Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - December 15, 2022


Ep 725 ｜ Leaving Mormonism for Christianity ｜ Guest： Lynn Wilder


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 10 minutes

Words per Minute

149.48946

Word Count

10,585

Sentence Count

734

Misogynist Sentences

9

Hate Speech Sentences

75


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one
00:00:05.540 we preach to you, let him be accursed.
00:00:10.420 Galatians 1.8.
00:00:12.600 There is one gospel.
00:00:14.120 There is one God who is three in one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
00:00:19.200 Everything else is a false God.
00:00:20.860 Everything else is a false gospel.
00:00:23.700 Today, we will be hearing from Lynn Wilder, who is going to tell us her incredible story
00:00:29.200 out of the Mormon church and into Christianity.
00:00:33.240 You are going to be challenged, informed, encouraged more than anything by the power of the gospel
00:00:40.800 and the courage that God has given her to speak the truth in love.
00:00:45.800 I'm thankful for this conversation, and I know you will be too.
00:00:48.900 This episode is brought to you by our friends at GoToRanchers.
00:00:52.240 Go to GoToRanchers.com.
00:00:53.440 Use promo code Allie at checkout.
00:00:55.040 That's GoToRanchers.com, code Allie.
00:00:59.200 Lynn, thank you so much for joining us.
00:01:09.700 I'm so glad that you're here.
00:01:11.260 For those who do not know, can you tell us who you are and what you do?
00:01:15.740 My name is Lynn Wilder.
00:01:17.860 I was Mormon for 30 years.
00:01:20.320 In fact, I worked for the Mormon Church at Brigham Young University as a tenured professor,
00:01:25.180 and Salvation came to my household a few years ago.
00:01:31.000 I left Mormonism, wrote a book, and that book is sold more every year than it did the year
00:01:37.400 before for the last eight or nine years.
00:01:39.720 Wow.
00:01:40.240 But God, right?
00:01:41.620 Yes.
00:01:42.240 That's really saying something.
00:01:43.620 As someone who has written a book myself, I know that that is not typical for books.
00:01:48.860 And so you're exactly right, but God.
00:01:51.920 But God definitely was almost a download from the Spirit, something that I just needed to
00:01:57.640 do, right?
00:01:58.800 And then God took it and did His thing.
00:02:01.660 I honestly believe that many Mormons are leaving their faith right now, and they're not aware
00:02:07.540 that traditional Christianity actually is a wonderful option for them.
00:02:12.720 And so that's what we offer to hundreds of thousands who are leaving the church, and this
00:02:21.720 God is amazing.
00:02:23.060 And actually, this grace message is for anybody that's in performance-based religion.
00:02:29.400 I have a podcast after the book called The Unveiling Grace Podcast, and we talk about that walk
00:02:37.140 from performance-based faith to grace-based faith.
00:02:41.940 And the book is, as you just mentioned, called Unveiling Grace.
00:02:46.360 I'm sure there are a lot of people listening who have already read the book.
00:02:50.740 My mom was the first person to introduce me to your book and to your content, and that
00:02:55.860 was several years ago now.
00:02:57.540 But there are a lot of people listening who don't know your story at all.
00:03:00.600 There are a lot of Mormons listening right now.
00:03:02.740 So could you take us back to how you became a Mormon?
00:03:06.180 Because you and your husband, you were not raised Mormon.
00:03:09.100 So is that correct?
00:03:10.620 No, I actually grew up going to a Presbyterian church every week.
00:03:15.460 My husband grew up Baptist.
00:03:17.980 But I could tell you neither of us opened the word.
00:03:21.700 I couldn't have told you even how someone got saved.
00:03:24.560 It was definitely kind of cultural Christianity for me.
00:03:27.800 I would say I was a nominal Christian.
00:03:30.560 It's not unusual for nominal Christians, actually, to join Mormonism.
00:03:35.700 That's kind of who the missionaries target.
00:03:38.720 Somebody who's heard of the Bible, thinks they believe in Jesus.
00:03:43.340 And then Mormonism offers a perfect family, you know, this wonderful community.
00:03:50.620 And my husband and I were taken in.
00:03:52.840 We were looking for a church, age 24, and we marched into Mormonism.
00:03:59.880 We were in a while before we learned all of the kind of strange doctrines.
00:04:05.120 But by then, we were so connected to the culture and the people.
00:04:09.180 Yeah.
00:04:09.720 They're good folk.
00:04:10.780 So who evangelized to you?
00:04:13.100 How did you first hear about Mormonism?
00:04:16.020 Two Mormon missionaries knocked on our door.
00:04:18.980 One day, my husband was home working on his master's thesis, and he wanted a diversion.
00:04:24.920 And honestly, I just read Hal Lindsey's book, and I was a little interested in Last Days, right?
00:04:32.140 The Mormon missionaries' tags said the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
00:04:36.840 which is the King James Version of Last Days, right?
00:04:40.000 They said they were Last Days' experts, and we believe them because we didn't know the Bible.
00:04:47.740 Pew did a study a few years ago about who joins Mormonism and why and where they come from.
00:04:54.840 This study said that 83% of the people that join Mormonism come out of nominal Christianity.
00:05:03.940 So Mormon missionaries come to the door, oh yeah, we believe the Bible, right?
00:05:09.020 And then they add to it the Book of Mormon, and then it goes off in a direction that's
00:05:14.900 not Christian.
00:05:15.720 But if you don't know your Bible, you don't know that.
00:05:18.640 Right.
00:05:19.300 So you got connected in the church.
00:05:21.300 You guys were 24 years old, Mary.
00:05:22.860 Did you have kids at the time?
00:05:24.300 No kids at the time.
00:05:25.480 No kids at the time.
00:05:26.240 And so you started going, and then when did you—you said that you weren't at first introduced
00:05:31.760 to what you described as strange doctrines, but then later on you were.
00:05:35.780 So tell us about that.
00:05:37.320 When you first started going to church, did it just kind of seem like, well, this is just
00:05:40.600 another great Christian church?
00:05:43.020 Within a year, we joined the church, the Mormon Church in Indiana.
00:05:46.580 At the time, our closest Mormon temple was in Washington, D.C., so we had to get in our
00:05:52.480 car, go 13 hours away to this temple.
00:05:57.840 I had a horrible first experience in the Mormon temple, came out with a terrible migraine headache.
00:06:04.620 It's very strange to the normal world.
00:06:08.140 You can actually go online and see people who have secretly taped Mormon temple ceremony.
00:06:13.660 But I learned things in the temple that I just hadn't picked up from a normal Mormon ward
00:06:22.360 church service, things like a man can become a god, that man can possibly be polygamous in
00:06:31.300 the next life, people his own world, you know, become a god of his own world, that there were
00:06:40.000 multiple gods.
00:06:40.940 It's almost like Greek mythology.
00:06:43.920 And so a lot of times...
00:06:45.220 And this is in the Book of Mormon?
00:06:46.960 Some of this is in the Pearl of Great Price.
00:06:49.420 Some of this is in the Book of Mormon.
00:06:51.020 Some of these things I learned in the temple.
00:06:53.860 Okay.
00:06:55.280 And so you started to learn these things.
00:06:57.220 Even after your first bad experience, you all stuck around.
00:07:00.380 You started to learn some of these things, which I'm guessing you did kind of understand
00:07:05.200 this is not the same as traditional Christianity at this point, even though you didn't really
00:07:10.620 know the Bible.
00:07:11.880 And yet I was surrounded by Christians, even in my family, none of whom ever stepped into
00:07:18.080 a conversation with me.
00:07:19.720 So my own mother eventually started Bible Study Fellowship on the south side of Indianapolis.
00:07:26.760 800 women came every week.
00:07:29.260 But I had been out of the house and in Mormonism years earlier.
00:07:33.960 My dad was Christian.
00:07:35.580 I had a sister who would have said they were Christian.
00:07:38.280 My mother and my sister would not attend my Mormon baptism, but no one ever told me why.
00:07:43.980 I always got the sense that they thought we were strange or something wasn't right.
00:07:50.480 But honestly, Allie, after I read the Bible and discovered what Jesus himself said about
00:07:57.980 all of this, which was 30 years later, I was a little bit angry with my Christian friends
00:08:05.600 because I realized I had been marching off to a place that wasn't good all those years.
00:08:11.380 And people were so afraid of rocking their relationship with me by stepping into an honest conversation
00:08:19.460 about whether Mormonism was traditional Christianity, that they just ignored the topic.
00:08:28.000 And so I will spend the rest of my life talking to anybody who wants to talk to me about what
00:08:34.880 the doctrinal differences are and why it matters.
00:08:38.060 Yes.
00:08:38.260 And before we talk about your exit from the Mormon Church and some of those doctrinal differences,
00:08:43.900 tell us a little bit more about what the Mormon Church is really like and what your experiences
00:08:50.680 were, both for better and for worse.
00:08:52.740 Because obviously, you had some good experiences there.
00:08:55.480 That's why you guys stayed.
00:08:56.920 You were attracted to it.
00:08:58.360 I'm guessing you raised your family and your kids there for several years.
00:09:02.940 So tell us kind of what you saw in the Mormon Church while you were there, good, bad, and
00:09:09.980 ugly.
00:09:11.740 They immediately took us in as family.
00:09:14.880 So my husband had gotten a job as an instructor at the local university, and one of the professors
00:09:20.600 in his department was Mormon.
00:09:22.780 Immediately, they had us for dinner.
00:09:24.920 It opened a whole new cultural world for us, all these important friends.
00:09:31.680 Mormons take care of each other.
00:09:33.260 They give each other jobs.
00:09:36.220 They'll bring you a car if you need a car.
00:09:38.720 I mean, they in many ways are wonderful people.
00:09:42.560 Although I felt I had to do those things in Mormonism, it is performance-based religion.
00:09:49.180 You need to do things in order to please God that he might save you.
00:09:54.980 Wait a minute.
00:09:55.960 Does that ring a bell with anybody?
00:09:59.240 That's exactly what Islam teaches.
00:10:01.520 If you do X, Y, and Z, and do the five pillars, and then you've done enough good works by the
00:10:08.260 end of your life, Allah might save you, right?
00:10:13.540 Mormonism is just like that.
00:10:15.300 There's no assurance of salvation, and so you're just working yourself crazy, and so you have
00:10:23.440 these sweet Mormon moms with six, seven kids trying to homeschool, trying to visit people
00:10:30.260 in the hospital, and do a church calling, and be a friend to everybody, and it was so exhausting
00:10:39.860 when I hit age 40, I remember just sitting and bawling, one day, I can't do this another
00:10:45.860 day.
00:10:46.120 Because you were so exhausted, because in your mind, you weren't doing these things.
00:10:50.680 I'm sure, I mean, sure you were a loving person, but you weren't doing these things necessarily
00:10:56.020 because of an outpouring of grace and love and mercy, but because you felt like you had
00:11:02.140 to, because your very salvation was on the line if you didn't.
00:11:06.920 Yes.
00:11:07.980 So in Mormonism, there are three different heavens, and in order to get to the highest
00:11:13.220 heaven, you have to go to the Mormon temple.
00:11:15.340 In order to go to a Mormon temple, you have to get a Mormon temple recommend.
00:11:19.820 In order to do that, you have to do this whole host of things like pay tithing, and live a health
00:11:26.300 code, and have a calling in the church, and the list just goes on, and on, and on, and yeah, it's quite exhausting.
00:11:48.380 So the three heavens, the celestial, and the terrestrial, and then what's the other one?
00:11:54.400 Tea last joke, good for you.
00:11:56.880 Tea last joke, okay, got it, got it, got it, okay, because I recently read an autobiography
00:12:02.140 by someone who was raised in the Mormon church, and she was kind of talking a little bit about that.
00:12:07.040 Can you tell us, because we like to talk about theology on this podcast, I know my audience
00:12:11.680 is interested in this, can you tell us just a little bit about Mormon theology and Mormon doctrine?
00:12:18.760 You've already touched on a lot of it, but how would you kind of summarize some of the
00:12:24.180 teachings, like, do they rely on the Book of Mormon, or the Pearl of Great Price more?
00:12:28.620 I've heard from a lot of Mormons that they say they rely mostly on the Bible, and that
00:12:35.080 it is, that the Book of Mormon, and that all of the Mormon books align perfectly with the
00:12:40.820 Bible, that there's no contradictions at all.
00:12:43.280 Well, I obviously don't believe that, but tell us, just kind of what do Mormons believe?
00:12:52.040 Who is Joseph Smith?
00:12:53.700 All of this stuff.
00:12:55.560 There are 13 articles of faith, and it's Mormon scripture, and one of them, you just alluded to,
00:13:02.640 says, we believe the Bible to be the Word of God as far as it's translated correctly.
00:13:09.400 But we believe the Book of Mormon to be the Word of God, no qualifier.
00:13:15.640 So as a Mormon, I believe that the Book of Mormon had come directly from Jesus to Joseph
00:13:21.500 Smith.
00:13:22.460 There's also a Doctrine and Covenants, which is supposedly revelations to the Mormon prophets.
00:13:30.340 Mormons have a prophet at the head, a prophet, he has two counselors, they have 12 apostles.
00:13:36.480 So you have 15 men at the top of the church considered prophets, seers, and revelators.
00:13:43.460 There's a whole priesthood hierarchy, a priesthood system in the Mormon church.
00:13:49.360 Those people determine scripture, they determine doctrine, because the God that the Mormons follow
00:13:56.620 is a God that changes.
00:13:59.100 So the God of the Bible says over and over, he's the same yesterday, today, and forever.
00:14:05.160 But the God of the Mormons changes, and they like that about him.
00:14:12.320 He updates with the times.
00:14:14.860 So some examples are Mormons lived polygamy, right?
00:14:20.760 Then they weren't, Utah wasn't allowed to be a state unless they stopped living polygamy.
00:14:26.060 The U.S. government, Ulysses S. Grant, when he was president, actually marched the army out
00:14:32.660 to Utah and said, you know, you will stop practicing polygamy, it's against the law in the United
00:14:37.920 States, or we'll take your church assets away.
00:14:42.220 So the prophet had a revelation, we're not practicing polygamy anymore.
00:14:46.160 But then you had all these Mormon families in the 1880s.
00:14:49.660 Yeah.
00:14:49.920 Mitt Romney's family was one of them who were polygamists, and they either had to run then
00:14:55.300 to Canada or Mexico, where it wasn't against the law, or they had to go underground.
00:15:01.060 So you have maybe as many as 100,000 polygamists living underground in the Intermountain West,
00:15:08.300 just in the United States.
00:15:09.460 But those polygamy colonies still exist.
00:15:12.160 Yes.
00:15:12.640 And they're from original Mormonists.
00:15:14.100 It was called fundamentalist LDS, and they were still, as of recently, they live as if
00:15:22.040 they are kind of in the 19th century still, and they have lots of young wives.
00:15:29.100 Some of them, or some look like you and me, are very contemporary sister wives, or Corey
00:15:38.820 and all his wives, I forget the name of that one.
00:15:41.480 But yeah, it's very real, and it exists out West, particularly in Utah.
00:15:47.620 But I'm saying that to give you an example of how the God of Mormonism changes.
00:15:54.060 That was doctrine once, then it became overnight not doctrine.
00:15:59.100 Same thing with blacks in the priesthood.
00:16:01.500 Blacks were not allowed to hold the priesthood until 1978.
00:16:05.240 They couldn't go to the Mormon temple, which meant they couldn't live with a heavenly father
00:16:10.400 in the next life.
00:16:11.480 So these three heavens in Mormonism, the upper one's for heavenly father, the middle one's
00:16:17.860 for Jesus, and the bottom one's the Holy Ghost.
00:16:21.320 But if you want to live with God the Father, you have to do all these works and work your
00:16:26.080 way up to the top one.
00:16:28.740 Not at all the God of the Bible.
00:16:30.880 So I love your episode 416 because you addressed who God is according to the Bible and who God
00:16:39.240 is according to the Mormon Church.
00:16:42.340 According to the New Testament, you have an issue if you have a different God.
00:16:48.360 The other thing, so just to stick to the basics when you ask me about differences, is if you've
00:16:57.500 got a different God and he teaches a different gospel, then that is not the same gospel.
00:17:05.820 You can't tell me as a Mormon that what you believe is the same as what I believe as a
00:17:11.140 Christian.
00:17:12.100 But when I was Mormon, I would have said, oh, yeah, Mormonism lines up with the Bible.
00:17:17.600 Oh, I'm a Christian.
00:17:18.840 Oh, I believe, at least in recent years, Mormons say they're Christians.
00:17:23.620 We didn't for many, many years.
00:17:26.300 This is fairly new.
00:17:27.680 The last 15 years or so.
00:17:29.940 And I do want to talk more about that.
00:17:32.220 One thing that I will say, just if people are considering, you're talking about how Mormons
00:17:38.880 changed their doctrine or said that God changed, and they've kind of done the same thing recently
00:17:43.460 with same-sex marriage.
00:17:44.740 Yes, yes.
00:17:45.140 They recently came out in support of the Respect for Marriage Act, which is really interesting.
00:17:52.180 But I think some people might think, well, the Christian church has done the same thing.
00:17:56.800 The Christian church, a large portion of the Christian church used to be pro-slavery or
00:18:00.560 pro-segregation or whatever it was.
00:18:04.280 But I would say the difference is that Christians did not change biblical doctrine.
00:18:10.660 They did not say that God changed, but they realized that actually in being pro-slavery or
00:18:16.220 being pro-whatever degeneracy and immorality they were, that those who professed to be Christians
00:18:22.620 and aligned with those things were in the wrong.
00:18:24.760 It wasn't that God had changed.
00:18:26.800 It was that there were Christians who were in sin and who were not in alignment with
00:18:30.920 the Bible, which has stayed consistent throughout the ages.
00:18:33.600 So there is a difference there.
00:18:35.780 We believe that Christians should change in conforming to God and not the culture, whereas
00:18:41.360 Mormonism says, well, actually God has changed as the culture has changed.
00:18:45.700 So that would be the difference, right?
00:18:48.220 So as a Mormon, I would have called the Bible a dead word and the living prophet a living
00:18:55.040 word.
00:18:56.340 So the living word that came to my living prophet that I followed would be more contemporary,
00:19:04.460 more updated than the dead word.
00:19:07.560 Does that make sense?
00:19:08.380 So that's another huge difference between Mormonism and Christianity.
00:19:12.960 As a Christian now, I have a huge God.
00:19:18.020 He's been God from beginning.
00:19:19.600 He'll always be God.
00:19:21.740 He knew me before I was born.
00:19:23.940 He purposed every day of my life before he called me to himself.
00:19:28.560 And he's able to keep his word together.
00:19:32.100 And he knows what the truth is from the beginning.
00:19:34.840 He created it all, right?
00:19:37.220 And it's all in the Bible.
00:19:39.320 And one of the things I realized when I left Mormonism, because we were taught as Mormons
00:19:44.500 that the Bible was sometimes corrupt, sometimes not translated correctly.
00:19:51.040 So how could I say I believe the Bible if I don't know when it's telling me the truth
00:19:57.000 and it's not telling me the truth?
00:19:58.880 So I always went to the Book of Mormon for the truth, because I believe that came directly
00:20:03.300 from Jesus, right?
00:20:05.020 So yes, they really don't believe the Bible is 100% the word of God.
00:20:10.340 But what I realized was God is so big, he can easily keep every word of his word together
00:20:20.160 down through the ages.
00:20:23.320 I heard a pastor say one time, the Bible says it's the word of God.
00:20:27.000 3,800 times.
00:20:29.820 Do you think he's trying to tell us something?
00:20:32.400 Right.
00:20:32.940 What kind of God lets somebody corrupt his word?
00:20:37.880 Right.
00:20:38.720 The God I follow now is well able to keep his word together.
00:20:44.000 In fact, the evidence, both scientific, historical, manuscript evidence, prophecy evidence that just
00:20:51.760 goes on and on for the Bible is so overwhelming.
00:20:56.640 It's still the biggest seller and always has been, right?
00:21:01.460 It draws people to itself.
00:21:03.760 It has a power.
00:21:05.680 It has a truth.
00:21:07.420 The Spirit of God lives in the word of God.
00:21:10.560 And changing the word of God is a big problem for me.
00:21:13.740 And before we go into some of the other doctrinal differences and kind of this movement towards
00:21:30.760 saying, oh, we're Christians.
00:21:32.300 I want to go back to your story.
00:21:34.220 You mentioned how when you were 40 years old, so you had been in the Mormon church a little
00:21:38.720 over 15 years, I guess at this point, you had your children and you kind of had a breakdown
00:21:43.380 because you were so overwhelmed with the performative nature of your religion and just trying to be
00:21:49.400 everything for everyone, hoping that one day you will make it to the highest kingdom, right?
00:21:55.940 But you didn't leave the Mormon church then, correct?
00:21:59.940 Was that the beginning, though?
00:22:02.100 I didn't.
00:22:03.360 But, you know, I don't know that I've ever told this story publicly, but I'm going to go there.
00:22:10.560 Let's go there.
00:22:11.620 About that time, I had an interesting experience.
00:22:16.000 Went to bed one night and someone called my name, it sounded like, at 2 a.m. and I sat
00:22:22.520 bolt upright.
00:22:25.020 Well, I couldn't go back to sleep the whole rest of the night.
00:22:27.800 I did not know the story of Eli in the Old Testament where God literally calls him, right?
00:22:36.420 I didn't know God could interact with you.
00:22:40.240 In Mormonism, my prayers were very stilted.
00:22:43.300 You have a very formal way, King James, in a pattern that you have to pray.
00:22:50.400 The next night, the same thing happened.
00:22:53.460 And the next night and the next night.
00:22:55.220 Now I've got four kids, a part-time job.
00:22:57.700 I'm a Relief Society president, which is, there's kind of like a male pastor,
00:23:02.360 and then there's a woman over, you know, the women in the ward.
00:23:05.700 I'm exhausted.
00:23:06.660 I'm working for the church, 20 hours a week, volunteer besides everything else that's going
00:23:12.220 on, and taking care of elderly in-laws.
00:23:15.700 God wakes me up over and over, and after two weeks of hearing my name in the middle of night
00:23:24.560 and not being able to go back to sleep, I remember going to my knees and just kind of
00:23:28.960 an anger saying, look, if you have something to tell me, just tell me, because I can't stay
00:23:34.760 up another night, right?
00:23:37.040 And I got the impression that I needed to go back to school.
00:23:42.640 Now, I had gotten a master's degree before I had my kids.
00:23:47.140 And the Mormon prophet had just done a fireside called, come home from your typewriters, which
00:23:57.880 of course, we didn't do typewriters in the early 90s.
00:24:02.020 But the point was, women are not supposed to work, and they're supposed to stay home and
00:24:08.140 have lots of kids and work for the Mormon church.
00:24:10.600 That was the pattern.
00:24:12.060 And prophet had just said that, and I'm thinking I'm having some strange spiritual experience
00:24:18.220 that's saying the exact opposite, because if I go back to school, I'm going to have to
00:24:23.420 get a doctorate.
00:24:24.600 Going back to your typewriter.
00:24:26.160 I'm going back to my typewriter, right?
00:24:30.120 I think this is when the Holy Spirit began to work with me.
00:24:35.600 It was kind of time.
00:24:37.700 But after I got my doctorate in 99, I went to work for the Mormon church.
00:24:44.140 I got hired at Brigham Young University.
00:24:47.000 Now, Brigham Young is a wonderful school.
00:24:50.040 It's a level two research university, 36,000 students, but it's owned by the Mormon church.
00:24:56.680 And you don't work there if you're a Mormon, unless you have a temple recommend, and your
00:25:02.140 Mormon testimony is vetted by someone high up in the Mormon church.
00:25:06.200 But then once you get a coveted position like that, there was lots of money, lots of support.
00:25:14.840 They sent me worldwide.
00:25:17.060 I ended up as a journal editor, international journal editor, had lots of publications.
00:25:23.260 I love in your book where you talk about self-promotion and all of that, everything revolves around
00:25:35.660 self.
00:25:36.700 That's the way it is in performance-based religion, because you're constantly trying to measure
00:25:43.000 yourself against other people and what they're doing and making sure that you're ticking off
00:25:48.340 all the boxes and that you're doing things for God that he might be pleased with, right?
00:25:55.120 That you might be saved in the end.
00:25:58.500 So, I just got more and more exhausted doing those kind of things.
00:26:06.680 But oddly, Brigham Young was in trouble with their accrediting agency for not teaching diversity.
00:26:14.580 And this was back in the 90s?
00:26:18.160 This was about 2000.
00:26:19.960 Okay.
00:26:20.960 And I was a new professor, and my background was that I'd worked in the inner city.
00:26:26.480 I'd worked with the juvenile delinquents, lots of different cultures, et cetera, homeless.
00:26:32.280 And so, I get slatted to teach multiculturalism.
00:26:35.740 My boss apologizes to me.
00:26:38.040 We don't really, you know, like this topic.
00:26:42.020 You're not allowed to say social justice.
00:26:45.520 But we have to do this in order to keep accreditation.
00:26:51.000 So, I began teaching multiculturalism at BYU in my very first multicultural class.
00:26:57.340 My students, I'm talking to them about all these wonderful different cultures.
00:27:02.380 And they're like, no, but if you have dark skin, you're less than other cultures.
00:27:10.700 The students in 2000 at Brigham Young were saying that.
00:27:15.240 Yes.
00:27:15.580 And do you believe that that's what, because the doctrine had said that in the Mormon church
00:27:20.820 for a period of time?
00:27:22.600 It still says it in the Book of Mormon.
00:27:26.260 I was unaware that my own LDS scriptures say 26 or 27 times that dark skin is a curse, and
00:27:36.160 they still say that.
00:27:37.820 Wow.
00:27:38.640 I was blown away.
00:27:41.080 That's the stupidest thing I ever heard.
00:27:43.640 It's not true, right?
00:27:45.440 And how am I going to teach multiculturalism to students who are reading the Book of Mormon
00:27:50.840 and believing that?
00:27:52.820 Certainly, it's something God used to begin to open my eyes.
00:27:57.480 Wow.
00:27:57.720 That is really interesting.
00:27:59.980 Because obviously, I mean, I've got my own problems with social justice and how ineffective
00:28:05.680 it is and how backwards I think that it is.
00:28:08.340 And yet, God used kind of the introduction in that subject to show you, okay, what is true
00:28:16.080 is incongruent with what the scriptures in Mormonism is teaching.
00:28:22.060 That's really interesting.
00:28:23.480 So that was another moment for you of kind of, hmm, all right, this isn't maybe what
00:28:30.000 I thought it was.
00:28:31.920 Exactly.
00:28:32.960 But here's the funny thing.
00:28:34.500 My students told me it was in the Bible, and I remember saying out loud in class, that's
00:28:40.260 stupid Bible.
00:28:41.660 Wow.
00:28:42.420 I had no idea.
00:28:43.660 It's not in the Bible, friends.
00:28:46.060 It does not say in the Bible that dark is less than white.
00:28:50.120 So sometimes when Mormons say in the Bible, do they really just mean in Mormon scriptures
00:28:55.920 in general?
00:28:58.480 I'm sure they just don't know scripture much.
00:29:01.980 So here was my conundrum in Mormonism.
00:29:05.680 Because your God changes, even the scriptures in Mormonism changed.
00:29:11.420 So what Joseph Smith wrote in the Book of Mormon, which was his earliest writings, right, was
00:29:18.140 then often contradicted in the Doctrine and Covenants, which are supposedly revelations to
00:29:23.960 the Mormon prophet.
00:29:24.980 So you have Mormon scripture that's on one side, and then it's on the exact opposite side.
00:29:31.120 I can give you probably 11 examples of those.
00:29:34.580 So I never could use my brain and faith, although I had this researcher brain, this logical brain.
00:29:46.420 I was taught to use only emotions in determining truth, right?
00:29:52.360 Because if Mormon scripture is all over the map, think, though, how convenient that is for
00:29:58.280 a false faith, to have a scripture on this side and a scripture on this side, then you
00:30:03.160 can pull out for the outside world, whichever one you want them to think you think, right?
00:30:10.260 Scriptures aren't really that important to you, though, if you're looking to a living prophet
00:30:15.440 anyway, for your answers.
00:30:19.180 Right.
00:30:19.200 So tell us a little bit more, then, about your journey a few years after.
00:30:24.220 It was just a few years after this, in 2000, after you started teaching this, that you
00:30:28.540 realized Mormonism is not true.
00:30:30.660 Mormonism is not Christianity.
00:30:32.480 So tell us about that, the unveiling grace.
00:30:37.460 I am embarrassed to tell you that although I hated polygamy, and it's in Mormon scripture
00:30:44.960 still, that I hated the racism when I discovered it, that I did not want my husband to become
00:30:55.800 a god and have multiple wives in the next life, that I was so comfortable in this life and
00:31:04.820 with these people.
00:31:06.700 They're good people.
00:31:09.040 And it was your job.
00:31:11.020 Yeah.
00:31:11.700 And it was, right, it was my job.
00:31:13.840 I was making good money.
00:31:15.220 I was traveling around the world.
00:31:18.600 I guess it just didn't matter that much to me, right?
00:31:22.580 Life was good.
00:31:25.380 Our first son went on a Mormon mission to Russia.
00:31:28.940 Our second son on a Mormon mission to Denmark.
00:31:32.120 The third son was headed to Mexico City.
00:31:35.740 God did an odd thing in his life.
00:31:38.600 His lung collapsed in the missionary training center.
00:31:41.760 And so he couldn't go to a place where the medical help wasn't really good.
00:31:49.160 So they sent him to Florida, the happiest place on earth.
00:31:53.140 He got sent to Orlando, Florida, where as a Mormon missionary, he was bumping up against
00:31:57.920 evangelicals.
00:31:59.920 Decided he needed to...
00:32:00.860 Those darn evangelicals.
00:32:02.160 No, decided he better know his Bible better, right?
00:32:06.440 Because he hadn't really trusted it and didn't read it much like the rest of us.
00:32:10.780 He said, I think he said he'd never read the New Testament from one end to the other.
00:32:15.800 He encounters a Christian pastor.
00:32:18.600 This was about 2005, 2004 or 2005.
00:32:22.180 Challenges him to read the Bible.
00:32:24.620 Says, you don't have to believe a word, I say.
00:32:27.040 Just open the New Testament.
00:32:28.640 Just want to see what Jesus has to say, right?
00:32:31.460 So for the two years of his Mormon mission, and he was a leader in his Mormon mission,
00:32:36.680 he's reading the New Testament over and over and over, thinking he can prove Mormonism
00:32:43.280 to evangelicals.
00:32:45.000 And what happens?
00:32:46.300 Three weeks before the end of his Mormon mission, it goes to his knees, gives his life to the
00:32:51.620 Jesus of the Bible, realizing this is a very different gospel and a different God.
00:32:56.720 And that crazy God, Micah gets up from his knees, and he said, I had asked the Lord, you've
00:33:07.260 so profoundly changed me, how do you want me to come forth about what you've done in
00:33:11.860 my life?
00:33:14.240 And he said, the phone rang, and it was his leader of the Mormon mission, leader over about
00:33:20.440 100 missionaries.
00:33:21.480 Says, Micah, you're about to go home from your mission.
00:33:23.560 And we'd like you to stand in front of your missionary peers and bear testimony of what
00:33:29.000 you've learned over the last two years.
00:33:31.260 Well, what he'd learned was that Mormonism was not true, that Jesus was enough.
00:33:37.000 He had the courage to profess that.
00:33:39.500 He got in a bit of trouble with the Mormon church.
00:33:43.120 So, but that rocked my world.
00:33:45.720 That finally rocked my world.
00:33:47.620 Were you disappointed when he called and he told you this?
00:33:51.960 Yeah.
00:33:53.560 I knew something profound had happened to a kid who'd gone out so zealous for Mormonism
00:34:01.200 to actually stand up against the Mormon church.
00:34:05.600 Something profound happened to this kid.
00:34:08.660 And as his mom, I wanted to know what it was, right?
00:34:11.720 So, they sent him home early.
00:34:16.720 The Mormon church tried to communicate him.
00:34:18.860 Micah and I could not figure out why he was in trouble.
00:34:20.860 They kept saying, he's preaching saved by grace.
00:34:25.120 It's like, don't we believe saved by grace?
00:34:27.380 You keep telling us we believe the same as the Christians, right?
00:34:31.020 Why is he in trouble for professing saved by grace?
00:34:34.840 Well, the other part of that was, Jesus was enough.
00:34:38.320 He didn't need the Mormon church for salvation.
00:34:40.700 He didn't need the Mormon temple, right?
00:34:42.920 He didn't need the Mormon prophet and those kind of things.
00:34:46.480 In Mormonism, there are five parts of a Mormon testimony.
00:34:49.920 Jesus is only one of them.
00:34:52.040 So, if you jettison Joseph Smith, you jettison the book Mormon,
00:34:55.700 you're in trouble with the Mormon church.
00:34:58.440 And that's what he had done.
00:35:01.400 But we put him on a plane to get him out of Utah
00:35:05.140 so we could figure out what was going on
00:35:08.000 so they wouldn't excommunicate him.
00:35:09.840 And he begged me.
00:35:11.600 He begged me at the airport,
00:35:13.260 Mom and Dad, please just read the New Testament.
00:35:18.340 Open it.
00:35:19.980 Read it with no preconceived notions.
00:35:22.640 And just see what Jesus has to say.
00:35:26.700 Allie, the very first verse I read was,
00:35:31.720 in the beginning was the Word.
00:35:34.100 I think that's Jesus.
00:35:35.980 And the Word was with God.
00:35:37.980 And the Word was God.
00:35:40.300 And I went, Jesus wasn't God from the beginning.
00:35:44.120 He was a man.
00:35:45.160 He earned his godhood right there.
00:35:48.600 Right there.
00:35:50.520 These plain truths are all over the Bible.
00:35:53.480 And the Bible's consistent.
00:35:54.740 And it doesn't have scriptures that are on one side
00:35:57.620 and on the other side, like Mormonism.
00:36:00.220 I laughed.
00:36:01.600 We call that, in statistics, internal consistency.
00:36:05.420 Right?
00:36:05.660 I'm reading the Bible.
00:36:06.740 It's saying the same thing.
00:36:08.200 Over and over.
00:36:09.640 It's the same message.
00:36:10.960 And it's very clear.
00:36:11.980 It's like the 30,000 archaeological digs for the Old Testament alone.
00:36:17.840 Not one for the Book of Mormon.
00:36:19.760 Wait.
00:36:20.540 Isn't God trying to show you, right, that this Bible is reliable?
00:36:27.060 It's the Word of God.
00:36:28.620 And it can be trusted.
00:36:30.120 And I read things like, God doesn't live in temples made by human hands.
00:36:35.640 Mormon church has 180 temples around the world.
00:36:38.960 I was taught that God's Spirit lived in that temple, and that I needed to go to the celestial
00:36:44.880 room of a Mormon temple in order to be closer to God there than any place on the earth.
00:36:50.000 I didn't know that salvation could come to your household.
00:36:54.960 The Holy Spirit could enter you, never leave you, and that you were now the temple of the
00:37:02.760 Holy God, that you were living stones.
00:37:05.640 A very different gospel.
00:37:09.080 Now, here's what I've learned over the years.
00:37:13.120 Poor Paul.
00:37:15.080 He'd go a place.
00:37:16.360 He'd preach the gospel of grace.
00:37:18.240 Jesus did it all for you.
00:37:21.060 All you have to do is accept him as Lord and Savior, right?
00:37:24.820 Repent and accept him as Lord and Savior.
00:37:27.700 And someone would come right behind him and teach performance-based religion.
00:37:32.840 No, you have to be circumcised.
00:37:34.820 You have to do X, Y, and Z.
00:37:37.060 Paul's 13 epistles are all about setting up churches and someone coming behind him with
00:37:43.180 the false gospel, and then he has to go back to that area and say, no, remember the gospel
00:37:47.680 I brought.
00:37:48.240 If I come back and I look like an angel and I bring you another gospel, throw me out,
00:37:53.620 right?
00:37:54.460 This is the gospel.
00:37:55.780 This is not the gospel.
00:37:57.080 That's what the whole New Testament is about.
00:37:59.800 The gospel does not change.
00:38:02.060 And if it does change, you don't have the same God and you don't have the same gospel.
00:38:08.620 It's not the same message.
00:38:10.380 And it does matter the way to salvation.
00:38:13.200 Yeah.
00:38:13.640 Whenever I've had conversations with Mormons who follow me, a lot of Mormons are very conservative
00:38:32.000 and they vote Republican.
00:38:33.040 And so that is, and I want to talk a little bit more about that in a second.
00:38:36.820 But so a lot of them are part of this audience, or maybe were a part of this audience before
00:38:40.380 I started talking about the differences in Mormonism and Christianity.
00:38:43.880 But just within my inbox, one thing that I bring them to, really the only thing that I
00:38:49.760 bring them to, or I have the opportunity to, because the conversation typically stops,
00:38:54.320 is John 1.
00:38:55.300 I mean, there are a lot of differences between Christianity and Mormonism, but that's what
00:38:59.740 I take them to.
00:39:00.420 Look, in the beginning, the word was God and the word was among us.
00:39:05.460 We know that that is Jesus Christ all in John 1.
00:39:07.920 And that's not what Mormonism teaches.
00:39:10.400 Mormonism teaches, as you said, and as you know, that Jesus was man, that he earned himself
00:39:15.360 to God.
00:39:15.820 Because what I hear from Mormons who want so badly to be considered Christians, just another
00:39:21.480 denomination of Christianity, they will say, we need to shelve the differences, put on
00:39:26.520 the shelf the differences between what I believe and what Mormons believe.
00:39:29.980 They will say, we're Christians because we love Jesus.
00:39:33.000 We believe he died on the cross for our sins.
00:39:35.600 We believe that he offers salvation.
00:39:39.220 And I've even heard some believe, well, we believe in grace.
00:39:41.980 We believe in love.
00:39:43.020 We believe in faith.
00:39:45.400 You know, all of the other things.
00:39:47.000 Sure, there are differences, but there are lots of differences in denominations.
00:39:49.940 That's what I hear.
00:39:51.460 And I also hear from them, do not call us Mormons, only call us Latter-day Saints.
00:39:56.420 And then often if I get into a conversation where the other person gets extremely volatile
00:40:01.580 and defensive, they will then say what I think is believed probably across the board among
00:40:07.340 LDS people, they will say, well, we are the real Christians, not you.
00:40:12.040 We are the Latter-day Saints, not you.
00:40:15.480 And that's when to me, it's like, okay, I got it.
00:40:18.840 That's what you actually believe, that it's actually me who is either the inferior Christian
00:40:24.060 or not a real Christian.
00:40:25.840 And that even though LDS people will say that they're Christians, really at the end of the
00:40:29.400 day, they think that they are the real deal, have the real truth and the real stuff, and
00:40:33.660 that you and I are the ones who are lacking.
00:40:36.220 And it goes back to those three heavens.
00:40:38.880 So Mormons can go to the higher heaven and be with God the Father.
00:40:43.620 And of course, they believe there are three separate gods, right?
00:40:47.800 It's not a Trinitarian God.
00:40:50.880 No.
00:40:51.420 But so the middle one's Jesus.
00:40:54.880 So Christians go there.
00:40:56.880 They'll say Mormons who drink beer and Christians go to the middle one.
00:41:01.600 Billy Graham, he'd be in the middle one.
00:41:03.340 It's basically universal salvation, and everyone else goes to the bottom kingdom, even Hitler.
00:41:10.400 They'll tell you, even Hitler's in the bottom kingdom.
00:41:12.620 The only people that go to hell in Mormonism would be Satan, his minions, and those like
00:41:19.180 me who are apostates from the Mormon church.
00:41:23.220 Now imagine how that fear, again, performance-based religion.
00:41:28.080 If you have to do, do, do, do, you have to stay within a certain box, or you're going to
00:41:34.960 be outcast.
00:41:36.220 So this is what I dealt with, right?
00:41:38.500 When salvation came to me the day in October of 2006, I went face down and gave my life to
00:41:45.640 this amazing Jesus of the Bible.
00:41:48.340 I knew I wouldn't be allowed to stay at BYU.
00:41:51.560 So they can say they're Christians, too, but if you get saved to grace alone, you can't
00:41:59.780 stay at BYU.
00:42:01.000 They have an honor code.
00:42:02.480 You have to honor the Mormon church.
00:42:05.040 You have to be working your way to the top.
00:42:11.080 So we joined, Mike and I, in 1977.
00:42:15.980 As Mormons, we would never have been called Christians.
00:42:19.740 That was, we were graders as Mormons, you were lessers as Christians.
00:42:26.400 And this is how I would have explained it when I was Mormon.
00:42:30.580 Christians only have the Bible, and it's not reliable.
00:42:35.200 But I had the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants on
00:42:40.480 top of that that came directly from Jesus, and they were 100% reliable.
00:42:46.100 So yes, you were lessers, we were graders.
00:42:48.600 So no, we never called ourselves Christians.
00:42:51.260 That would have been a type of downgrade, although that is their mission field, right?
00:42:57.140 It's nominal Christians.
00:42:59.940 In recent years, though, it's only been maybe 15 years, maybe a little more, that Mormons
00:43:07.260 are beginning to say, I'm a Christian, too.
00:43:11.560 Um, my suspicion, and this is only personal for me, is that, and I was a Mormon when this
00:43:21.620 began, I think they were trying to promote a Mormon to run, um, for office.
00:43:30.040 And if they're running in the Republican Party, right?
00:43:34.200 So particularly Romney in 2012, they realized that if Christians thought that Romney was
00:43:43.080 not in the body of Christ, that they might not vote for him.
00:43:47.740 And so why does that matter?
00:43:52.900 When I was Mormon, it mattered that we got a Mormon president.
00:43:58.220 Why?
00:43:59.040 Because Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, had a prophecy that I was well aware of in
00:44:05.400 Mormonism called the White Horse Prophecy.
00:44:08.080 The White Horse Prophecy, says that there will come a day when the U.S. Constitution will
00:44:14.260 hang by a thread, and a Mormon elder will ride in as on a white horse and save the United
00:44:21.920 States of America.
00:44:23.240 So this is what I believed as a Mormon.
00:44:25.800 I'm not saying every Mormon believes this, but this was what I believed as a Mormon, that
00:44:31.640 I needed, there needed to be the most powerful man on the earth needed to be LDS.
00:44:37.040 So that he could then set up the world politically for the LDS, so that Jesus, the Jesus of the
00:44:45.240 LDS, could return to rule and reign the earth politically.
00:44:50.280 Certainly those are not things that, as a Mormon, I would have talked about publicly.
00:44:57.320 But there is a huge push right now for Mormons to say they're Christian.
00:45:02.220 My guess is maybe a Mormon will resurface at some point and try to run for the highest political
00:45:09.440 office of the land.
00:45:11.780 So here's what some of this confusion has done, though, in recent years.
00:45:16.180 And now that I'm in Christian ministry, ex-Mormon Christians United for Jesus, I get a lot of
00:45:22.260 phone calls from Christian organizations that'll say things like,
00:45:25.840 I do homeschool, Christian homeschool.
00:45:29.980 All of these Mormon families are all of a sudden joining our Christian homeschool,
00:45:34.100 believing they're Christian too.
00:45:35.800 But then they want to be leaders.
00:45:37.960 And then they want to tell people their kids have to be baptized at eight.
00:45:43.080 Because for Mormonism, the age of eight is the age of accountability, right?
00:45:48.340 Where your sins matter, so you have to be baptized.
00:45:50.920 I'm really confused.
00:45:53.420 I don't know if they're Christians too.
00:45:55.000 Are they not Christians too?
00:45:56.320 Should I let them run my organization?
00:45:58.400 So I've had a lot of these kind of phone calls lately.
00:46:02.740 So Mormon kids will be going to Christian preschools.
00:46:05.920 They'll be going to Christian, even high schools and stuff.
00:46:10.840 The other kind of, I got a phone call a couple of months ago from a Christian publisher who does
00:46:17.200 homeschool materials.
00:46:18.400 He was quite frustrated because a lot of the people that used to buy his Christian homeschool
00:46:25.240 materials are now buying Mormon Christian homeschool materials.
00:46:30.520 So the Mormon church has stepped into Christian homeschool curriculum.
00:46:35.760 And because there's so much money behind it, and often you can't trace it directly to the Mormon
00:46:41.740 church, but they will go to one of their wealthy people and say,
00:46:45.860 would you please donate to this cause so that we can step into this place?
00:46:50.960 So there are now Christian curriculum being taught in Christian schools that are done by Mormon
00:47:02.280 companies, right?
00:47:04.320 Yeah.
00:47:04.640 And the, and the Christians just don't discern that it's Mormonism couched in Christian language.
00:47:14.200 Yeah.
00:47:15.360 So that takes us to another place, which is the chosen.
00:47:22.580 Cool.
00:47:23.980 Go there.
00:47:24.920 So Dallas Jenkins has publicly said that Mormons follow the same Jesus as the Christians.
00:47:35.200 So you have a Christian filmmaker that Christians look to as a kind of cultural Christian icon.
00:47:43.420 In fact, I noticed recently that both Tim Tebow and Nick Yikovic are also financially,
00:47:53.100 they're in advertisements that are asking Christians to donate to angel.com.
00:48:00.800 Okay.
00:48:01.040 It's a company that's owned by Mormons.
00:48:03.960 It was originally started by two Mormon brothers, the Harmon brothers, who have a grocery store in,
00:48:10.300 in out West.
00:48:11.660 So what you've got is now Mormons stepping into home school curriculum,
00:48:18.500 stepping into Christian school curriculum,
00:48:25.040 stepping into Christian film.
00:48:28.320 Many things on the Hallmark channel are very LDS.
00:48:31.980 It's, and only someone who's been on both sides kind of has the discernment, right?
00:48:37.760 On the chosen, because I have seen that controversy, it's not a series I've watched myself.
00:48:43.740 I know a lot of people have, and a lot of people love it.
00:48:46.600 There was a controversy in one of the episodes where it seemed like Jesus, I believe, was paraphrasing a Mormon prophecy.
00:48:56.700 And I believe it was Dallas Jenkins who kind of came out with the statement and said,
00:49:01.160 that's not true, or that's not what we were trying to do.
00:49:05.280 But I did notice, like, in his defense, he didn't, I didn't see where he said that they worship the same Jesus,
00:49:13.900 but I did notice that he did not clearly distinguish between Christianity and Mormonism.
00:49:22.260 So I just, I thought that that was interesting.
00:49:27.260 It is.
00:49:28.720 So during the 2012 election, John Ankerberg, who's a Christian apologist and has a TV show,
00:49:37.300 had my husband and myself and Sandra Tanner do a six-week series on Mormonism.
00:49:42.200 Romney was running at the time, and he got so much backlash from his Christian donors that they made him take it off the air.
00:49:55.920 Franklin Graham was a strong promoter of Romney, right?
00:50:01.540 And he took off of his website during the election that Mormonism was a cult.
00:50:07.900 And then when Romney did not win, he put it back up in January.
00:50:14.260 So in my place in ministry, this is what I deal with, right?
00:50:20.400 You have Christians who are afraid to step into conversations where the lines are definitive because they don't want to offend.
00:50:31.800 And so you have people like Joel Osteen saying, oh, they say they follow Jesus.
00:50:38.240 Yeah.
00:50:38.960 But doesn't somebody need to look at whether that's the same Jesus that you're following?
00:50:44.200 Their Jesus is very different.
00:50:46.320 He literally is the brother of Satan.
00:50:49.880 Yeah.
00:50:50.400 Mormons believe that Jesus was the brother of Satan and became God.
00:50:54.180 Yes.
00:50:54.440 Um, one thing that I've heard before, and this kind of goes maybe back to the white horse prophecy about Mormon and Mormon needing to be the most powerful man in the world, um, is that America is kind of the center of what they would call biblical prophecy.
00:51:15.580 Whereas in Christianity, like we don't see in scripture, some special, specific place for America in the end ages.
00:51:25.660 But from what I've heard in Mormonism, there is, as you said, the constitution is a part of that.
00:51:31.580 The presidency is a part of that.
00:51:34.100 And so is that part of why for so long Mormons have been seen as kind of a conservative stronghold?
00:51:43.040 They, they have typically voted Republican, because I also think that is one reason why it's so difficult for Christian conservatives, for Christians who vote Republican to say anything about the differences.
00:51:55.620 Because, well, they're not just are they kind and do they have a lot of the same values that we do?
00:52:01.060 They take care of each other.
00:52:02.320 We like that as conservatives.
00:52:03.900 But also, they're a really big voting bloc.
00:52:07.820 They are, you know, even more so than some people who profess to be Christians, very conservative on a lot of issues.
00:52:14.980 I think that is probably why there's some like, ooh, I don't want to upset that.
00:52:19.580 I don't want to rock the boat.
00:52:21.380 So I guess my question is, like, why is America and the constitution and conservatism so much a part of Mormonism?
00:52:30.480 Their last days ideas are a little different than what the Bible says.
00:52:35.940 They would say that the Bible came out of Jerusalem, but that the Book of Mormon came out of the Americas, right?
00:52:44.040 And so the one true church is actually centered here in the United States of America.
00:52:49.140 They also say that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri.
00:52:54.600 Oh, wow.
00:52:54.940 Near Independence, Missouri.
00:52:56.400 So what I believed as a Mormon, we actually had like 72-hour backpacks that we kept at our house in case Jesus called and you had to go to Missouri immediately.
00:53:11.300 So Mormons are big preppers and they're big food storage people.
00:53:16.960 And part of the reason is supposedly Jesus will return to Missouri to the Mormon priesthood before he shows himself to the world.
00:53:28.260 And I literally believe that.
00:53:31.000 Missouri, of all places.
00:53:33.480 Yes.
00:53:34.760 Interesting.
00:53:35.480 Not to Utah.
00:53:36.060 No, not to Utah, although we called Utah Zion.
00:53:41.400 We would have called Salt Lake Zion.
00:53:54.400 So one thing that I that we talked about before the camera started rolling that I know a lot of people are going to relate to is that is influencer culture.
00:54:02.940 Like you talked about how Mormonism is infiltrating curriculum in a lot of different ways, the charity world, Christian media.
00:54:12.440 And I'm sure there are a lot of other avenues where it's happening that we maybe don't even know.
00:54:17.000 Healthcare sharing ministries, Christian healthcare sharing.
00:54:20.180 Interesting.
00:54:21.200 Wow.
00:54:21.420 So it's also happening on Instagram and TikTok.
00:54:25.580 I don't have TikTok, but there is this whole controversy, I think, a year ago where it was discovered that a lot of these TikTok-ing influencing moms, beautiful, put together, conservative, have a ton of kids, preppers, which, again, conservative Christians like a lot of this stuff, too.
00:54:42.920 Mm-hmm.
00:55:12.920 That?
00:55:13.320 That's not correct or that's not biblical.
00:55:16.960 And sometimes you can say, oh, well, that's because they're progressive or that's because that.
00:55:20.960 But it was always something a little strange or just a little bit off.
00:55:25.000 And then I'll see a post, oh, they're sending their sons on mission or they posted a link to the LDS church or they have a leader from the LDS church coming to their hospital room or whatever, whatever it is.
00:55:39.120 And then it kind of starts clicking.
00:55:40.840 And so what I fear is for a lot of women my age who were so desperate, understandably so, I think, for like-minded people, for camaraderie, to link arms with people who are like us.
00:55:54.360 Because we do look at the evil of the world and we're like, we don't want nothing to do with that.
00:55:57.960 So people with family values that say that they love Jesus, it's really easy to just say they're one of us.
00:56:05.240 And so I've just noticed how insidious it is and how careful they are, these Mormon influencers are in curating their image and their feet to look a lot like Christians until they kind of introduce you to, well, we're LDS.
00:56:23.260 We're also Christian, but we're LDS.
00:56:25.940 And that worries me.
00:56:29.200 And some of those influencers, when they have messaged me, I mean, the fire of hatred that comes and the anger and the vitriol that comes from these seemingly happy and joyful and loving moms that is directed at me and my private messages when I say something about the difference between Mormonism and Christianity.
00:56:52.260 Wow.
00:56:53.080 Welcome to my world.
00:56:54.220 Oh, I can't even imagine.
00:56:56.260 I can't even imagine.
00:56:57.020 So I don't know if you just have any like commentary on that, but that is one part of all of this that worries me.
00:57:02.580 So as a Mormon, I did something called milk before meat, which means I'm not going to admit to you that I believe something that you're going to think is silly or you're going to think isn't biblical.
00:57:16.520 So I'm certainly not going to see somebody came out.
00:57:20.900 I think it was Huckabee at one point said something about what Romney believed and he was so indignant.
00:57:29.820 He said, that's exactly what he believes in Mormonism.
00:57:33.660 But he said to the outside world, I will not even dignify that by answering a question like that.
00:57:42.340 So definitely he deflected.
00:57:45.920 So that would be a typical Mormon technique.
00:57:49.940 I'm not going to tell you, I believe my husband can become a god.
00:57:53.700 You're going to laugh at that.
00:57:55.440 That's going to sound absolutely silly, right?
00:57:57.880 So I'm going to offer you things that you do like, like the conservatism and the mother advice so that then you're coming my direction.
00:58:07.000 And then you might be open to listening to some of the stranger things.
00:58:12.340 Things down the road.
00:58:14.220 But that's a very deliberate thing called milk before meat.
00:58:18.840 In the 90s, the Mormon...
00:58:20.120 And Christianity has that too, but in a different way.
00:58:25.640 I mean, Paul also talks about spiritual milk.
00:58:29.140 And then you need to be able to grow up and to chew on solid food.
00:58:33.020 I think the difference is, is that Christianity does not keep those complicated messages hidden from you.
00:58:40.600 They are not secret.
00:58:42.580 We're upfront about them that, yes, this is what Christianity is.
00:58:46.900 And your understanding will grow through sanctification.
00:58:49.640 But we're not going to hide these complicated things from you to kind of trick you into believing what we believe.
00:58:56.100 So that's a difference with a very important distinction.
00:59:00.820 Yeah, I'm not afraid to say anything that Christ would say in the Bible.
00:59:06.720 Again, I don't have to own it as mine personally.
00:59:11.220 It comes from the living God.
00:59:13.300 And then each person can make their own decision about what that is.
00:59:18.080 There are many secret things in Mormonism.
00:59:20.460 So all of those, you make six covenants in the Mormon temple.
00:59:25.220 Well, people aren't supposed to know what those are.
00:59:27.940 The last covenant that I made in the temple over 30 years, over and over, was that I agreed with all my talents,
00:59:37.440 anything I owned, anything I would own, any money I had,
00:59:40.780 all of that gets dedicated to the building up of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
00:59:47.660 Not to Jesus in particular, but to building up of the Church.
00:59:52.300 The Mormon Church is very wealthy.
00:59:54.660 Folks must tithe in order to go to the highest heaven.
00:59:59.480 And they also own for-profit businesses and non-for-profit businesses.
01:00:04.520 And that money sometimes gets mixed up, right?
01:00:08.960 So the Mormon Church owns 2% of land in Florida.
01:00:13.820 They have cattle ranches everywhere.
01:00:15.880 They own lots of conservative radio.
01:00:18.820 Bonneville Communications is one of the larger owners of conservative stations.
01:00:27.080 So a lot of people are not aware, right, of that.
01:00:33.980 I love to hold hands with other people that politically are on the same plane that I am.
01:00:41.120 I don't have any problem with that.
01:00:44.180 Me too.
01:00:45.140 As a believer, though, the problem I have is if you elevate someone like Mitt Romney, who's following a false Christ,
01:00:54.300 the Mormon missionaries, 60,000 of them go worldwide and knock on a door.
01:00:59.120 Oh, don't you love Romney?
01:01:00.640 These five beautiful sons and such a wonderful family.
01:01:04.360 You know, you know, he's Mormon, right?
01:01:06.220 And then you have people being led astray, not just to a false faith, but often Christians led.
01:01:14.200 It says in Matthew 24, who are the false Christs after?
01:01:20.260 They're after the elect.
01:01:22.040 They're after those who would seek Christ, right?
01:01:25.360 But then they send him off the wrong direction.
01:01:29.160 So I'm sure Romney would have been a great president, and maybe he still will be someday.
01:01:34.920 I don't think he would make a great president anymore.
01:01:37.480 I mean, thankfully, he's fallen out of favor with the Republican Party because he's grown liberal in a lot of ways.
01:01:44.060 Well, and that's the Mormon church changing, right?
01:01:47.260 That was a whole nother LGBTQ.
01:01:50.240 Kids can't be baptized in the LGBTQ.
01:01:52.620 Folks who are huge in Salt Lake, by the way, there's a huge population of former Mormons and gay Mormons in Salt Lake,
01:02:04.340 really came against the church, and then the church changes its mind, you know?
01:02:08.820 And so that's what you get with a wishy-washy cultural Jesus, which you can get with any man.
01:02:15.020 Yeah.
01:02:15.320 We don't want a man.
01:02:16.700 We want the true and living God.
01:02:18.620 Yeah, he was the same yesterday, today, and forever, and our obligation as Christians is to conform ourselves to him and to his word and not the other way around.
01:02:27.800 I wish we could talk for two more hours.
01:02:29.900 We'll have to have you back on to talk even further.
01:02:32.200 But to close this out, there are Mormons who are listening to this.
01:02:37.020 There are Mormons who are angry listening to this.
01:02:39.380 There are Mormons who are thinking, hmm, maybe she's onto something.
01:02:45.260 There are Christians listening to this who had no idea before this conversation that there was any difference.
01:02:50.660 I want you to speak.
01:02:52.580 Just share the gospel, the true gospel that changed your life with everyone who is listening,
01:03:01.220 no matter what stage of confusion or anger they are in.
01:03:05.500 What do you say to them?
01:03:06.380 When I opened up the New Testament, read it with a sincere heart, the first thing that happened to me is I was drawn.
01:03:19.960 I knew I was being drawn.
01:03:21.920 There was this, like, spiritual thing that was happening where I couldn't put it down.
01:03:27.740 I just had this hunger to know, wait, who is this God?
01:03:32.400 And what does he say?
01:03:34.640 And should I care?
01:03:36.480 Should I jettison God altogether?
01:03:41.380 I found out he was consistent.
01:03:44.160 He was compassionate.
01:03:45.700 He was bold.
01:03:47.320 He was kind.
01:03:48.940 He was merciful.
01:03:50.080 But he's also full of justice.
01:03:52.300 It's this wonderful mix of, you know, setting the rules and people needing to meet the rules, but knowing that you can't.
01:04:03.340 And then just being grateful that he took your weapon for you and then giving your life to him.
01:04:10.700 I cannot tell you, Allie, how my life changed.
01:04:13.700 For one thing, like I said, I love the part of your book where you're talking about the me-ology, the me-culture, me, me, me, me, me.
01:04:21.000 In Mormonism, it was all about me.
01:04:22.780 I was constantly trying to promote myself professionally and worldwide.
01:04:27.720 And I was promoting myself professionally so that people would be drawn to the Mormon church.
01:04:32.080 That was the bottom line.
01:04:33.960 That's why these TikTokers do what they do.
01:04:36.760 It's all about promoting Mormonism because they believe it's the one true way.
01:04:43.380 But I realized it is not about me.
01:04:47.440 God actually took me through 18 months of my sins and my pride after I got saved until I was so face down, empty of myself, and just willing to do whatever God does.
01:05:03.780 So here I sit because somebody, Brie, contacted me and said, Allie wanted to talk to me.
01:05:11.580 And I went, God is in this.
01:05:15.120 I will pick up and go and talk to Allie, right?
01:05:18.900 I'm not the author of my life anymore.
01:05:21.780 I'm not the master of my soul.
01:05:24.380 This wonderful God that I can trust who saved me, thank God.
01:05:30.540 I went face down at 54, and I cried and cried and cried.
01:05:35.980 Why didn't anybody tell me I'm 54 years old that I needed a Savior, right?
01:05:43.780 The difference with works now, in Mormonism, I was constantly doing works to try to please him.
01:05:51.680 Now the Holy Spirit lives in me, and he brings the works.
01:05:55.200 I don't have to dig off boxes.
01:05:58.200 I just pay attention to the girl in line at the grocery store because God probably put them behind me for a reason.
01:06:05.240 It's a very purposeful life to know the Lord, to know that he loves you, that he called you for a purpose.
01:06:13.800 So obviously the purpose he called me for was to tell my story from performance-based faith to grace-based faith, and I'll do that any opportunity I have.
01:06:26.260 It was funny going from Brigham Young, where I could pray with my students, to go to a secular university after that Florida that hated Christians, right?
01:06:36.800 And to learn to stand for my faith and let people laugh at me, and I'd laugh with them.
01:06:44.760 It was just, it's just fine.
01:06:46.820 I know who I am in Christ, and I'm fine with that.
01:06:49.800 And you have no idea how many people are drawn to that, right?
01:06:52.940 You don't have to be fake in any way.
01:06:55.400 Yes, and you talked about just the repudiation of all different kinds of works-based faith.
01:07:01.420 It's not just Mormonism.
01:07:02.740 In fact, everything, whether it's mimicking Christianity or whether it's something that has nothing to do with Christianity, every faith besides Christianity, true Christianity, tells you how to climb the hill to get to God.
01:07:19.140 Here's what you have to do.
01:07:20.260 And Christianity is different in that God got down from his throne off the hill and came down to us and said, there is nothing that you can do to climb this mountain.
01:07:30.620 Come on.
01:07:31.520 And he did it for us.
01:07:33.160 Ephesians 2 lays all of this out perfectly, that we were once dead in our sin apart from Christ.
01:07:38.400 If you are dead, you cannot help yourself.
01:07:40.840 You cannot earn your salvation.
01:07:42.660 You cannot revive yourself.
01:07:43.820 You can't resuscitate yourself.
01:07:45.300 Someone has to make you alive.
01:07:47.760 There's nothing you can do to clean yourself up.
01:07:49.740 You can't make a corpse smell good or look good or make it presentable to God.
01:07:54.600 You are dead in your sin.
01:07:56.580 Only Christ makes you alive.
01:07:58.500 And that's what Ephesians 2 tells us.
01:08:00.460 By grace, you have been saved through faith.
01:08:03.180 And this is not your own doing.
01:08:05.620 Not a result of works.
01:08:06.820 He's so consistent and so repetitive in that.
01:08:09.280 Not a result of works so that no one can boast.
01:08:12.200 And Ephesians 2 says that we were created or God saved us for the good works that he created beforehand that we should walk in them.
01:08:21.520 So you're talking about those good works.
01:08:24.020 In Christianity, those good works flow from the grace that God has given us.
01:08:30.520 They're not to earn our faith or to earn his approval, but because he has already approved of us, because of what Christ did for us, we turn around through love and through grace, do the good works that God gives to us.
01:08:42.880 It makes all the difference in the world.
01:08:46.320 The gospel makes all the difference in the world.
01:08:48.580 And I'm just thankful to you for how you've used it, how God has used you to bring the gospel of grace to others.
01:08:56.680 And so thank you so much.
01:08:59.080 We've even had Muslim converts, right?
01:09:02.320 So we've had Catholic converts.
01:09:03.920 There's anybody in a place of performance-based religion who thinks that they have something to offer at the bottom of the cross that makes a difference.
01:09:13.680 Look what I did, God.
01:09:15.900 It doesn't.
01:09:17.060 He's done it all.
01:09:18.640 He's wonderful.
01:09:19.500 He's all loving.
01:09:21.120 And when you give your life to him, your life will change profoundly.
01:09:25.100 Yes.
01:09:25.540 Amen.
01:09:25.940 Well, thank you so much.
01:09:26.960 I really encourage everyone to get her book, Unveiling Grace.
01:09:30.720 It's an amazing testimony, and we really could talk for two more hours about all of this.
01:09:36.140 But thank you, Lynn.
01:09:37.540 Everyone can find you in your podcast, the Unveiling Grace podcast, correct?
01:09:43.040 And find your book and follow you.
01:09:44.900 You've got lots of resources.
01:09:46.100 So thank you so much.
01:09:47.380 Thank you, Allie.
01:09:48.420 Thank you for what you do.
01:09:49.860 Thank you.
01:09:55.520 All right.
01:09:56.240 I knew you guys were going to enjoy that conversation.
01:10:00.140 She's really incredible.
01:10:02.480 She mentioned Dallas Jenkins.
01:10:04.280 We will have him on the show Monday, and we will ask him about this.
01:10:08.800 And so that'll be a really interesting conversation as well.
01:10:12.860 The timing just happened to work out really well.
01:10:15.600 All right.
01:10:15.900 Thanks so much for listening.
01:10:17.660 And just as a reminder, next week starts kind of like our holiday break, but we are going
01:10:23.220 to have all new episodes, four new episodes next week.
01:10:26.040 We'll have two new episodes the following week after Christmas.
01:10:28.800 And then after that, the first week of 2023, we will have three new episodes, maybe four,
01:10:36.440 but probably just three.
01:10:37.700 So all new stuff, really amazing interviews and topics and questions answered and all of
01:10:42.420 that good stuff.
01:10:43.600 You're going to love it.
01:10:44.780 And so Merry Christmas.
01:10:46.860 We'll see you guys back here on Monday.