Ep 725 ｜ Leaving Mormonism for Christianity ｜ Guest： Lynn Wilder
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 10 minutes
Words per Minute
149.48946
Summary
Lynn Wilder shares her incredible story of leaving the Mormon church and becoming a Christian. She talks about how she became a Christian, why she left Mormonism and why she believes that Christianity is a wonderful option for her and her family.
Transcript
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But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one
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There is one God who is three in one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
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Today, we will be hearing from Lynn Wilder, who is going to tell us her incredible story
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out of the Mormon church and into Christianity.
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You are going to be challenged, informed, encouraged more than anything by the power of the gospel
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and the courage that God has given her to speak the truth in love.
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I'm thankful for this conversation, and I know you will be too.
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This episode is brought to you by our friends at GoToRanchers.
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For those who do not know, can you tell us who you are and what you do?
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In fact, I worked for the Mormon Church at Brigham Young University as a tenured professor,
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and Salvation came to my household a few years ago.
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I left Mormonism, wrote a book, and that book is sold more every year than it did the year
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As someone who has written a book myself, I know that that is not typical for books.
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But God definitely was almost a download from the Spirit, something that I just needed to
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I honestly believe that many Mormons are leaving their faith right now, and they're not aware
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that traditional Christianity actually is a wonderful option for them.
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And so that's what we offer to hundreds of thousands who are leaving the church, and this
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And actually, this grace message is for anybody that's in performance-based religion.
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I have a podcast after the book called The Unveiling Grace Podcast, and we talk about that walk
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from performance-based faith to grace-based faith.
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And the book is, as you just mentioned, called Unveiling Grace.
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I'm sure there are a lot of people listening who have already read the book.
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My mom was the first person to introduce me to your book and to your content, and that
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But there are a lot of people listening who don't know your story at all.
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There are a lot of Mormons listening right now.
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So could you take us back to how you became a Mormon?
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Because you and your husband, you were not raised Mormon.
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No, I actually grew up going to a Presbyterian church every week.
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But I could tell you neither of us opened the word.
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I couldn't have told you even how someone got saved.
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It was definitely kind of cultural Christianity for me.
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It's not unusual for nominal Christians, actually, to join Mormonism.
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Somebody who's heard of the Bible, thinks they believe in Jesus.
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And then Mormonism offers a perfect family, you know, this wonderful community.
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We were looking for a church, age 24, and we marched into Mormonism.
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We were in a while before we learned all of the kind of strange doctrines.
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But by then, we were so connected to the culture and the people.
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One day, my husband was home working on his master's thesis, and he wanted a diversion.
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And honestly, I just read Hal Lindsey's book, and I was a little interested in Last Days, right?
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The Mormon missionaries' tags said the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
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which is the King James Version of Last Days, right?
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They said they were Last Days' experts, and we believe them because we didn't know the Bible.
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Pew did a study a few years ago about who joins Mormonism and why and where they come from.
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This study said that 83% of the people that join Mormonism come out of nominal Christianity.
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So Mormon missionaries come to the door, oh yeah, we believe the Bible, right?
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And then they add to it the Book of Mormon, and then it goes off in a direction that's
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But if you don't know your Bible, you don't know that.
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And so you started going, and then when did you—you said that you weren't at first introduced
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to what you described as strange doctrines, but then later on you were.
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When you first started going to church, did it just kind of seem like, well, this is just
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Within a year, we joined the church, the Mormon Church in Indiana.
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At the time, our closest Mormon temple was in Washington, D.C., so we had to get in our
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I had a horrible first experience in the Mormon temple, came out with a terrible migraine headache.
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You can actually go online and see people who have secretly taped Mormon temple ceremony.
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But I learned things in the temple that I just hadn't picked up from a normal Mormon ward
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church service, things like a man can become a god, that man can possibly be polygamous in
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the next life, people his own world, you know, become a god of his own world, that there were
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Even after your first bad experience, you all stuck around.
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You started to learn some of these things, which I'm guessing you did kind of understand
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this is not the same as traditional Christianity at this point, even though you didn't really
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And yet I was surrounded by Christians, even in my family, none of whom ever stepped into
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So my own mother eventually started Bible Study Fellowship on the south side of Indianapolis.
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But I had been out of the house and in Mormonism years earlier.
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I had a sister who would have said they were Christian.
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My mother and my sister would not attend my Mormon baptism, but no one ever told me why.
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I always got the sense that they thought we were strange or something wasn't right.
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But honestly, Allie, after I read the Bible and discovered what Jesus himself said about
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all of this, which was 30 years later, I was a little bit angry with my Christian friends
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because I realized I had been marching off to a place that wasn't good all those years.
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And people were so afraid of rocking their relationship with me by stepping into an honest conversation
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about whether Mormonism was traditional Christianity, that they just ignored the topic.
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And so I will spend the rest of my life talking to anybody who wants to talk to me about what
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the doctrinal differences are and why it matters.
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And before we talk about your exit from the Mormon Church and some of those doctrinal differences,
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tell us a little bit more about what the Mormon Church is really like and what your experiences
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Because obviously, you had some good experiences there.
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I'm guessing you raised your family and your kids there for several years.
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So tell us kind of what you saw in the Mormon Church while you were there, good, bad, and
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So my husband had gotten a job as an instructor at the local university, and one of the professors
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It opened a whole new cultural world for us, all these important friends.
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I mean, they in many ways are wonderful people.
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Although I felt I had to do those things in Mormonism, it is performance-based religion.
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You need to do things in order to please God that he might save you.
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If you do X, Y, and Z, and do the five pillars, and then you've done enough good works by the
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There's no assurance of salvation, and so you're just working yourself crazy, and so you have
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these sweet Mormon moms with six, seven kids trying to homeschool, trying to visit people
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in the hospital, and do a church calling, and be a friend to everybody, and it was so exhausting
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when I hit age 40, I remember just sitting and bawling, one day, I can't do this another
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Because you were so exhausted, because in your mind, you weren't doing these things.
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I'm sure, I mean, sure you were a loving person, but you weren't doing these things necessarily
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because of an outpouring of grace and love and mercy, but because you felt like you had
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to, because your very salvation was on the line if you didn't.
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So in Mormonism, there are three different heavens, and in order to get to the highest
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In order to go to a Mormon temple, you have to get a Mormon temple recommend.
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In order to do that, you have to do this whole host of things like pay tithing, and live a health
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code, and have a calling in the church, and the list just goes on, and on, and on, and yeah, it's quite exhausting.
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So the three heavens, the celestial, and the terrestrial, and then what's the other one?
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Tea last joke, okay, got it, got it, got it, okay, because I recently read an autobiography
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by someone who was raised in the Mormon church, and she was kind of talking a little bit about that.
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Can you tell us, because we like to talk about theology on this podcast, I know my audience
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is interested in this, can you tell us just a little bit about Mormon theology and Mormon doctrine?
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You've already touched on a lot of it, but how would you kind of summarize some of the
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teachings, like, do they rely on the Book of Mormon, or the Pearl of Great Price more?
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I've heard from a lot of Mormons that they say they rely mostly on the Bible, and that
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it is, that the Book of Mormon, and that all of the Mormon books align perfectly with the
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Well, I obviously don't believe that, but tell us, just kind of what do Mormons believe?
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There are 13 articles of faith, and it's Mormon scripture, and one of them, you just alluded to,
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says, we believe the Bible to be the Word of God as far as it's translated correctly.
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But we believe the Book of Mormon to be the Word of God, no qualifier.
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So as a Mormon, I believe that the Book of Mormon had come directly from Jesus to Joseph
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There's also a Doctrine and Covenants, which is supposedly revelations to the Mormon prophets.
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Mormons have a prophet at the head, a prophet, he has two counselors, they have 12 apostles.
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So you have 15 men at the top of the church considered prophets, seers, and revelators.
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There's a whole priesthood hierarchy, a priesthood system in the Mormon church.
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Those people determine scripture, they determine doctrine, because the God that the Mormons follow
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So the God of the Bible says over and over, he's the same yesterday, today, and forever.
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But the God of the Mormons changes, and they like that about him.
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So some examples are Mormons lived polygamy, right?
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Then they weren't, Utah wasn't allowed to be a state unless they stopped living polygamy.
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The U.S. government, Ulysses S. Grant, when he was president, actually marched the army out
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to Utah and said, you know, you will stop practicing polygamy, it's against the law in the United
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So the prophet had a revelation, we're not practicing polygamy anymore.
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But then you had all these Mormon families in the 1880s.
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Mitt Romney's family was one of them who were polygamists, and they either had to run then
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to Canada or Mexico, where it wasn't against the law, or they had to go underground.
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So you have maybe as many as 100,000 polygamists living underground in the Intermountain West,
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It was called fundamentalist LDS, and they were still, as of recently, they live as if
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they are kind of in the 19th century still, and they have lots of young wives.
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Some of them, or some look like you and me, are very contemporary sister wives, or Corey
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and all his wives, I forget the name of that one.
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But yeah, it's very real, and it exists out West, particularly in Utah.
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But I'm saying that to give you an example of how the God of Mormonism changes.
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That was doctrine once, then it became overnight not doctrine.
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Blacks were not allowed to hold the priesthood until 1978.
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They couldn't go to the Mormon temple, which meant they couldn't live with a heavenly father
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So these three heavens in Mormonism, the upper one's for heavenly father, the middle one's
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for Jesus, and the bottom one's the Holy Ghost.
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But if you want to live with God the Father, you have to do all these works and work your
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So I love your episode 416 because you addressed who God is according to the Bible and who God
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According to the New Testament, you have an issue if you have a different God.
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The other thing, so just to stick to the basics when you ask me about differences, is if you've
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got a different God and he teaches a different gospel, then that is not the same gospel.
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You can't tell me as a Mormon that what you believe is the same as what I believe as a
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But when I was Mormon, I would have said, oh, yeah, Mormonism lines up with the Bible.
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Oh, I believe, at least in recent years, Mormons say they're Christians.
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One thing that I will say, just if people are considering, you're talking about how Mormons
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changed their doctrine or said that God changed, and they've kind of done the same thing recently
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They recently came out in support of the Respect for Marriage Act, which is really interesting.
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But I think some people might think, well, the Christian church has done the same thing.
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The Christian church, a large portion of the Christian church used to be pro-slavery or
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But I would say the difference is that Christians did not change biblical doctrine.
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They did not say that God changed, but they realized that actually in being pro-slavery or
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being pro-whatever degeneracy and immorality they were, that those who professed to be Christians
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and aligned with those things were in the wrong.
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It was that there were Christians who were in sin and who were not in alignment with
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the Bible, which has stayed consistent throughout the ages.
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We believe that Christians should change in conforming to God and not the culture, whereas
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Mormonism says, well, actually God has changed as the culture has changed.
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So as a Mormon, I would have called the Bible a dead word and the living prophet a living
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So the living word that came to my living prophet that I followed would be more contemporary,
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So that's another huge difference between Mormonism and Christianity.
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He purposed every day of my life before he called me to himself.
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And he knows what the truth is from the beginning.
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And one of the things I realized when I left Mormonism, because we were taught as Mormons
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that the Bible was sometimes corrupt, sometimes not translated correctly.
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So how could I say I believe the Bible if I don't know when it's telling me the truth
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So I always went to the Book of Mormon for the truth, because I believe that came directly
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So yes, they really don't believe the Bible is 100% the word of God.
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But what I realized was God is so big, he can easily keep every word of his word together
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I heard a pastor say one time, the Bible says it's the word of God.
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What kind of God lets somebody corrupt his word?
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The God I follow now is well able to keep his word together.
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In fact, the evidence, both scientific, historical, manuscript evidence, prophecy evidence that just
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goes on and on for the Bible is so overwhelming.
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It's still the biggest seller and always has been, right?
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And changing the word of God is a big problem for me.
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And before we go into some of the other doctrinal differences and kind of this movement towards
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You mentioned how when you were 40 years old, so you had been in the Mormon church a little
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over 15 years, I guess at this point, you had your children and you kind of had a breakdown
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because you were so overwhelmed with the performative nature of your religion and just trying to be
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everything for everyone, hoping that one day you will make it to the highest kingdom, right?
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But you didn't leave the Mormon church then, correct?
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But, you know, I don't know that I've ever told this story publicly, but I'm going to go there.
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About that time, I had an interesting experience.
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Went to bed one night and someone called my name, it sounded like, at 2 a.m. and I sat
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Well, I couldn't go back to sleep the whole rest of the night.
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I did not know the story of Eli in the Old Testament where God literally calls him, right?
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You have a very formal way, King James, in a pattern that you have to pray.
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I'm a Relief Society president, which is, there's kind of like a male pastor,
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and then there's a woman over, you know, the women in the ward.
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I'm working for the church, 20 hours a week, volunteer besides everything else that's going
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God wakes me up over and over, and after two weeks of hearing my name in the middle of night
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and not being able to go back to sleep, I remember going to my knees and just kind of
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an anger saying, look, if you have something to tell me, just tell me, because I can't stay
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And I got the impression that I needed to go back to school.
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Now, I had gotten a master's degree before I had my kids.
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And the Mormon prophet had just done a fireside called, come home from your typewriters, which
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of course, we didn't do typewriters in the early 90s.
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But the point was, women are not supposed to work, and they're supposed to stay home and
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have lots of kids and work for the Mormon church.
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And prophet had just said that, and I'm thinking I'm having some strange spiritual experience
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that's saying the exact opposite, because if I go back to school, I'm going to have to
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I think this is when the Holy Spirit began to work with me.
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But after I got my doctorate in 99, I went to work for the Mormon church.
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It's a level two research university, 36,000 students, but it's owned by the Mormon church.
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And you don't work there if you're a Mormon, unless you have a temple recommend, and your
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Mormon testimony is vetted by someone high up in the Mormon church.
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But then once you get a coveted position like that, there was lots of money, lots of support.
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I ended up as a journal editor, international journal editor, had lots of publications.
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I love in your book where you talk about self-promotion and all of that, everything revolves around
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That's the way it is in performance-based religion, because you're constantly trying to measure
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yourself against other people and what they're doing and making sure that you're ticking off
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all the boxes and that you're doing things for God that he might be pleased with, right?
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So, I just got more and more exhausted doing those kind of things.
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But oddly, Brigham Young was in trouble with their accrediting agency for not teaching diversity.
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And I was a new professor, and my background was that I'd worked in the inner city.
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I'd worked with the juvenile delinquents, lots of different cultures, et cetera, homeless.
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And so, I get slatted to teach multiculturalism.
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But we have to do this in order to keep accreditation.
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So, I began teaching multiculturalism at BYU in my very first multicultural class.
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My students, I'm talking to them about all these wonderful different cultures.
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And they're like, no, but if you have dark skin, you're less than other cultures.
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The students in 2000 at Brigham Young were saying that.
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And do you believe that that's what, because the doctrine had said that in the Mormon church
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I was unaware that my own LDS scriptures say 26 or 27 times that dark skin is a curse, and
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And how am I going to teach multiculturalism to students who are reading the Book of Mormon
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Certainly, it's something God used to begin to open my eyes.
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Because obviously, I mean, I've got my own problems with social justice and how ineffective
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And yet, God used kind of the introduction in that subject to show you, okay, what is true
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is incongruent with what the scriptures in Mormonism is teaching.
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So that was another moment for you of kind of, hmm, all right, this isn't maybe what
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My students told me it was in the Bible, and I remember saying out loud in class, that's
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It does not say in the Bible that dark is less than white.
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So sometimes when Mormons say in the Bible, do they really just mean in Mormon scriptures
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Because your God changes, even the scriptures in Mormonism changed.
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So what Joseph Smith wrote in the Book of Mormon, which was his earliest writings, right, was
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then often contradicted in the Doctrine and Covenants, which are supposedly revelations to
00:29:24.980
So you have Mormon scripture that's on one side, and then it's on the exact opposite side.
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So I never could use my brain and faith, although I had this researcher brain, this logical brain.
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I was taught to use only emotions in determining truth, right?
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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?
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Scriptures aren't really that important to you, though, if you're looking to a living prophet
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So tell us a little bit more, then, about your journey a few years after.
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It was just a few years after this, in 2000, after you started teaching this, that you
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I am embarrassed to tell you that although I hated polygamy, and it's in Mormon scripture
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still, that I hated the racism when I discovered it, that I did not want my husband to become
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a god and have multiple wives in the next life, that I was so comfortable in this life and
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I guess it just didn't matter that much to me, right?
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Our first son went on a Mormon mission to Russia.
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His lung collapsed in the missionary training center.
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And so he couldn't go to a place where the medical help wasn't really good.
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So they sent him to Florida, the happiest place on earth.
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He got sent to Orlando, Florida, where as a Mormon missionary, he was bumping up against
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No, decided he better know his Bible better, right?
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Because he hadn't really trusted it and didn't read it much like the rest of us.
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He said, I think he said he'd never read the New Testament from one end to the other.
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So for the two years of his Mormon mission, and he was a leader in his Mormon mission,
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he's reading the New Testament over and over and over, thinking he can prove Mormonism
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Three weeks before the end of his Mormon mission, it goes to his knees, gives his life to the
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Jesus of the Bible, realizing this is a very different gospel and a different God.
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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
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And he said, the phone rang, and it was his leader of the Mormon mission, leader over about
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Says, Micah, you're about to go home from your mission.
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And we'd like you to stand in front of your missionary peers and bear testimony of what
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Well, what he'd learned was that Mormonism was not true, that Jesus was enough.
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He got in a bit of trouble with the Mormon church.
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Were you disappointed when he called and he told you this?
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I knew something profound had happened to a kid who'd gone out so zealous for Mormonism
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to actually stand up against the Mormon church.
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And as his mom, I wanted to know what it was, right?
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Micah and I could not figure out why he was in trouble.
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They kept saying, he's preaching saved by grace.
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You keep telling us we believe the same as the Christians, right?
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Why is he in trouble for professing saved by grace?
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Well, the other part of that was, Jesus was enough.
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He didn't need the Mormon church for salvation.
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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.
00:34:52.040
So, if you jettison Joseph Smith, you jettison the book Mormon,
00:35:01.400
But we put him on a plane to get him out of Utah
00:35:13.260
Mom and Dad, please just read the New Testament.
00:35:40.300
And I went, Jesus wasn't God from the beginning.
00:35:54.740
And it doesn't have scriptures that are on one side
00:36:01.600
We call that, in statistics, internal consistency.
00:36:11.980
It's like the 30,000 archaeological digs for the Old Testament alone.
00:36:20.540
Isn't God trying to show you, right, that this Bible is reliable?
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
00:37:21.060
All you have to do is accept him as Lord and Savior, right?
00:37:27.700
And someone would come right behind him and teach performance-based religion.
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
00:37:48.240
If I come back and I look like an angel and I bring you another gospel, throw me out,
00:38:02.060
And if it does change, you don't have the same God and you don't have the same gospel.
00:38:13.640
Whenever I've had conversations with Mormons who follow me, a lot of Mormons are very conservative
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,
00:38:55.300
I mean, there are a lot of differences between Christianity and Mormonism, but that's what
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.
00:39:10.400
Mormonism teaches, as you said, and as you know, that Jesus was man, that he earned himself
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.
00:39:39.220
And I've even heard some believe, well, we believe in grace.
00:39:47.000
Sure, there are differences, but there are lots of differences in denominations.
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.
00:40:15.480
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
00:40:25.840
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
00:40:38.880
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?
00:40:56.880
They'll say Mormons who drink beer and Christians go to 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
00:41:23.220
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
00:41:38.500
When salvation came to me the day in October of 2006, I went face down and gave my life to
00:41:51.560
So they can say they're Christians, too, but if you get saved to grace alone, you can't
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.
00:42:51.260
That would have been a type of downgrade, although that is their mission field, right?
00:42:59.940
In recent years, though, it's only been maybe 15 years, maybe a little more, that Mormons
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.
00:43:52.900
When I was Mormon, it mattered that we got a Mormon president.
00:43:59.040
Because Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, had a prophecy that I was well aware of in
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
00:44:25.800
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
00:45:11.780
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,
00:45:29.980
All of these Mormon families are all of a sudden joining our Christian homeschool,
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.
00:45:58.400
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
00:46:18.400
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
00:47:04.640
And the, and the Christians just don't discern that it's Mormonism couched in Christian language.
00:47:15.360
So that takes us to another place, which is the chosen.
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.
00:48:03.960
It was originally started by two Mormon brothers, the Harmon brothers, who have a grocery store in,
00:48:11.660
So what you've got is now Mormons stepping into home school curriculum,
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.
00:49:28.720
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.
00:50:38.960
But doesn't somebody need to look at whether that's the same Jesus that you're following?
00:50:50.400
Mormons believe that Jesus was the brother of Satan and became God.
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.
00:51:34.100
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?
00:52:07.820
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.
00:52:21.380
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.
00:52:56.400
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.
00:53:54.400
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.
00:54:21.420
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.
00:55:16.960
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.
00:55:40.840
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.
00:56:29.200
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.
00:56:57.020
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.
00:57:49.940
I'm not going to tell you, I believe my husband can become a god.
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.
00:58:14.220
But that's a very deliberate thing called milk before meat.
00:58:20.120
And Christianity has that too, but in a different way.
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.
00:58:42.580
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.
00:59:13.300
And then each person can make their own decision about what that is.
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.
00:59:54.660
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.
01:00:08.960
So the Mormon Church owns 2% of land in Florida.
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.
01:00:45.140
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.
01:01:00.640
These five beautiful sons and such a wonderful family.
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?
01:01:22.040
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?
01:01:52.620
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.
01:02:18.620
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.
01:02:29.900
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.
01:02:52.580
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.
01:03:06.380
When I opened up the New Testament, read it with a sincere heart, the first thing that happened to me is I was drawn.
01:03:21.920
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?
01:03:52.300
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.
01:04:13.700
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.
01:04:22.780
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.
01:04:36.760
It's all about promoting Mormonism because they believe it's the one true way.
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.
01:05:15.120
I will pick up and go and talk to Allie, right?
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.
01:05:58.200
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.
01:06:46.820
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?
01:06:55.400
Yes, and you talked about just the repudiation of all different kinds of works-based faith.
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.
01:07:20.260
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.
01:07:33.160
Ephesians 2 lays all of this out perfectly, that we were once dead in our sin apart from Christ.
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.
01:08:09.280
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.
01:08:24.020
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.
01:08:46.320
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.
01:09:03.920
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.
01:09:21.120
And when you give your life to him, your life will change profoundly.
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.
01:09:37.540
Everyone can find you in your podcast, the Unveiling Grace podcast, correct?
01:09:56.240
I knew you guys were going to enjoy that conversation.
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.
01:10:17.660
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,
01:10:37.700
So all new stuff, really amazing interviews and topics and questions answered and all of