily it's really hard for him to keep that under control and and our i think our 17 year old you know had had um already started to find things online that that were making him realize um maybe the narrative isn't exactly what the church is saying it is and he heard it from other kids too yeah and from other kids um but i think for us it was just sitting down yeah it was just sitting down with our kids and the initial reaction again was a little bit of shock our youngest son is 12 and he was a little sad frankly because um and and hopefully i'm not putting words in his mouth but the way that i interpreted it interpreted it was that he was just a little sad that maybe we were like turning our backs on god a little bit and and was really quite confused of why we would come to the conclusion that we didn't need church in our lives um he likes church i think he's sensitive and you know maybe kind of like i was when i was 12 it it speaks to him he feels good when he goes and not questioning i mean he's only 12 but he was he's out of the four children he was the hardest one to talk to about it to let let him know that you know we can still believe in god we can still believe in the life after death we can still believe that we'll all be together again that doesn't have to change it's just that we didn't want him going to church and getting these unhealthy um toxic manipulative um indoctrination and and then trying to help him to understand that when he's older he'll he'll probably thank us for it so i don't know if that's well it was during covid and so we weren't going to church and he his was he had been passing sacrament since he was 11. and he's a cool 12 year old and everybody loves them the leaders love him the older kids love him um he likes that and he likes that i think he likes that attention the community and um but his fear went right too well what happens now like when we die and and we didn't explain a lot of doctrine and different things to him we just and we had already showed him i think believer on um the movie from imagine dragons the documentary believer believer yeah and actually for our 12 year old that was that was uh it impacted him pretty hard because he's so sensitive and he just accepts all the kids in a good way yes yeah he he just is kind super kind and um he just said the church shouldn't act like that and yeah yeah when he saw that the church really pushes this this harmful id idea that lgbtq people just aren't the same and that they kind of almost are a threat to us um he just was super sad about that yeah and it maybe kind of started to open up his mind that maybe not everything the church does is wholesome so yeah we kept we told the kids and and to be honest we didn't think it was going to um affect all of them we said we'd support our son on his mission um and this point has a call we said we'd support our kids if they wanted to go to church when they went back to church we would take them um again a couple of them one was going to go on a mission a couple of them were like yeah we're good and then there was ben so we said when church starts again we'll go um and then it goes from there we well okay so then our our oldest uh it was getting closer yeah and they the church gave him the option they said well your mission is gonna look like um online mtc at home learning spanish learning spanish on your own over zoom and then you'll probably be reassigned stateside for who knows how long and he wasn't really excited about that he was really mostly excited about going to guatemala and so he was like i don't know and then the church gave me the option to hit pause for 18 months and hopefully then the pandemic would fall over and he could just go have a regular experience at a regular mtc and go straight to guatemala and he he really didn't want to delay he wanted to just go but i started talking to him a little more seriously one on one saying well this is why mom and dad are stepping back well first i want to say that he some of his friends had come home from missions because of covid and they said no way are you going to be able to learn spanish and do the mtc online that's weird take the option so he had already told the stake president he was going to start the online mtc and because he didn't want to wait he didn't want to wait so then we ended up talking to him well and i've got to put a plug in here for another book that i absolutely love the name of the book is no more mr nice guy so someone on reddit had suggested it to other members of the church who are leaving and it's it's totally about reclaiming your personal power and reclaiming your ability to just own who you are and in the first time i talked to my son he was like you know dad i really kind of don't want to hear about this because it's going to mess with my head i just i'm going to go on my mission i've made the decision been planning on it for years he didn't want to regret anything later in life so he did say that yeah um but i'd been reading that book and i woke up one morning one morning and it just hit me that i'm not being authentic i'm not owning my truth i'm kind of holding back and and so i just went into him and said i've got to be honest about this i i think you need to understand where i'm coming from we're still trying to protect their feelings i think because we didn't know how to navigate it right and and so i just started to talk to him very honestly about why i was in for 41 years and almost 42 years and now i'm out and and then he admitted he said you know just even a little bit that we'd talked as a family over the proceeding for four to six weeks he said it started to make him think and he said you know i've prayed to know if the book of mormon's true because i don't want to go on a mission and and be teaching this if i don't know and he's like i've never gotten an answer um he just started to talk about his own doubts and we just let him know that it was okay to have doubts and it was okay for him to do what he wanted to do if he wanted to go because he didn't want to have any regrets then then he would go and we'd support him but that if he was having any doubts that maybe the safest option was for him to hit that pause button that the church had given him take that option to hit pause and that would slow everything down that would give him some time to really think it through do a more serious investigation before he commits to 18 months i mean sorry two years out in the mission field and going to the temple because that was a big thing for me like to start to realize like he's not just going on a mission but he's got to commit to going to the temple and and the the promises that you're going to make there and commitments yeah so it was just it only took actually a couple more times we kept talking and and i just kept being very blunt even though the feelings on the inside are hard to describe because on the one hand for 19 years we have hoped and wished and prayed and encouraged this kid to prepare for a mission and to go um and now the sudden at the last minute i'm saying you know maybe you shouldn't go because you're going to go teach people about a false narrative and tell them that they're lamanites when they're not really lamanites and try and convince them that they need to be a lot more like us caucasian americans and and give their money to a corporation that doesn't need it and i mean just the whole thing about how unhealthy it could be and even thinking back to my own life well and we'd read a really great book by stephen hassan um compatibility cult mind control yes yeah and marlena was the one actually reading yeah i didn't even read it i just because i didn't have time because i'm yet to read the whole thing and i just went to the you know the index and found all the mormon parts of it and i just read that he said he was um talking about when he was in the moonies and how they make you give up your bank account and your car and your everything and um go live with them and the indoctrination that that creates and he said the mormons do it the same way with their missions and i was like and i was worried about him talking to carson and kind of talking him out of it because i was still i still wasn't sure 100 that that's what i wanted to do that we weren't going to mess up his life but as soon as i read that i was like you go talk him out of it right now like right now because you realize and and i'd begun to realize that you know the mission is the biggest indoctrination tool that the church has and and it meets all the hallmarks of just like scientology or or the moonies that rip you away from your support system they let you have very limited contact with your family um you pay for it yourself you pay to go be indoctrinated you you memorize stuff that you're going to repeat um you're trying to gain adherence you know through the high pressure sales tactics um all of these things meet the hallmarks of just a high class indoctrination program and it made me realize you know i i came home from my mission much much more committed than i ever would have been if i hadn't gone and that um you know i think we'd both just come around to the idea that the mission really is a great tool for the church to build lifelong adherents that will never be able to to step away and to get the to get that out of their own heads um and then come home and get married really quickly and quickly and raise the family so they they got it yeah hooked it's like if we wanted to create a little army of jason bourne's you know we'd send them to the mission field so um so anyway we just started talking very honestly with him and and he he still hadn't decided well he he did decide and he's emailed the state president and said i'm definitely going and then the deadline passed for him to decide and about three days later he said oh no no no no i need to hit pause i've i've really got serious doubts now the more we've talked and the more that i've let it sink in and so he hurried and emailed the state president and luckily the state president was able to call it call salt lake city and talk to the missionary department and and put it on pause and he's read enough now on his own and he hasn't really even studied that much but he's read enough on his own now that he's like yeah i don't i don't think actually i want to do this just in general because we've talked to him about how mormonism i mean it can be a positive in your life but um maybe there's even a better way where we can find um self-actualization and happiness and and just do it under our own will without needing all the rules and the shaming and the manipulation to try and force us to be good decent people and i think he's starting to see that himself and so he hasn't he hasn't contacted the state president but he needs to and just tell the state president that he doesn't plan to go but as of right now he still has a mission call technically wow what an epic story and uh sounds like you're all things considered your family has handled all this so well and you guys have dodged a lot of potential bullets and you're all kind of emerging intact and maybe even stronger as a family yeah definitely yes and actually i wanted to mention that earlier when marlena said something or maybe it was you john about how the kids have been able to be a little more open and honest with us and i feel like i feel like my relationship with marlena is deeper and stronger than it's ever been um i feel like our relationship with our kids is so much more open and honest they feel free to be who they are and to own that and not try and put on a facade or lie to us um just to make us happy so you know just even in the last few days our kids have talked to us to us as they begin to realize okay my mom and dad um aren't going to punish me for not being mormon and they begin to talk to us more bluntly about mistakes they've made in their lives and it's actually uh sad to think about not mistakes but explore the world experiences that they've had and um and they're able to talk to us more frankly and it's actually sad to think like you know some of our kids have dealt they've been carrying a burden for a year two years um about things they didn't think they could talk to us about that may have even been traumatic for them but they didn't think they could talk to about it because they didn't think we'd understand or that we would punish them for it so um it's made us a lot more open as our entire family i would say like extremely more open yeah and we thought we were pretty open before but this is a whole new level of honesty i mean i don't i didn't think we could get any more honest for the most part but uh stepping back away from the church and not becoming your own self and having your own being accountable for your own self and not someone else judging our worthiness as um it will change your yeah your relationship with your spouse and with your children and realize that yeah it's such a mind-bender to like have that condition fear that if you leave the church your marriage will fall apart and your kids will become a disaster and your family will fall apart and to find out that if you handle it right you'll be healthier your spouse will be healthier your marriage will be healthier your kids will be healthier and your whole family will be healthier and that's not that there isn't difficulty and pain in the process because life always contains suffering but when you can be more authentic more vulnerable more real more open more connected more honest with each other how can that not lead to good things right exactly yeah that's uh how i lost my thoughts well exactly and and i mentioned our stake president and bishop came and visited us a couple of nights ago at our home and and we told them the same thing that you know the church pushes this narrative that if you ever walk away you're walking away from all the blessings that god was giving you and raining down on you you know for for paying your tithing for wearing your garments for doing your callings for all those things all those performances and you know as we step back we continue to see little and what the church would call tender mercies you know that things just continue to happen and to fall into place and it's astounding to see that our worlds haven't fallen apart i mean it was tough and it was you know that there was trauma in leaving the church but the church caused that trauma not not us we didn't cause the trauma to ourselves it's trauma because of the indoctrination and the fear of what's going to happen if you leave but actually stepping back you're allowed to finally see that we we we're blessed all along um um the blessings didn't stop um if you want to call them blessings or whatever or it's just life continues to happen and the rain falls on the good and the bad and it was never conditional upon us um adhering tightly and strictly to the performances of mormonism and doing all those checklists and all those things that were told hey if you don't do it you're not going to have the spirit with you and you're not going to be led and you're not going to be able to know how to teach your kids and you're probably going to get in a car accident and you know all these things that we we think we're told that we have to do or else so i just want to say that's why i finally realized even though i realized that when i'm going back to when i said i found the um lifestyle after mormonism that i couldn't put my you know i couldn't really decide why they were happier than we were and i think i've come to realize that that we are now our authentic selves and realize that we're inherently worthy without the church and them someone else telling us that we are and that um and with openness and the our family is so much stronger and stronger than i thought it could get you know more strong and um even though that's what you're processing is even though i knew when i found out about the first vision i was like and that was almost enough for me and i needed to explore all the other things and to absolutely make sure we studied and researched and did all those things but it was also processing um how we're going to live without all those things in our lives that the gospel teaches i can't remember the wording you said it earlier and um you said it perfectly but i can't remember exactly how you said it so it's just better all together yeah so i'm so happy that you guys have and you know your kind of babies in this process right you're kind of new to it but you're handling it so well and i'm so happy that things right now are going so smoothly for the family thanks thanks so i wanna i wanna end because we may be having you back on mormon stories because you guys have been vocal on facebook and you've received kind of a threat and you know we have a commitment we have two at least two standing offers on mormon stories if you know if you've if you or your loved one has been in a high level of leadership you automatically get a mormon stories episode and if you get threatened with the disciplinary counsel or you know get uh excommunicated or whatever you automatically get to come on and tell that story because we hate hate hate uh disrespect whatever the word is i i don't like to use the word hate let me take that back we think that excommunication disciplinary councils especially for losing your faith when they haven't been honest with you are just it's just so wrong along with any time they silence people and try and shut people up and try and keep members of the church ignorant from the problems by coercing and intimidating people not to speak up not to share what they've learned not to express concern that's you know silence is deadly it's the silence that kills and so people need to be vocal and so when they coerce or intimidate people with disciplinary counsels or excommunication just try and shame them or marginalize them or ostracize them or silence them we're not going to have that so tell us really quickly as we're wrapping up kind of what that experience was and what you guys are anticipating go ahead marlene all right um i'm just going to finish up by that i told my um family in september that i told my family i told my parents in september the end of september and then i told my brothers and sisters october 1st because we are going to come out publicly because stuff was getting around you know in the ward in our area um and we just wanted to you know navigate our own story and make sure that that was going out correctly so we put out a public statement on facebook and instagram october 3rd that adam eloquently wrote um about all of us and we got a lot of positive feedback adam i mean get into another time and you know there's for the most part it was positive i don't know if you want to say anything more than that um and then i felt a huge did you go into detail adam or did you keep it really brief and non-specific i didn't talk a lot about the reasons why or even our story of how we came out because i knew it would take four or five hours like this um but i i just went over the main bullet points that i think would apply to anybody leaving which is that we were all in we loved the church it was our entire life it was our entire world view um but that through a series of events we had begun to study and that a deeper study and investigation of the church um forced us to find that the church didn't live up to its own standards of integrity and how they've they've approached their own history and that they've whitewashed it and that due to that we were going to have to um step back due to our own sense of personal integrity and honesty that we couldn't keep going forwards um and just that we we didn't feel adversarial towards any of our our friends or board members that we still would welcome those friendships that they could continue that people could feel free to reach out to us and ask questions um but but letting people know that we found a higher level of just honesty and authenticity and kind of peace as we had stepped away yeah but i'll go ahead and you chose to do that over facebook yeah we didn't want to go public we didn't but people were getting pieces of our story and but they wouldn't come to us directly so and we weren't in church so we felt the need to um put it out there like i did not want to because i my parents aren't on social media but i didn't want people that saw that to get for them to go back to my parents to say something stupid or whatever or insensitive and which can happen with social media so i um i said well i've got to talk to my parents first and talk to them and then because i wanted them to hear it straight from me and then i said okay we still can't do it till i talk to my brothers sisters they need to know that so um another go how did that go talking to your parents um that's terrifying for people yeah so i approached it a little bit earlier in the summer um just saying i i thought they had questioned when they were my age um a little bit later um they had a lot of church books you know again nauvoo there you know i know you know who doesn't have a problem but polygamy sorry mouse getting dry um i knew my mom didn't love that and like who does and so i thought that maybe they had questioned it so i i kind of brought it up that way and they said they hadn't but um yeah so i just kind of brought it up asked them about some books they had a lot of church books i asked them if they had a certain book about emma smith they said they did and i just kind of approached it gently saying i was questioning some things i didn't believe it all and and they were cool and talked to me about it so and then i actually went back to their house and um was going to talk to them in person and they're still in illinois and and it wasn't the time and so then i actually just called them and and told them uh it was the hardest thing i've ever done um through tears and i mean ugly crying telling them that i didn't believe it was true and having a discussion but my parents and i knew because i had said a little bit earlier that i didn't have you know some siblings that were you know completely in and i knew that they would be loving and accepting so they said we will love you no matter what you do whatever you choose to do in your life you're an adult and you can make your own choices and it went a lot better than i i mean i knew that would be their main response and they would love me no matter what but um i always you know when my brothers and sisters see this i always say that i'm the favorite child and um in my own mind anyway that um it's hard to step down from that pedestal yeah i was gonna i was gonna come off that pedestal of maybe you know checking all the boxes and doing those things so but again they i knew they would love me and they support me and do those things and they were willing to have a conversation more about those things that you know they didn't weren't aware of that i was talking about so that's still to happen and then my brothers and sisters i sent a text um i talked to some siblings um a little bit before that in person but um sent a text and um everything was positive except from about one person but it was still it did good um i think it was a shock and um scary fear fear on their part of that if i could be leaving maybe and maybe i interpret that wrong but i think it was um shocking so and we just agreed to disagree and to move on without hard feelings and we didn't want to i didn't want any of that and to change our i didn't want it to change our relationship and i was you know we'd still support any marriages baptisms missions uh different things like that that we weren't going to be like you know anti about the church like antagonistic yeah we still love a lot of things about that so again going back so then we put it out on october 3rd publicly because um we were commenting on other people's pages and people um you know what the church is taught that we are um offended we leave because we're lazy we want to leave because we sin and we wanted um to clear that up of kind of the reasons we were leaving that we weren't doing it because of those things so so just to make it sure did you guys leave to drink alcohol did you leave to sin no did you leave because you wanted to you know do all the things mormonism wouldn't let you do no no no none of that really ever held an appeal for us so we didn't we didn't again we didn't think this would happen in a million years it's still shocking to me to find ourselves in this situation because never in a million years and we weren't looking for this we weren't we didn't want this to happen and that's why we did so much studying is because i didn't want to not be true i wanted to stay in i wanted it to be true i wanted joseph smith to be who they said he was i wanted the church to be what they said it was there is good in the church and it's good for those people especially like adam that you know converted on his mission and it's good for those people that or maybe not a good situation that it brings them to a better situation and but i like i think john you sorry calling you by your whole name but you said on a podcast or somewhere that if you're gonna give your time and your money and your life and i was willing to give my life just a year or so ago i remember thinking would i die right in front of my kids if someone asked me to deny the church i would die and not deny that and so to find out that it is not true that the things they've told us that that sent me over when you're that committed that's unacceptable and i love that you made that point because you're you better darn well know what you're getting into and you when you're born into it you trust your parents they don't know any better you trust what you've been taught it's there's so much good about it they don't question those things that we had issues with because you know you know where your kids are gonna go you know you know and there's that path that's laid out for them that they're gonna turn out good and you don't question if it's toxic or bad or harmful for them and mentally and physically and different things you know and so um again i we didn't think we'd find ourselves there but if you're willing sorry i'm losing my train of thought getting emotional about that if yeah if they're asking them what are you getting emotional about the pain it causes you it causes me that it causes other people that and so that's what led not just our public post i wanted people to know why we came um why we were leaving the church and so they didn't come up their own narrative that they knew the facts and not that we left because we were offended and all those things you said but i get emotional because i get angry kind of about it i get um mad that they take people's entire lives and mess with them on something especially if it's not true and that's why i started to post because even though it would make me sick to my stomach it would make me ill in fact i went through a week of um i would post something i'd get sick actually the middle of the night i think and i actually found out just from the dentist i was grinding my teeth and i would throw up in the middle of the night because of the stress and then i threw up because i just see a picture i said when kovald was over i'd go back to church and i didn't feel like actually going to church so we turned on the zoom church and he pulled up something and it physically made me ill um i think you actually threw up i threw up uh probably over a week span at least four or five times thinking of the pain and the the stress that the church yeah because i feel like i need to do my part of sharing that with other people and you know and then i stress out that i'm posting stuff and i don't want to diminish any people that are in it and that's they're okay where they're at but at the same time i feel like my loved ones should know the truth and be able to make that logical decision so even though an informed informed and so even though it was making me physically ill i didn't i didn't want to stop and i think it was good to get out of my system to be honest because after that i felt i feel like i had to get rid of a little bit anger and a little bit of sharing and then i had this i felt a lot better and i i mean i'm still posting some things but yeah it was crazy though because i was the one that brought up church on the zoom on the computer and uh because she said well maybe we want to see it you know just see what it looks like i mean this was just a couple of weeks ago right um yeah like a week and a half ago yeah and um at the same time i thought well i wonder uh how much tiding i paid oh cause we got an email saying it's time for tithing settlement i thought i wonder how much tithing i paid this year i couldn't remember so i pulled up the church's website and and it pulls up you know to where you're making online donations and it pulls up a big uh version of the tithing donation slip and marlene is like uh i think i'm getting sick looking at that and and i'm like no no i'm sure you're not and she's like no actually can you hand me that garbage can and i handed the garbage can and she threw up and um she comes back and and sits down again and there's zoom church on and she immediately starts feeling sick again she's like i think it's the church i think you got to turn that off and as soon as i turned it all down she was okay and later that day you saw something on social media that had a picture of someone standing in front of one of our churches it was a sunday and as soon as she saw that on her phone she's like i feel like i want to throw up again and so i don't know call me crazy but i i felt like there was a i think yeah the cause effect relationship there yeah definitely i think and i you know googling all these symptoms of stress and different things that i think i was just stressed out about all of it so and maybe going more public i don't know i mean that's a pretty severe reaction to literally throw up because of the seeing seeing how much tithing you paid for example that's pretty intense right and i don't know it's that it's that severe it's that emotional we're not being dramatic here no this is what it's like to be an orthodox mormon find out the church isn't true and then to realize you've dedicated your entire life to something that wasn't what uh not only was it not what it claimed to be but you were knowingly and intentionally misled by the leaders right enough to give my i mean i was in it enough to give my life for it and so yeah when you find out that it's not true that things you've been misled and you know some of your things on um bh roberts where they knew they knew a long time ago they know what they're doing it makes it obviously makes me ill physically ill and i feel that need to speak up and that's why i posted it tried to only post truth stuff because people are happy in the gospel then that's great for them but again they need to know that stuff so they can make that informed decision because and you've had a lot of people actually reach out to you a lot i've had a lot of people reach out to me and thank me for my voice in being because i'm kind of feisty and if the church if they're going to say they don't as soon as i heard them say we they don't want us to go quietly um because you know that that's they just want you to go quietly so you don't stir the pot i'm gonna stir the pot a little and so i tried to be nice about it and put out you know just the facts church sourced so that people knew you know because they're afraid to read stuff that's not and so that they would be informed and i had people reach out to me with um yeah issues of their son was gay someone that was separated and going back to their feeling pulled back in to talk to the bishop which was toxic um for them i just so many different things and people that want to get out of the church but they can't you know they have to stay closeted there's people if i when i saw that because i had guilt like okay i've put it out there i've kind of made a stink about that if i can save one person's relationship one person's life keep a family intact whatever i can do to help those people i'm gonna do it so if that comes to you know the bishop and stake president wanting to just come and see me after a month of posting um that's what happened they call the sunday i don't know if you want me to get into that well well and it's interesting because you know the bishop i was in the bishopric i was i was serving there and of course i said i didn't wanna i didn't want anyone to make us into a project um so maybe he felt like he needed to be a little hands-off i don't know but you know uh i knew him we we served together for about two years and and um we weren't good friends but we we were friends and um for five months there was no contact from the bishop he actually called once in the summer to release my daughter he called adam and said i need to get a hold of mara hmm whatever to get a hold of our daughter to release her from because they're reorganizing something in the in the young women's and um he didn't ask adam how he was doing it he just not even a casual how are you doing he just said i need to get a hold of her to release her so no one reached out to us but apparently i made somebody mad or someone went to the bishop well it was when you started posting all of a sudden when you started posting so publicly october the beginning of october just for a month all of a sudden they called on a sunday afternoon and needed to come together i was posting stuff before before that but it was a little cryptic and not exactly about the church but it was about things to do with that that you know authentic and different things so yeah and um they called us and came over and act i don't know i don't want to say i'm sure they cared and i'm sure they wanted to really know how what led us out of the church is what they asked us and um how we felt they were cordial and it was cordial but it at the end and maybe i'm wrong and i don't think so but at the end when they finally said i've heard you've been posting and i'd like you basically to not keep posting well they said that we they'd have a problem they would have a problem and i said well i'm only posting things that i think are truths or facts and he said okay i have a problem with that but i don't think the stake president knew what i was posting and only the bishop did and again i could i could see when he was seeing my posts and he he stopped for a while but i know there was other people so i don't know if someone went to them and said these are offensive or she's out of hand or if he just thought i was out of hand or that i'm going to bring people out of the church and i don't know i just i didn't get angry about it until the next day that they weren't concerned about us until they thought that we were going to take people out of the church or use their word recruit we were recruiting people they thought we were recruiting people and i told them that i'm helping people and then i'm a safe space for people and i didn't think about the time but they might have thought that was a competition of being a safe space where they could go talk to the bishop yeah i thought it dawned on me really quickly because she said to the to the bishop and say president that a lot of people had reached out to even people in our ward who who don't want to be known they they don't believe at all but they they don't feel like they can say anything because of their family situation or whatnot and and that these people had reached out to her um just as someone to talk to and i'm thinking oh this is what a bishop does a bishop is the spiritual counselor the spiritual counselor for the entire ward and they may see that as um they might not have seen that but at that moment in time i'm thinking oh this this is in direct competition with what the bishop does and they might i don't know we might be getting a letter in a week or two saying this is not okay just i told them there was no safe space there is for us there was no safe space in the church to talk about these things because you're either in or you're out and if you go talk to them they're going to try to convince you to stay in or do whatever they're not going to give you the real facts so you've got to dismiss your concerns you've got to do it on your own and find those other people that can can help you um navigate that you know and like that's what mormon stories podcast does and that's why even though they just came and talked to us on monday and i'm like here we are all of a sudden on mormon stories three days later um which they're probably not gonna like but um i told them i wasn't gonna stop posting and i'm not gonna stop being a safe space for people that need that safe space and yeah well and i feel like um very much so that it is so hard to come out it's so shameful in the church to say i'm questioning because it's just um you know the church brings this spirit this picture that if you're questioning you're weak um you just need to have more faith you just need to try harder um for some reason you're the one that's broken um if if you're questioning and if or if the church doesn't work for you then i mean it's god's one plan so if it's not working for you then there's something wrong with you not with the plan so i just felt like we needed to go public i was a little more adamant that we go public because i wanted to at least kind of pave the way for other people and to normalize it to be able to say it's okay it doesn't matter if you've been in 40 years and devoted your life to it it's okay to admit that maybe it's not working for you and it's okay to say i want to take a step back metta harrison i love her writings and she talked about doing the same thing where she just thought the church was toxic thought it wasn't working for her and she said i'm going to do a test she has an article um somewhere on this where she talks about you know she just took a break and at the end of the break she's like wow my mental health improved a lot of things in my life improved i'm going to make this change permanent because it's it's improved so my point with posting was again just to kind of normalize it and let people see that um average everyday people do leave and it's not because um we wanted to go have an affair even though people have told us that they've said well you literally have i've had someone say what stops you from now having an affair i've had i just made a list the other day because i got so bad again that people said um what's stopping you from being a drug addict or alcoholic what's stopping you yeah from having an affair now what uh the biggest one i was surprised about is just please tell me you still believe in god right you still believe in god like i got that a lot and i'm like i never said i don't believe in god i never i just don't believe the church is true so i was it was kind of like again i made a post that i said no one asked me why because and i called out people saying basically because they're gonna have to confront themselves and confront their their whole life you know what their whole life is based on but they no one would ask why but they would just wanted to confirm for themselves that you know everything was okay yeah people don't want to know why you left um they're just um assuming that because you've left now your life is going to unravel and you're going to end up like i said um in the gutter uh addicted to drugs and having affairs um and that's just we definitely want to destroy that false narrative it is completely a false narrative and it's a narrative that the church purposely pushes to create that fear and emotional control that doesn't let people question or to go there in their own minds and to into to use their own thinking abilities to decide does this even make sense and is this all logical um because we got other people too that actually texted before we came out and said i all um you know sent messages and saying i hope i didn't ever offend you oh yeah immediately people started texting saying uh did i offend you we didn't even say we're out but yeah i was super shocked that people actually i've never thought that with people that have left so well okay so i'm gonna admit as a bishop and as a leader um in all my callings as a missionary i was always taught the same thing that people leave either because they were offended or because they couldn't hack it so i hate that i used to think that about people and and i uh i apologize for that but the that um but i i don't blame people for thinking that because that's the standard narrative in the church is that there's no legitimate reason to step away from the church so the only reason is because you wanted to sin or um or what was the other reason i gave it well that was actually the other day that we were lazy someone had said that you were lazy and couldn't hack it basically like not in so many words but i had a good friend that said um and they thought what's funny is in the same message on the one hand they said no judgment we accept you as you are and on the other hand in another part of the message they said um it's sad that you're you're trying to step away from the accountability and your covenants yeah you just don't want to be accountable and and follow up and live up to your covenants that you made so but no judgment yeah yeah it's tricky it's so tricky it's so messy well so you guys may face a disciplinary counsel then because coming out mormon stories is kind of like i mean from my perspective it's an act of honesty and sincerity it's it's an act of charity of kindness of service it's sharing with others sharing your story being authentic being open helping others but from the standpoint of the church it's probably viewed as a thumb in the eye as uh as an excommunicable offense yeah um so are you guys are you guys prepared for that are you ready for it will you attend have you thought about that i just want to say really quick when they said about the posting um that we said we weren't going to and they said we kind of asked how it works because he said well we're going to have to decide he said he had to talk to the area 70. so i don't know if that means they were going to proceed or kind of wait and see what happens but i just want to make it clear that we were not planning on coming on mormon stories the same week they said that to kind of you know right this just kind of fell into place at the last minute yeah that i didn't do that on purpose i mean that is kind of in my style but it did not happen on purpose um and well i do want to say again really quickly they asked us very poignant questions that did go along with the apostasy questions like how we believed in god if we believed another religion and i didn't see any of that until um they after they left and i looked at the apostasy questions um you know in the church and the church the definition of apostles and that they actually were asking us those questions of apostasy to see where we stood and i did not realize it until after and again i think it was deceptive on their part that they came in acting like they were caring and then said okay well we're really here because you're posting um so they did ask us where we stood on did they not about if we wanted our oh yeah they asked what we what we wanted to do with our membership in the church and um i was honest actually with them and said that um for me it's taken this long it's taking 15 months and i was like out months ago but it's taken this long for me to be mentally okay and emotionally okay with the idea of letting my church records go and i mentioned to them that you know the thought had crossed my mind to just do it myself that would save them and me a lot of hassle um and time and and uh maybe hurt feelings to just do it but at the same time i don't know i i know i like there's been other people on your podcast john that have said that you know that's it's not my responsibility um there should be space within the church for all of us very few churches out there take such drastic measures so most churches you can have a wide variety of thought and not face the possibility of being excommunicated from your community i mean it is my community i have it's my heritage it's everything and so you know maybe by not removing my records it just makes a statement that it's the church that is making the decision that i'm no longer welcome in this community despite all my hours of service despite all the contribution all the ways we've contributed despite my own heritage pioneer heritage in the church that it's it's their decision i'm not the one um removing my name but it's them so i don't know if that was clear or not but yeah i have thought about it i don't know i'm not prepared i still have family um that i you know there's a whole issue of all that and i don't i haven't even talked to him in depth about that but um about remembering your name yeah remove my name thanks but i mean i think about it sometimes when i get bugged enough and how mad i sometimes get about things that i don't want any part to do with it but at the same time um if they're gonna excommunicate me or just i mean i sometimes i'm like yeah they're not gonna do that to me you know maybe distillership because i'm a girl and i'm posting these simple things but maybe they think i'm more of a threat than i am then i am ready to let that be a show of how ridiculous that is that they're gonna i posted a few truths um maybe it's more threatening to them than they i thought and if they're willing to go that far then that's on them so i'll take whatever they and i let them know this is interesting and maybe a little bit of a shameless plug here for my website but i let them know while they were there that i had just like about a week ago uh set up a website um it's super basic uh it's mormonknow.com k-n-o-w and um i because i i feel just as and i let them know this i let the state president and the bishop know that i feel almost as passionate about letting people know and making sure that people have informed consent as i did when i was a missionary so if you want to call that recruiting if you want to say i'm an apostate uh whatever fine but i know for me that first six months after my shelf broke i really kind of stumbled around for a long time um i know on your show you frequently asked uh folks um how long it took them did they did they know about mormon stories before they had their faith crisis did they know who you were i had no idea who you were never heard of it it took me months and months yeah closer to four months before i even stumbled upon mormon stories and and i i just uh and a lot of people actually um that i've seen online that posted and said i wish there was just a one-stop shop where i could go and find quick links to all of the important stuff that helps explain this because i'm struggling i can feel that something's not right i i can feel that that there's misinformation here coming from the church but i can't combat it myself you know these are people who are in a faith crisis themselves and they're reaching out online for help and they're saying you know my my husband or my wife is just absolutely um uh what's the word i'm looking for um you know like dominating me with with uh conference talks and church doctrine and quotes and all this and and they're searching for a convenient place to go and find uh quick information at their fingertips so i just put together a really simple website and i'm just trying to make together put together a list of you know the best uh youtube videos and books and documentaries and um just another source so people just hope they can find yeah you know so so anyway and not to be in competition with with uh with the mormon stories website because your website is outstanding john uh but just to try and help us spread that awareness in any way that i can and uh and i let the state presidency uh i mean the state president and the bishop know that just as they were leaving i figured that eventually they're gonna figure it out and that i might as well just be upfront and honest with them too and and uh and again that's one of the gifts that this all has given me is an ability to just own my truth and say it unapologetically and um and hopefully we've done that here today so yeah you sure have um this has been such a lovely and powerful and thoughtful interview in the same you know in the legacy of lee and cody young of julie and jerry johnson doug and julie becketts of uh you know so many the ones that you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast so many couples and families have been excommunicated just for speaking openly about their experiences and and i'm just going to say that i i want to try and always speak responsibly and kindly but this tendency the church has to silence to keep keep the information from the members and to silencing coerce members when they try and speak openly it's what allows mormon stories to exist 15 years for it to be covered in the new york times you know you know global coverage of mormon stories on mormons jehovah's witnesses jews know about it but most active believing mormons have no idea that it even exists the ces letter can like transform mormonism and nobody knows that the gospel topics essays can be put out by the church and no one knows that they're even out there this lock on information that the church has is so damaging to this idea of informed consent to letting people make informed know what they're a part of and make informed decisions and it's outrageous and that's why uh we're gonna we're gonna spotlight the church every time they try and silence of course people from speaking their truth and that's what makes your interview today so courageous in addition to just the lovely thoughtful kind people that you are so on behalf of my listeners i just want to and viewers i want to thank you guys for your willingness to tell your truth and i know that just like um you know so many of these faith crisis stories have impacted you i know that your story is gonna bless lives even save lives even save marriages because you were willing to tell the truth well thanks for having us because that's all we want to do like yeah it's just again yeah we just want to save those lives and get the truth out there and help those people no matter if it again makes me ill or gets me in trouble or whatever um i think it's important again it it only took you know i mean multiple people reach out to me and um it only took that one person to know that you're helping so whatever it takes i'm willing to help those people so reach out to love it yeah i love it well it's time to roll any final things you guys want to say before we before we close i think i'm about all talked out if i think of it i'll i'll send you a message john if i think of anything else i just want to say on my the stories we told of our kids um it's their their stories are their stories and um i mostly shared that what they said i could share um so again i don't share too much but um they've been awesome and i just want to i'm grateful for them going on that journey with us and i think that um families that can be open and honest and share that with their kids that it'll just make your family become closer than it's ever been and that's the most important thing and thing we want and and i guess the one thing i do another thing is um it'll be okay it's gonna be okay your you and your spouse are hopefully gonna be okay and if you work at it and open your eyes and it's gonna take some work and it's gonna be hard but your family's gonna be okay that's what it's searching for at the beginning knowing that we're gonna come out on the other end okay um because it's scary and you don't know where that other end leads but um it's good and you're going to be fine and reach out to people that you know are out reach out to us reach out and get help and get that comfort and make friends that are out that can support you i love it well our listeners and viewers are all sharing their love ken says thank you adam and marlena susan says thank you all this is so inspiring roger says thanks john um josh john says thank you for doing this video i appreciate you all billy says i commend your courage joey says thanks for sharing mormon stories was my savior helped me realize i wasn't crazy um mary jane says thank you for sharing your story so thanks to all your listeners for your kind words and comments and adam and marlena hughes thank you so much for sharing your story today on mormon stories it's it's meant the world you're welcome thank you thank you all right you guys are awesome and uh stay will you come back if if they try and excommunicate you will you uh you uh record as much of that as you can either written or whatever however you record it and come back and let us know how that goes okay because we're gonna shine a big fat spotlight on that of course all right and love to your kids and your family thank you john and to yours thank you all right listeners thanks for joining us on mormon stories we love you thanks to everyone who donates that makes this possible if you don't donate less than one out of a thousand of our listeners and viewers donate if you want to see this continue we need you to donate so go to mormonstories.org click on the donate button 10 bucks a month 25 bucks a month whatever you can afford 100 bucks a month tax deductible all of it goes to helping this cause and we'll keep going as long as you support it so if you value it please uh please support it and thanks to everyone who already does please spread the word like us uh give us positive reviews on all the um social medias share this with everyone you can and email us at mormonstoriesgmail.com with any feedback you have a comment uh everywhere you want to share this everywhere and let's just keep this ball rolling so more and more people can learn the truth about the church so that people can make informed decisions thanks everybody love you take care we'll see you all again soon

Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast

Views: 76,875

Keywords: lds, mormon, bishops, latter-day saints, church of jesus christ of latter-day saints, tucson, arizona

Id: ekrKDLJ2CpY

Length: 284min 32sec (17072 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020