Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change): As Evangelicalism grows increasingly unhinged, where is Mormonism going?

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Episode Summary 

Over the years on this program, I’ve often said that the political differences dividing Americans are really just artifacts of much deeper epistemic divides. In the episode before this one, we explored how those differences manifest psychologically—but psychology alone cannot explain why so many people feel so alienated that they willingly support political leaders like Donald Trump whom they acknowledge to be deceptive and chaotic.

The truth is that most of Donald Trump’s supporters back him because they feel like their religious viewpoints are being shunted aside by scientific and educational progress that they cannot refute or even understand.

The tension between recalcitrant belief and modernity has always been the core conflict motive of Christian fundamentalism, but how this works specifically in terms of doctrines varies widely across epistemic communities. That’s why in this episode, we’re going to focus on just one faith tradition, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormons.

Our guide to Mormon epistemology is going to be Luna Corbden, the author of a book called “Recovering Agency: Lifting the Veil of Mormon Mind Control,” which discussed various cultural and linguistic methods that the church used on its members to keep them coming back for more.

In a lot of ways, not much has changed within LDS Mormonism since Corbden published in 2014, but some things have—and they’re revealing some deeper divisions between the institutions of the Latter-Day Saint Movement and its longtime rival of Evangelical Protestantism.

The transcript of this audio-only conversation is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full page.

Theory of Change and Flux are entirely community-supported. We need your help to keep going. Please subscribe on Substack or Patreon and get unlimited access.

Related Content

—The long and tangled history of Mormonism and Evangelical Protestantism

—Religious authoritarians have always been at war with democracy, regardless of whether anyone else realized it

—The Christian right was a theological rebellion against modernity before it became a political movement

—How Mormons, evangelicals, Native Americans, and tourists mix in the state of Idaho

—Salt Lake Tribune cartoonist Pat Bagley on politics, Utah, and being an ‘emeritus Mormon’

—Luna Corbden on the Mormon Stories Podcast

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

04:06 — Challenges of free will and information control

14:08 — Mormonism created new doctrinal controversies while solving for classical Christian dilemmas

20:12 — Centralization and doctrinal evolution in Mormonism

26:47 — Intellectual Mormonism’s conflicted epistemology

35:42 — Sweeping embarrassing doctrines under the rug doesn’t make them disappear

40:01 — Scientific claims and the Book of Mormon

44:40 — Spiritual polygamy remains an actual practice in today’s Mormonism

53:49 — Former Mormons and active progressive Mormons are reconciling

58:42 — Reclaiming self-worth and autonomy

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So we're going to have a discussion here about Mormonism and Epistemology and all that. But before we get into it, I did want to talk a bit about your book specifically and what you meant by agency, because for people who are not familiar with Mormonism, the term of agency is a core doctrine and something that is very important.

So what does Mormonism mean by the concept of agency?

LUNA CORBDEN: Yeah, It is a core doctrine to, or what they call the plan of salvation or in recent, the, recent thing they call it is the plan of happiness. When I was still in it was the plan of salvation. And the idea is that in the war of heaven, Jesus and Satan both stood up and had a different plans for the, future progress of their brothers and sisters, spiritual humanity at that point.

And Jesus wanted to send everybody down. We can make our own choices, and if we made the wrong choices, we'd have to be punished for them for some reason. And then Satan was like, we're Lucifer. we'll actually just force everyone to make the right choices and then that way we can save everyone and no one has to be punished.

And there was a huge war in heaven over that. And Lucifer's obviously the bad guy, and he got cast out and we ended up in this. That's the. How Mormonism solves the problem of evil, which is not something they talk about in Mormonism, but you get out of it and you're like, oh, that's how they're solving the problem of evil is basically free will. It's basically free.

Will we have the ability to choose good versus evil? We need evil in order to be able to choose good, because if our only choice was good, then it's not really a choice, and that's really central. So the idea is we are free to choose, but also we have to live with whatever consequences we end up with [00:04:00] except through the saving power of Jesus Christ, who can at least save us from the eternal consequences of that.

Challenges of free will and information control

CORBDEN: and it's not entirely true, as I learned when I got out, the concept of free will is a very complicated one. One that has been debated by philosophers for thousands of years. There's no scientists study fruit flies, the see if fruit flies have free will.

There's no consensus on it because it is a complicated question. It's not simple. And really the best way to get them to maximize the free will in your own life, regardless of what's going on around you, is through self-awareness and really understanding what your choices really are and what they aren't.

SHEFFIELD: The other thing that's interesting about the concept of free agency within Mormonism is that as the growth of the LDS Church has slowed down quite a bit in recent years, they have used it as a way of explaining why the church continues to remain small, despite the fact that they believed for most of their history, that it was going to be the stone cut out of the mountain that fills the whole Earth as a phrase that they repurposed from the book of Daniel to describe Mormonism.

So they have to say that this is. A belief system that most people are not going to choose the full truth. And that's unfortunate, but they have free agency.

CORBDEN: Yeah. And I've been out for over 20 years, so when I left, they were still able to say, oh yeah, no, we're the stone, we're filling the earth because they were still growing.

At the point that I left, I think they were at 10 or 11 million. People members, when I left, according to their reporting on their records, it wasn't really until the rise of the internet, the popularity of the internet, that more of this information that used to only be relegated to what they called anti-Mormon literature.

[00:06:00] They were published books or videos and you had to go out and find them. And so it was that milieu control. That's one of the concepts I talk about in my book, restricting people's access to dis-confirming information. It was a lot easier to retain milieu control, whereas in the last two decades someone can go out and they can just search.

SHEFFIELD: Hey, I'm sorry to interrupt your point here real quick, but what do you mean by milieu control? what is, what do you mean by that? What does that mean?

CORBDEN: Yeah, So milieu control, was identified by cult researchers as being just the idea that in order to keep people from discovering.

Negative aspects of your high demand group is you have to control their information intake. And there's various ways that different groups do that. Some have everyone move onto a compound, so there's no unapproved information coming in or out. Like you just cannot access it. Since Mormonism doesn't do that, at least LDS Mormonism, they have to use more softer techniques.

And so they'll be like, don't read that information 'cause it's anti-Mormon. Don't watch those movies because they're R rated. Don't listen to anyone who's left because they have a chip on their shoulder. Or they're misled by saying, and so it's basically. Convincing its members to be afraid of or to not want to access information.

But the trouble is with the internet is you go on there and maybe because Mormonism has a lay clergy, and so you might be researching a Sacrament meeting talk or a Belief Society lesson, and you're like, oh, I'm going to go look up some cool little vignettes about Joseph Smith's. Childhood and you, so you put in there Joseph Smith's childhood or whatever, and suddenly you're getting these websites from, often from ex Mormons or even just Wikipedia, and they're showing you information that the church was previously when I was coming up in Mormonism was restricted from me.

[00:08:00] It's showing them just right there. Oh, the story about the Joseph Smith refusing to have alcohol when he was a boy was, that doesn't make any sense for lots of reasons or other aspects of church finances or all of the information basically that's freely available out there that a member of the church can just accidentally stumble on.

That has caused quite a few people to not join the church, to who otherwise would've, or to leave the church or to be what they call female physically in mentally out. And so that has reduced the church's growth rate considerably. And in fact that kind. They hide their numbers a little bit, but many people say that if they were being realistic about their numbers, that the membership is actually decreasing or would be, if not for members having children.

SHEFFIELD: and on that point, the LDS church is quite different from a lot of other congregations in that most churches remove you as a member if you stop showing up. Whereas in the Mormon church, they keep you on the rolls, even if they haven't seen you in decades until you're either 110 or 120 or something like that.

I always forget the specific decade, that they cut you off. but yeah, they'll keep you there even if they haven't seen you in 50 years, they say you're still a member. Yes. but yeah, and so as a result, I think it's, hard to use public opinion surveys to gauge Mormon affiliation because it's just such a small group inherently and always has been.

And so when you're dealing with a group that is smaller than the margin of error in public opinion surveys, it really makes it hard to know how big it actually is, right? Yeah. Yep. So just going back to the concept of free agency a bit here. So a lot of people have compared Mormonism to a cult. and I think one could also compare [00:10:00] a lot of other religious movements to cults as well.

but that's a side point because really what you're doing with the book here is you're trying to show people this is what sound thinking actually looks like.

CORBDEN: Yeah. Yeah. yeah, and that is my ko eye audience number one XX Mormons. Number two are Mormons. That might. In, but they're progressive or questioning, or like I said, chemo and they're just interested in what's, how they work.

And then probably my third layer outer layer of audience are people from other high demand groups who can relate to the content because I do something that I hadn't seen in any literature prior to me, and that is that I, organized all of those manipulation techniques into one place as like a list or I identified 31 of them and put them in order.

And then under each one I have examples, whereas. Other literature I'd read lift and had his eight and Ha Hassan had his bite model and everybody had their own little model and I just gleaned all of it, pulled it all out and put it all in one place. So I've had people who were, had a military wife who really related to it for military wife culture that she was in.

So evangelicals, I had a lot of people from other high demand groups that really related to it. So those are my audiences and yeah, that's what the cult exit literature largely was saying. The best way to free yourself from that organization that you grew up in, or that you had joined for a few years is to really understand what focus a c look.

What those techniques were, because those are still living in you. Even if you've rejected God or you've rejected that religion or that non-religious high demand groups. Those, levers, those less defined and they're not doctrines at that point. They're worldviews and beliefs about yourself and about the world that are [00:12:00] a little bit more insidious, a little deeper.

And so that's what this does is goes through and says, okay, here's love Loving. It's an insincere. they love you and they pull you in, but it's not sincere. They just want you as a member, and as soon as they know that they have you, they drop you. they you're in and they're not going to send you cookies every week anymore, right?

Or, here's sacred science. It's saying that organization has the truth and is one with God. Here's a doctrine over self that your own desires are less than what the religion or organization says is most important. And so you have to subdue your own instincts and your own promptings.

And so then that, that way each reader can go through and say. Okay, that I remember I latched on Luna saying some scriptures here that do that, but I remember a talk that was given by so and so back when, and that really is what stuck in my head. And I still have that belief. And so they can revisit and then maybe decide.

And then that's where the free agency comes in. Maybe there's a lot of Mormon doctrines and Mormon core beliefs that Mormonism instilled in me that I still follow today because I've consciously, and then it becomes a choice, right? Because I've consciously pulled it out and gone, that's actually a pretty good idea and I'm going to keep that internalized.

Or I can look at other stuff and go, oh, actually that's not serving me. It's not serving other people. And so I'm.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and you make a good point there, because a lot of these high demand religions, people obviously think of them as extremely theological, which of course they are. But really what they are is totalizing philosophies. That's fully what they are. They're full systems that tell you what to think about everything and also how to think.

So it's a philosophy with a mystical delivery mechanism, if you will. That's what [00:14:00] we're talking about here. And so Mormonism is not that unique, as you said, compared to these other groups like evangelical Christianity?

CORBDEN: Exactly.

Mormonism created new doctrinal controversies while solving for classical Christian dilemmas

SHEFFIELD: The other way that Mormonism has a lot of similarities with other fundamentalist religions is that while Christianity itself had always had a very long tradition, in fact in the Roman Catholic Church of saying that the Bible was not to be interpreted literally in all places, and you didn't have to consider things that you thought were unreasonable or were unscientific, you didn't have to believe them.

But a lot of Christians, especially Protestant Christians, they did see the Bible as a literal document, and Mormons did that as well. But they also have had some additional controversies on top of that. So while the. Fundamentalist Protestants have had to deal with the lack of evidence of the ancient Hebrews being in Egypt, or the fact that there is a lot of evidence that the God of the Bible is just one of several Canaanite deities that existed at the same time that he had a wife and things like that.

Ban. Mormonism inherits all of those controversies and also has its own as well, because they make some extra historical claims, not just about the alleged ancestors of Native Americans, but also about the Book of Abraham, which is an additional scripture that Mormons have, that a lot of non-Mormons might not have heard of.

Can you tell us a bit about that for people who aren't familiar with that controversy?

CORBDEN: Yeah, so the Book of Abraham is LDS scripture. It's part of what's called the Pearl of Great Price, a couple of small, smallish books that came from different places. And specifically the book of Abraham was said to have been back in the 18 hundreds, there were these touring shows, and one of them would have these Egyptology artifacts, and one of them was a [00:16:00] sarcophagus with a mummy in it, and it had some books in it.

And Joseph Smith comes across it and he's I want to buy, I don't know if it was Joseph Smith, by the way, I'm not a Hi Mormon history buff. There's people who get really deep. So I'm glossing over, and I might get a couple of the little details wrong, but whether it was Joseph Smith or one of his missionaries or apostles sees that and is oh, I'm going to buy that.

So they buy, up the, these, papers, these old papyri, and Joseph Smith gets ahold of it and he has his y and thumb, and he's a prophet. And he says, ah, that was written by Abraham's own hand, the prophet Abraham from the Old Testament. And so he, he translates this, these papyri, and it's the book of Abraham.

And Abraham tells us. His time in Egypt and there were some hieroglyphics or some, pictures in, there. And he says, oh, this is Abraham being sacrificed by the priest of Egypt. This is before the Rosetta Stone, so he could just make up whatever he wanted about the hieroglyphics. And that is what he did.

and there's some core doctrinal things in the Book of Abraham. it's, it's not one of the most quoted scriptures within Mormonism, but it certainly is very pivotal. If, for instance, if the Book of Abraham were to say, be proven by Egyptologists who understand hieroglyphics now to be just another copy of the Book of the Dead, which were often included with mummies, which is what happened, that, that would yank the rug out from underneath Joseph Smith's prophetical ability and, his credibility as a prophet.

and that is exactly what happened. Other Rosetta Stone was discovered. and then conveniently, the actual original retire were missing for, they were thought to have been destroyed for the rest of, after the Rosetta Stone was discovered. But we still had those, I'm not remembering the word right, but the, those, the art [00:18:00] basically.

And that's where Egyptologists were like, first of all, these look doctored, and second of all, that's not Abraham and that's not a priest. That this is, these are actually gods and this is the thing that it's depicting. And again, I'm not an Egyptologist, so I'm glossing over the finer points, but they were like, that is not what those images are depicting.

And they've been probably the doctor. And then, I don't remember when it was, but it's been in my lifetime, three decades ago, two decades ago, they actually discovered the original prop retire in a museum. I want to say Chicago, I don't know. They, were discovered in, some archives and they were like, ah.

And they were able to prove that it was actually the ones that Joseph Smith had translated to from, and we're like, yeah, this is just. The Book of the Dead, they put copies of these in every sarcophagus. It's just describing how to prepare very taxes is the word. And so yeah, that's been a big linchpin for a lot of people who love the church

SHEFFIELD: who

CORBDEN: go are like, yeah, this pretty much proves that Joseph Smith is.

SHEFFIELD: And then chronologically speaking, Mormonism and Evangelicalism also have a lot in common because they got started around the same exact time period.

CORBDEN: Yep. The, second great awakening, Joseph Smith came a little bit after that, the sort of revival period, but he was definitely part of those at the time.

what the time would've been new religious movements. We had that in the sixties as well, where there's just a lot of people who were spiritually curious and wanting to get back, and a lot of Americans don't realize that there had actually been a period where atheism and deism and just secularism and not being very interested in religion had happened right before that awakening.

And so that was a backlash. and so we're now in that we're the nuns, right? The, not religiously affiliated or on the rise again. And so we might expect to see like, we're seeing with Christian [00:20:00] nationalism, a sort of a backlash to that. And that's where Joseph Smith was as well, is, was people were like, wait, maybe we should get back to our religious roots.

Centralization and doctrinal evolution in Mormonism

SHEFFIELD: One of the core organizational differences between Mormonism and Evangelicalism is that they're very different in how they're run. So Evangelicalism is extremely decentralized. If you don't like a pastor, you can go and start your own church anytime you want. As long as you can get someone to pay you to preach, then you're good.

You can set it up. Whereas in Mormonism, that's not allowed. And in fact, they will kick you out of the church if you do something like that. And so the interesting thing about that centralization is that when the LDS leaders moved the congregation to Utah after they were being threatened with extermination by the Missourians, and after they had gotten involved in various political controversies in the state of Missouri, the doctrines of Mormonism became much, much more divergent from conventional Christianity.

So in some ways this isolation and control by the top leaders made them have doctrines that are, that are very unconventional, we'll say, compared to other Christian denominations. But as time went on, the centralization has probably made the LDS church less extreme compared to evangelicals because evangelicalism is so decentralized and so emotional that it incentivizes this kind of anti-intellectual extremism that is so common now among white evangelicals.

But before we go there, let's just talk about some of these other doctrines that came along once the LDS Mormons began centralizing power after they moved to Utah. And I think a lot of people do know about plural marriage and its association with [00:22:00] Utah Mormon, early Utah, Mormonism. But there were a lot of other doctrines including one saying that.

Adam, the first human was actually God himself.

CORBDEN: Yeah. And a lot of those doctrines. So yeah, the Adam God theory led atonement, some of the Brigham Young sort of weird stuff, the Quakers on the moon, a lot of that was disavowed in the 20th century and completely suppressed to the point that.

Coming up with a fairly nerdy family who really got into that sort of thing. Did. We owned a full copy, a print copy of the Journal of Discourses, which took like a whole shelf. My family didn't know about Blood Atonement. My family didn't know about the Adam God doctrine. So those super weird ones were just oh, we don't teach that.

That's Brigham Young was speaking as a man. It led as a prophet.

SHEFFIELD: they never said it was wrong though. They just said, we don't teach that.

CORBDEN: Exactly. Yeah. Yes. The plausible deniability, which is one of the indirective directives is what I call it in recovering agency. You you hint at something, or maybe someone said it, but you just dis, we, that's not really what we meant, or whatever.

But then you can still create that effect in believers because some of them still believe it and others. Don't know about it. And so it still keeps those hardcore believers who want that, those more violent or wacky beliefs, they, that keeps them strong. So a lot of Mormon doctrines though, in the way that it differs from evangelicalism and many of those originate with Joseph Smith, I think, answer a lot of problems, contradictions within Christianity, within Protestant Christianity and Catholic Christianity that I kind of respect Mormonism for doing that.

For saying, okay, yeah, it would actually make more sense if it were this way. For instance, God not being a Trinity, God [00:24:00] being, it's more of a materialistic religion. It's a more grounded in rationality, if you will, which doesn't survive. The 21st century rationality because we have more scientific evidence about the world, but certainly in the 19th century with the evidence that they had at the time, and even a large parts of the 20th century, those made more sense.

A, a more materialistic, it's a more enlightenment based religion. A free agency being a strong point, God having a body, God being actually three distinct individuals. Some of the Godhead, the idea that the God, the glory of God is intelligence. Therefore, science is a good thing. Science is the study of God's creation.

a lot of those beliefs. Really, I think, appealed to an enlightenment mind and solved issues like the problem evil and other contradictions. The atheists talk a lot about disproving God through these rational means. Mormonism can be like, up to a point, can be like, no, actually we're, good on that.

I think that, again, as science has developed more and more, it's gotten harder to stand on that ledge, that Mormonism definitely at least gave it a good effort. And I, if admire is the right word, and I'm, a science fiction buff, and I, do think that in terms of Mormonism World building off of, if you consider it say fan fiction, Christian fan fiction, I think that they're rec cons, if you will, to use all those terms.

They're, they've gone back and fixed a lot of the problems with, the Christian world building as it stood when Joseph Smith. Appeared on the scene. I don't know if I got away from your original question too much there, but that's, my stance on it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think that's a very good point to make because when you look at the historical record and the doctrinal record, it seems very clear that Joseph Smith was trying to solve for these [00:26:00] problems of classical Christianity, which you're describing there.

And among those controversies is the idea of do unbaptized infants deserve to go to hell? And Mormonism says, no, they don't. But other ones say, yes, they do. Yep. and so yeah, he was. And so Smith was basically trying to solve some problems, but of course in that process he created some other ones as well.

But that's why I do in the end, think that it's unfair for people who come from other Christian traditions to say, oh, look at Mormonism and all its wacky doctrines. And my reaction is, have you looked at your own doctrines and asked somebody outside of your own tradition whether they think they make sense or not?

You're just used to these doctrines. That's really what it comes down to.

CORBDEN: Exactly.

Intellectual Mormonism's conflicted epistemology

SHEFFIELD: But at the same time, circling back to the question of centralization and doctrinal resilience, if you will, you alluded to the idea that the glory of God is intelligence. And that actually is the literal motto of Brigham Young University.

The church owned university, and that's quite a big contrast compared to evangelical Christianity, where intelligence is often seen as something that is suspect, something that you should be scared of, something that you should be suspicious about. The wisdom of the flesh, the learning of man, that we should trust the spirit and who cares about all this book learning stuff that's become much more of a dividing line between Mormonism and Evangelicalism.

And we've seen that with the percentage of Mormons who oppose Donald Trump being higher than the percentage of Evangelicals who do. But we saw that also in the COVID-19 pandemic, where the Orman Church actively was telling its members, you should get the vaccine and vaccines work. Whereas in evangelical communities, if you said things like that and you were a religious leader, you could get fired for saying things like that.

You could lose your job or you could have your members leave because they didn't want you to be [00:28:00] placing your trust in science. So while they may not believe in snake handling or things like that, they did think that God would keep them safe from COVID-19 and that it was no big deal for them.

CORBDEN: Yeah. And it's caused a lot of issues at BYU. The I attended BYU briefly and one semester, and, I, know people who graduated BYU obviously, and the controversies, the excommunications of, professors over time said the wrong thing and BYU is really accurate for any of the fields that do not directly contradict core LDS doctrines From my own attending, there were a lot of professors who would say things that were not directly LDS doctrine, but that's what the science said, so they would say it and they wouldn't get into too much trouble 'cause it wasn't.

Too challenging. But now we have things like the, some of the biology stuff. They're not going to go as hard into evolution, although you will find professors who will say it. So that's a little tricky. The, then there's just like LGBT stuff. That's a really big con controversy right now. It has been for at least a decade, a lot of protestors and activists like activists will stand out in the quad and hold their signs, and then BYU will say, oh, we have free speech zones.

And so we're going to, that was a decade ago, I think, when that was going on. And so there then BYU, then the activists will do something else, and then BYU will one up them. I think it was a year ago, they, the activists cleaned up and they have a, one of those giant why's a le the letter for the university on the, on a hill, a giant white Y and they made it rainbow.

And so it's just been this like. Issues with.

BYU with Provo Police [00:30:00] and how someone can report a sexual assault to the police and they will report it to BYU Honor Code Office. Honor code is basically when you go to BYU, you agree to the honor code, which is extremely strict. In terms of sexual morality and alcohol and curfews and all these kinds of things.

And if you violate the honor code, they can kick you out of BYU and keep your tuition. So it's, severely a, severe control on students. And so there's all these controversies where they'd tell the police that they've been sexually assaulted and then the police would tell BYU, oh, they were drunk when they got sexually assaulted.

And then either because they were assaulted and it was sex or because they were drunk or whatever. There are all kinds of stories. They would get expelled without tuition and their transcripts would be withheld until they went through their repentance process. So yeah, that, dichotomy of the glory of God is intelligence.

if you follow that to certain conclusions. You end up with things that are doctrinally, oppositional to core LDS doctrines, which is enough to warrant your excommunication as in the September 6th in the, A bunch of BYU professors were excommunicated in the nineties, and since then there have been BYU professors who have been fired or excommunicated because of their stances that scientific investigation has led them to, and they've taught it or written about it, even outside of BYU grounds.

Maybe they've published a book about it or had a blog and been communicated. So yeah, it's, really the only way out of that trap is to, have a doctor and that says there are many ways to happen. There's many ways that we can understand. The world and we can understand what God wants us to understand.

And that kind of belief is not high demand, it's not cultish And, I would fully support an LBS church that took on that sort of doctrine that like, yeah, if you want to accept evolution, if you want to accept [00:32:00] being gay and get married, if you want, you're allowed, we're going to let you do that.

That said, they'd probably lose a lot more members. So it's a great dichotomy. Like what are they going to do? So I know what I want 'em to do.

SHEFFIELD: and speaking of, there is another Heritage Mormon denomination that was originally called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that was actually headed by Joseph Smith's first wife, Lucy Smith, and one of their sons.

And they really have evolved away from both fundamentalism and even Mormon doctrine itself. They don't believe in the Book of Mormon, and they also have women priests and things like that. So they have done some really interesting and positive things from a religious standpoint, at least in my opinion.

Yeah.

CORBDEN: Yeah, I think so. And they're still incredibly small. They're not very wealthy. That's the problem is these high demand organizations, they keep people in through all of these. Mind control techniques, and when you loosen up on those, yes, your members are freer, happier health healthly, you're creating a culture that fosters like true and genuine connection and people being able to be vulnerable with one another.

That said, you're probably not going to be able to get their tithes or their hardcore dedication and volunteer hours. Like they're just not going to be into it. And so I think the church, the community of Christ, I can, I think of them as Mormon Unitarians. they're a bit unitarian in the sense that yeah, you can be an atheist and.

Go to church and say, I don't believe in God that here's how I'm relating this doctor into my life and be totally okay. And with that said, that means when you raise up your kids, they might be like, yeah, that's not for me. I want to sleep in on Sundays and I'm going to follow my own new age ideas, or whatever they, and [00:34:00] yeah, it's tricky.

But I had to tell you, I, I went to a, I've only been to a couple of COC actual meetings. This one I was at the COC building in Seattle for a sunstone conference that was there. Sunstone is like a intellectual academic conference about Mormonism. And so I was there at a sun and not very many people were there.

But as, as I was mingling in the hall, I met this woman and shook her hands. And she was a former apostle of the COC and to shake the hand of a woman who. I was considered a, seer and revelator for the COC church was just really quite an experience and I would love to see that for, LDS formats to be able to, for, different kinds of people, whether it's gender or a person of color, or someone who's queer, to see themselves in the leadership of their organizations.

I think that's really what Christ metaphorical for me, the metaphorical Christ bid us to do was to, think about how we would want to be treated and to think about what it would be like to live in a world where it's only white men, straight white American men that you see in leadership positions.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. I think it would be great for a lot of people to see that and to be able to realize that they have a chance to be a part of a tradition that's really important to them and the family that they came from. So I think it would be great if the LDS leadership could realize that there are a lot of people who have a lot of things to add to their conversations and can really bring a lot of great skills.

Exactly.

Sweeping embarrassing doctrines under the rug doesn’t make them disappear

SHEFFIELD: Just circling back to this quote unquote, we don't teach that principle. It's that yes, they. Have discarded from instructional materials, the more embarrassing or offensive doctrines. But they can't wholesale admit that teaching that interracial marriage [00:36:00] was a sin that should be punishable by death.

They don't actually do that. They haven't actually disavowed any of these doctrines. They just don't talk about them anymore, and they don't say, our past leaders were wrong. And probably the reason this hasn't happened is that there are a lot of crazy Mormons who have clung to these doctrines, even though they're not officially taught anymore.

And if the church came forward and said, yeah, those past pro prophets, as they call themselves were wrong, and what they said was a sin or that it was actively wrong what they said it would be like pulling the bottom out from a house of cards, that everything would collapse, that a lot of the crazy people who were Mormons would take their tithing and leave.

That's what would happen. And that's not just conjecture on my part because something like that did actually happen in the community of Christ. When they decided that they didn't believe that the Book of Mormon was real, their already small church became even smaller because a lot of people said, no, we do want to continue to believe in the Book of Mormon.

And these controversies that now are so big and prominent within LDS Mormonism, they really weren't there in the beginning. Because in a lot of ways Mormonism was a religious re-imagining of the science because that is in fact what people in the 19th century did believe about where the Native Americans came from, or at least a lot of them did.

CORBDEN: and I think it's important to say that there was an active colonization and genocide against Native Americans to justify stealing their land.

SHEFFIELD: it was almost an ideal narrative, frankly, for that time period because not only did it accord with many people's viewpoint of what the science said, but it completely intellectually, it intellectually de-legitimized Native American cultures because it said that they were sinful and degraded, and so taking their land and forcibly converting them [00:38:00] to Christianity, it was actually a good thing.

It wasn't just not bad. It was actually positive.

CORBDEN: That wasn't Joseph Smith's idea.

SHEFFIELD: No.

CORBDEN: In the 1820s, I. That was something people thought. A view of the Hebrews, what came out in the 18 hundreds, and it was based before the Book of Mormon, and it basically said that, yeah, the, Native Americans descended from a group of, a group from Jerusalem of Israelites who settled in the Americas, and that's where all of Native Americans came from.

And so it wasn't even Joseph Smith's idea. he took that idea and wrote it as a more of a fictionalized or not fictional, more of a narrative. The Book of Mormon was a narrative telling of that. And another doctrine that was prominent in America at the time was Manifest Destiny, which is this idea that God had preserved the Americas for as a sort of promised land.

For Europeans to settle and that because of that, they were justified and had every right to kill off the wicked Native Americans and destroy their culture, to destroy their population. And that was all used to justify. So when Bergham Young takes off for the American West, with all of those doctrinally encoded in the story of the Book of Mormon, that they had every right to take that land.

From the Shoshone and the Paiutes and other tribes that were in, in those regions that they took over that, that had consequences, right? That had like deep and abiding consequences for the people that they stole the land from. And for those of us who were descended from people who stole that land like that's a toxic effect on every single person that was invol involved in that.

Like even though as a white person, I ended up on the better end of [00:40:00] that.

Scientific claims and the Book of Mormon

SHEFFIELD: Basically they were projecting their modern day technologies onto ancient peoples who simply did not possess them. There's just simply no evidence that there were any kind of ships that could make a transpacific voyage made by people in the Levite area that just did not exist.

But they left Mormons in a bit of a trap because here they had made this scientific claim, this historical claim, and now they have no evidence for it. So they've been gradually. Distancing themselves increasingly from it. and it all started going south in the 1970s because Brigham Young University had spent millions of dollars in Central America trying to dig around in the dirt to find the ruins of the ne fights, which is the main people that are described as the Book of Mormon.

And of course, they didn't find anything because there were no fights. And so since that time, the church has been slowly trying to back away from the much more expansive claims that it used to make about the Book of Mormon. And, but on the other hand, if they went all the way, I think they would lose a lot of members.

What do you think?

CORBDEN: and then there's the DNA evidence. So it, it's very clear. So Book of Warming says that there's the Lamanites and the knee fights and the, they were originally had the same father, that both groups of people split off when the wicked ones were cursed with dark skin because God's.

A racist anyway, and that's, that was their story. then that would mean that, the Native Americans should have some sort of like Middle Eastern, Semitic, DNA and they, don't, their DNA is Asian. And so the, and this is one of those areas in BYU where they have to be careful like they're in their archeology departments because they're, it's, just not true.

And not to mention deeply and horrifically offensive because it is. Misappropriation [00:42:00] in the worst possible way to look at a group of people and say, we know your ethnic history better than you know it. And we're, saying this to justify our own ethnic history and our own doctrinal position, and we're going to use that to wipe out your culture.

So it's pretty awful in, in multiple layers. But yeah, the, DNA evidence, and that happened after I left the church and the, there were two, two men involved in publishing that information. Both, both LDS, one of 'em, Thomas Murphy, I've met him. he's from the Pacific Northwest and he was an anthropology teacher at a little school up north of Seattle, and he published a paper that said.

Yeah, the DNA evidence isn't here for the la the Layman Knight speaking, the native arrogance. And then he was about to be excommunicated and he got media attention and they backed off within, Simon Suton published a book, a whole book about it, and he was excommunicated. And so they, they don't want that information out there.

And they've tried, oh, it's a, the limited geography theory is oh, all of the Book of Mormon actually just happened in one little tiny place. It wasn't, all of the Americas are not even North America. And that is absolutely in contradiction to what I was raised with. A hundred percent.

That is not what I was taught as a child coming up in primaries and, as you pointed out the introduction. So they're trying to walk it back. But really the only factual direction that is actually factual is that the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction. And if you want to find, and it has some deeply problematic aspects to it.

Not just in its claims that it happened in the Americas, but also just in some of its moral positions on like nephi killing Laben when he didn't have to. A lot of things like that. And if they just came out and said, okay, we're going to correct some of these problematic [00:44:00] things. So this is a new version of the Book of War and it's to be taken figuratively.

And there are some good stories in there. Like just we can find all kinds of figurative lessons in the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and like all of these like completely fantastical inventions. It doesn't mean they're not true in the sense that they have moral truths and they have truths about the human condition and they have characters that we can relate to and they can be inspired by.

And so that's what the perform is like the community crisis done. But again, they'll lose a lot of members if they do that. so they can't do that.

Spiritual polygamy remains an actual practice in today’s Mormonism

SHEFFIELD: and that's the unfortunate paradox in all of this is that by sweeping the doctrines under the rug, the LDS leaders are keeping the main body of the members away from these destructive and malicious doctrines.

But on the other hand, because they're not completely disavowing it, it gives these doctrines a kind of cache in a certain sense that breeds extremism among Mormons because these doctrines, which are ludicrous and harmful, they're granted as deep doctrines, ones that are so true and so serious that only the Lord's elect can possibly know of them.

And that's why Mormonism continues to breed these various cult members, one of which was profiled in the, recent miniseries that came out called Under the Banner of Heaven, which was based on a book.

CORBDEN: Yeah, I've read both. Yeah. Yeah. and that's, that is a huge, and usually they tend towards polygamy because if you're going to go fundamentalist Mormon, you cannot avoid that.

It's still canonized scripture. And the Mormon church tries to present it of, oh, this is actually about eternal marriage. But celestial marriage, [00:46:00] that those words, when Joseph Smith wrote them meant polygamy. It didn't mean that you, yeah, it did mean that you got married in the temple, but it also meant that you got married in the temple with multiple wives, not all at once, necessarily.

And the fact that those polygamist ideas are still encoded. I know they've changed some of the temple ceremonies recently because they were still encoded in those, it wasn't like, and thus the Lord is marrying you to multiple women. But that, but the way that, that it was worded, it was. The woman was giving herself to the husband and the husband was just giving himself to God, and it was completely open for that.

And the original meaning of a lot of those words were polygamous meanings. But it's still in it in the sense that if currently in LDS policy, if you are a man and you marry a woman in the temple and then something happens, she dies or you get divorced, the man can go on and marry another woman and he is still spiritually sealed to both women.

and there were famous Mormon men who this is true of they are spiritually polygamous and, but it doesn't work the other way. The woman, in order to, if she, if her husband dies or his divorce, she has to get special permission from the first presidency to get a temple divorce from him in order to go on and get a temple marriage to another man.

So polygamy is saturated throughout modern Mormonism, whether you want it or not. And even mainstream, I had a, Sunday school teacher when I was 14 years old. He was one of the families that everyone looked up to in the ward. He had Utah ancestry, even though this is in Washington state. And he sat there and told this group of teenagers that he personally thought that polygamy was an eternal principle and would be brought back.

It is. It is [00:48:00] dripping. Mormonism is dripping with polygamy as much as it tries to distance itself from it. So it's very easy. The number one recruiting ground for these fundamentalist groups is LDS Chapels, and they go in there and they pretend that they're LBS and they're looking for young women to recruit for to wives.

They're looking for men to recruit who might eat that, more of those traditionalist thinkers. And it's sometimes you have polygamists who are still attending LDS church and members of the LDS church, but they're also members of this secret polygamist group. So it's, and it's a problem, like I don't got no problem against Look, I'm polyamorous, so I get non-monogamy. I totally do be non, Not in a patriarchal way, not in a way that is unequal towards women and not in a secret way where there's a lot of abuses that occur and not in a way of God is commanding to marry this man. that's, disgusting to me.

SHEFFIELD: That's why the term that I use to refer to the position that the LDS Mormons have settled on as this kind of compromise between extremism and reform. I call it neo orthodoxy, and so it's not full orthodoxy or fundamentalism, but it's neo orthodoxy. So it's trying to uncomfortably reconcile science and dogma in a way that really only works for people who were born into it by and large.

Essentially after more than 150 years of just flat out denying that the church has a lot of problematic historical aspects and that its early leaders were involved in all kinds of scandalous things, they have decided to address them at least in some way through a series of essays on various controversial topics on their website, but they just don't seem to be very persuasive.

So ultimately Neo [00:50:00] Orthodoxy is a very untenable position, I think. What do you think?

CORBDEN: Yeah, and even the essays. So even the essays, they're not exactly coming clean. They exist. It's that plausible deniability, right? Where they have it on the website, so they can't, people can't say, oh, you're hiding it from the member.

Maybe they can say, no, it's right here. Like here's the link, but. It's not exactly like you have to search for the specific, did Joseph Smith look in a hat when he translated the book of warming? You have to actually be looking for it. Or if you go to the bishop and say, oh, I, I heard about this, it's really troubling to me.

Then the bishop will give you the link, right? you ha you have to be someone who has already struggling with that. They're not getting up in general conference and saying, by the way, we have these essays, you should go check them out. Or they're not putting that on the front of their website of saying, here, look at these race in the priesthood.

go check out our history. They're not advertising it. And so most mainstream LDS members have no idea those essays even exist. So they, again, it's that maeu control, right? They, want the best of all worlds. To their credit, they've juggled that pretty well for many decades, but they're, it's getting harder for them to do that.

And this is maybe where the nationalism comes in. Because if they want to retain control in that Mormon corridor to maintain that maloo control, they're going to need a compound. And when you got people living in suburban Utah, what better compound than all of Utah being a the, so get my conspiracy theory out, but it's not that big of a conspiracy theory.

The church already, most judges, police officers, legislators in the state of Utah are LDS. Most are like, no one knows if [00:52:00] the prophet actually gets on the phone with any of these judges or legislators, but at the very least, they're influenced to be. Pro Mormonism. And so anytime it comes down to I was there, I have those biases.

If it's a divorce proceeding and, one of 'em still a priesthood leader and the, wife is maybe got some of those stigmas on her for whatever reason that court case is going to go against her and for him, if it's someone getting arrested, And so as we start seeing American fascism creep up, I think that a lot of those people in power in Utah, whether in religious power or in secular power, are looking at that they're rubbing their hands together on Okay, bring it because, and you can see them cooperating with these sorts of things because I think that they foresee a potential theocracy style of theocracy over the state of Utah where they can physically, forcefully control the people who live there.

I think that there are people who have their, sights on that and with the justifications being there, preparing the way for Christ.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that is definitely a great point because Utah actually has passed a number of very, anti-free laws among them, forcing various local school districts to ban books from their libraries that, the legislature thinks should not be allowed.

Even though they supposedly like the ideal of smaller government and letting localities do what they want, they simply don't. And they've shown that also by trying to ban fluoride and also trying to, force various laws against pornography based on completely made up science which they have imagined for themselves.

So yeah, there is this coagulation of right wing extremism within Mormonism.

Former Mormons and current progressive Mormons are reconciling

SHEFFIELD: But I think it's also fair to say, and we should talk about it, I think that there has also been a coming together between people who have been more progressive, [00:54:00] Mormons, who still believe in the church, and people who are former Mormons who don't necessarily believe in it, that they have been realizing that maybe they aren't so far apart after all, and that really they might have some things in common despite their religious differences.

CORBDEN: Yes, there's been a lot of activism since I left the church, facilitated by the internet. I. Both from ex Mormons and from current Mormons, progressive Mormons to have these certain issues. There's LGBT rights issues. There's gender equality for, or the ordained women movement. There's protect LBS kids, which is about the abusive grooming tactics of interviews of teenage children about sexuality and other sorts of things like that.

A lot of the sexual abuse coverups, a lot of, and I could just go on all day with all the activism, whether they're organized groups or whether it's just people writing about things or talking about things or just getting together and, advocating for change within the church. We were raised like, this fires me to this day.

This is one of those. Doctrines that like I've examined in myself and have chosen to accept and continue with, is I was raised from my earliest memories. Like I, I am a daughter. I'm now both a daughter and a son of heavenly father. I was brought to this earth in the latter days to fight against the forces of evil.

I have to be valiant in order to achieve the highest level of heaven. Now, a lot of these are figurative. I don't believe in heaven or hierarchies or any of that, but like that gives me fire. I, have these both Old Testament and Book of Mormon prophets that were held up all the time as examples. ABAI spoke out against wicked priests and the wicked government and priests who were co coalesced [00:56:00] in and he was burnt at the stake for standing up against religious corruption.

And that's in the book of women. And that inspires me to this day. And, that's, and, not only that, but I was taught sp public speaking. I'm an introvert. I have social anxiety, but I was taught how to, overcome that stuff as a three-year-old with a microphone in front of the, congregation in SA fast and testimony meeting, right?

We're taught, especially men are taught leadership skills and organizational skills. How do you put together a relief society homemaking meeting and what kind of crafts are we going to do? Like I was raised with that. I had leadership positions as a, teenager, right when I was, IEI president?

Something like that. So you have this group of people that when they realize that it's their own church, that's corrupt. We're not talking about those wicked worldly people like it's us. we're the baddies. They get fired up and they have energy and they redirect those energies not to missionary more missionary work and not to more homemaking meetings and not to more ser service projects.

It's no, we're going to change the system. And that's what in a lot of these when these indivisible protests are happening, they're happening in Salt Lake City too. And those people are out there with their signs and thousands of people show up to those. And it's, yeah, a force to be reckoned with.

And again, I think that's why the fascism crackdown is happening because it's, backlash. It's an extinction burst. Hopefully it's an extinction burst because sometimes extinction burst bursts work to prevent extinction. That's why they happen. But that's where we're at right now. And when you look at prophecy and you still look at separating the wheat from the shaft.

That's what I see happening only, I like to think of myself as the weak. And that those [00:58:00] fundamentalist more fascist Mormons, they're the, chaff. They're what? They're, what they're going against the greatest command. They're going against love one another. They're going against all, or like unto God.

And to me, that's, what Jesus himself said was the core commandment. And so the d the DEI is, that's what we're fighting for. We're fighting for DEI because equality and inclusion and diversity, that's the planet that God created for us. To me, that's, Zion. That's what we're working for.

And yeah, there's a lot of other passionate former Mormons and progressive Mormons who are very on board.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah.

Perpetual inadequacy and self-worth

SHEFFIELD: we're coming up to the end here, so maybe we can wrap on the idea of something that you talk about also in the book, that you talk a bit, you talk at length, a number of, in a number of places, you talk at length in a number of places about the concept of perpetual inadequacy in the book.

yes. But you talk about it in the context of not just reclaiming your own agency, your own ability to make choices, but also in reclaiming your selfhood and understanding that is something that is valuable in and of itself. Can you talk about that? Tell us more what you mean by all of that.

CORBDEN: Yeah, So in the book, it's that idea, and you see this in abusive relationships. All high demand groups have this, even, in like self-organized anarchist groups, there's this like psychological pressure sometimes for purity, right? Like we're going to reject. Anyone who doesn't fit this exact very narrow list of standards, it's what puts the, high demand in a high demand group.

and so it's, that idea is we're going to hold the bar so high up and you don't count as worthy or good enough or allowed to be included unless you can pass that bar. And the bar is always moving up. [01:00:00] So you might get close, you might get to the bar, but all of a sudden it's Lucy. With the football, she's always going to yank that football away.

And what it does is it keeps, someone in that cycle of feeling like they're in control of their fate. When they're not really in control of their fate. The person in control of their fate is the person who's setting that bar. And so you are always going to, this, ties in all of these control techniques tie in with each other.

And so it's going to pull out blame reversal. You're going to want to blame yourself. It's going to pull out us versus them. they're, suffering because they didn't meet the standards. All of these different cycles that get in into you. And there's actually a number of studies out of Utah Valley University on talks of perfectionism within Mormonism.

And it creates this, this is one of the, things that's still very deeply watched in me that I have to fight. I. Constantly is that I'm not good enough, that I'm not trying hard enough that I am, and I, have disabilities now. So this has really come to a head because I can't, I cannot even do what I used to do when I wrote this book.

I'm not a, I can't write another book like that right now. I'm just not capable of it anymore. And so proactively coming to understand that, that, first of all, I'm of value just because I exist and because I can sense the world and perceive like I'm the only person in the universe who can perceive the universe the way I do.

And that's a value no matter what, even if I'm not telling anyone what I perceive. It's still a value. And so that's the belief that I've adopted to replace that.

And that I, borrow a lot from Eastern philosophy because they have a lot of ideas about how never expect any result from your actions that you're doing your action because of the action.

And so if it doesn't happen the way I thought it did, or I am not able to do it to the degree [01:02:00] that I wanted to, that just the action itself is of value. And just the doing of it and the being a person while I'm doing those actions is good enough that I don't have to accomplish, constantly accomplish things to feel okay about me.

yeah, that's, how I address that

SHEFFIELD: one. Yeah. And that's such an important message because we have to be able to develop meaning within ourselves to understand that the meaning of life is something that is inside of you, not something that someone else provides to you. Yes, exactly. You discover it.

Within yourself. Yep. And within the things that you do. And that's the ultimate freedom. And that can be a little scary if you've never known it, but it's worth it.

CORBDEN: Yes. It's, yep. Never said it would be easy. I only said it would be worth it.

SHEFFIELD: Ah. And there we go. Looping it around by the quote from Mormonism.

Yes. For post Mormonism. I like it.

Alright Luna. for people who want to keep up with what you are doing, can you give us some various websites and social media handles that you recommend for everyone to.

CORBDEN: All right. My main social media home is Mastodon. I am @[email protected].

I do have a blog and a website about Recovering Agency, although I haven't updated it in while recoveringagency.com. I would like to get back into blogging, but there's also, there's a lot of my old posts and basic resources there, and those are my two big things right now. So I also have a point you if, obviously if you're listening to this, you like podcasts.

So I did a, five part series, like if you're not a reader, as people are, more of an audio processor. I have an audio book by the way, as well as the print books, but also I did a podcast with [01:04:00] John Dehlin on Mormon Stories. It's a five-part series, 15 hours, where I basically cover most of the content that's in my book, but in more of a podcast dialogue sort of setting this.

SHEFFIELD: Cool. All right. thanks for being here. It was great to have you.

CORBDEN: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that does it for this episode. Thank you so much for joining me for the conversation and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show and you can get unlimited access to the archives if you are a page subscribing member.

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