Over the past five years or so, I’ve tried every so often to track down a particular conversation here at MSP about one of John Dehlin’s failures to tamp down a crisis he created for himself. Something about it nagged at me, and I wanted to review it. I was pretty sure the conversation happened during Obama’s second term, but I could never come up with a search that would let me find it—until yesterday, and it took me hours of poking around in the archives. (More about that in subsequent posts, because some of the conversations here are fascinating and deserve to be revisited.)
I was motivated to find it yesterday because yesterday was Sunday, and it seemed about time to spend part of my Sunday reexamining how a commitment to Mormonism messes up people’s lives, something I rarely do these days. Also, I learned that there was yet another kerfuffle over one of the stages of JD’s personal mystery cycle happening again: Some exmos in general and some exmo women in particular are upset that John demonstrates more loyalty to the COJCOLDS than he does to the people who pay his salary. In a recent podcast, he said that
• his goals are to strengthen the church, not weaken it
• he doesn’t want anyone to leave the COJCOLDS if doing so is in any way unhealthy for them
• he thinks the reasons the church refused to be transparent before the internet were “very good reasons”
• he didn’t fault the church for lying to people, adding that he probably would have done the same thing if he’d been in the church’s position (which I can totally believe, because I’ve seen him do it)
• he’s reading Joseph Smith’s biography and “has gained so much respect” for JS
• he has more empathy for both early and current church leaders because he knows how hard it is to be a prophet, er, uh, leader of a small group of people, much less a big one
• he doesn’t think secularism is “the way” or that “secular people have figured out a way to create not just community but morality, spirituality, a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, a sense of identity, in any sustainable, coherent, lasting, profoundly affecting way”
• he cares “about society maybe even more than [he does] the individual and [he thinks] in some ways, religion is the best we’ve ever come up with for helping people live happy, healthy, meaningful lives so far, and [he’s] just not necessarily happy with the practical results of secularism in the lived lives of people”
• he’s reached out to his bishop and said, “Hey, bishop, if I came to sacrament meeting, would you be okay with that?” and hasn’t heard back from the bishop
• if the church were to say, “We take away your excommunication and you’re still a member,” he “would at least occasionally attend”
I really find it shocking and gross that anyone who claims to care about the groups that John says he cares about could look at the way religion has infected US politics and say that the US and the world are better off now than when secularism meant we tried to treat everyone equally and believed in science.
When I first left the church, I still felt a lot of allegiance to it in a number of ways. I still had home teachers, and I let them in when they came to see me. My Institute ward got a new bishop within a year after I quit attending, and he called me in for an interview, and for whatever stupid reason, I went. Gordon B. Hinckley came to talk to the Institute, and I went to that too, just for the hell of it. (It was 1990, so Hinckley was running the church then but wasn’t prophet because Benson was still alive but incapacitated.) I don’t remember if it was Hinckley or the new bishop who went on and on about how terrible it was when men wore earrings, but neither man made me question in the slightest my decision to go inactive.
But by six or seven years later, when missionaries showed up at my door, I did not let them in. I wasn’t mean to them, because I remembered how that felt, but there was no way they were coming in my house. When I had to go to a Mormon funeral, I would get up and walk around the building during any really churchy sermons. I didn’t have my name removed, because my mother asked me to promise her I wouldn’t, but when the church sent me a letter commanding me to inform them whether I was the Holly Welker who was blessed on such-and-such a date and baptized on my eighth birthday, or one of the other Holly Welkers in the world, I didn’t.
I still had plenty of trauma to work through, and I had years when I had almost nothing to do with the church and years when I participated in various Mormon-adjacent forums (MSP being one of them, MSP meaning Main Street Plaza and not Mormon Stories Podcast) to help me work through that trauma and also because I found Mormonism interesting and enjoyed hanging out with a lot of the people who also found Mormonism interesting.
I’ve said a few times that I feel a tad sorry for people who understand major problems in the church but earn a lot of their income through activities requiring their continued engagement with Mormonism. I have made a very little bit of money from writing about Mormonism, though it doesn’t come close to what I paid the church in tithing, and if I’d earned it all in one year, I doubt I would have to pay income tax on it. In other words, it was never so lucrative that I felt obligated to keep doing it. When I got bored or frustrated by it, I could stop, so I did. I really enjoyed the years I spent living in Salt Lake City (which honestly surprised me a bit), and I wasn’t entirely thrilled to leave it when circumstances made it appropriate. But one thing that made it a lot easier was how nice it felt to be able to ignore the church when I no longer lived less than a mile from the Church Office Building.
John’s excommunication was in 2015, so he’s had a decade to process it. But he’s had to do it while still talking about the church all the time because that’s his primary income. His view of everything is still tainted by Mormonism—including secularism, as the MSP conversation I was looking for shows. Imagine someone who worked with their ex-spouse every single day and never pursued a relationship with another person saying that they couldn’t imagine anyone every being a better spouse than their ex. JD patterns his organizations on the church, so yeah, it’s not surprising that his attempts at secularism fail when the model they’re imitating is religious.
When the whole Ordain Women thing happened, someone who knew I didn’t think very highly of the Mormon priesthood asked me why I was participating. I said it was because if it succeeded, which I considered unlikely, that could be progress, but if it failed, which I fully expected it to do, more people would see how full of crap the church was and would leave. It was a win either way.
Also, I understood the cycle: People discover a problem in the church. People think that they have some power to change the church in meaningful ways. People try to change the church in meaningful ways. People fail. People feel bad. People confront the reality that the church is unlikely to change. People realize they can’t change back into someone who didn’t know about the problem. People leave the church. The church implements a few minor changes after the crisis that make being Mormon less awkward and inconvenient, but the changes aren’t enough to get most people to go back, because when it comes right down to it, the men leading the church do not want to change it–at least not the way members want it to. (See: Nicknames are a victory for Satan.) John Dehlin doesn’t want to change either, which is why, as people have been noting for years, he does the same thing over and over.
Unlike John, I readily admit that I am happy to help people leave the church. I’ve done it many times. I have no particular qualifications for it except that I had to manage my own departure all by myself before I even knew the internet existed and before I knew one single person like me, who had gone on a mission but just couldn’t stay in the church because it was so inhospitable to truth. But unlike John, after I help someone leave, I don’t talk at length about how awesome it would be if we could go back to church.
Instead, we talk about how secular weddings are a million times more joyful and fun than temple weddings. If you really want to celebrate your marriage, it’s way better to do it by exchanging vows in front of the people who love you best, even if they’re little kids or atheists, and then throwing a great party for them and having dancing and champagne. It’s totally superior to putting on white clothes and going into a cramped little room with a few adults who wear the same kind of underwear as you and having a ceremony you’re not allowed to photograph, and then serving hors d’oeuvres, cake, and booze-free punch at a sedate reception. We talk about how the world is a nicer place when you’re not judging it through the lens of Mormonism.
Also, just for the record: John doesn’t have to get permission to go to church. It’s not like they have bouncers at sacrament meeting who would physically eject him. Sure, some people might look at him askance, and he might be asked not to come back, but he has to be used to that by now, since he makes it happen over and over.
Plus the church claims that it wants its excommunicated members to go to church. Look at the September 6, six people disciplined by the COJCOLDS in September 1993 for publishing work critical of the church: Avraham Gileadi was rebaptized in 1996; Maxine Hanks was rebaptized in 2012; and Lavina Fielding Anderson, a wonderful human any congregation would be lucky to have, just kept going to church and participating in her ward for the rest of her life as if her excommunication had never happened. A couple of my friends who are no longer members (I don’t remember if they were excommunicated or resigned) are nonetheless very active and welcome in their blue state New England ward.
Finally, having invoked mystery cycles, I figure I should include a link explaining what they are, which is sort of like the temple ceremony but without as much audience participation. And having invoked medieval and Renaissance Catholicism, I can’t resist an opportunity to mention my favorite emissary of those times.
In his substack post, John says at some point:
I recently got back into doing some blogging, based on things I was seeing on X/Twitter (which, uhh, yeah, not a great platform, would not recommend people continue going there.) And it just felt like faithful Mormons were going completely “mask off”. I wanted to say, for example, “in 2025, Mormons understand it’s beyond the pale to make statements justifying the priesthood ban for black people, so it’s a mystery or God did it.” But then I saw a thread where someone said with their full chest: “change my mind: Brigham Young was right: blacks are cursed.” And the responses from other faithful Mormons were not unanimous and complete condemnation of the guy’s message.
And I realized something: I do not feel the need to voluntarily subject myself to Rightwing talking points 101 day in and day out. I know that I will involuntarily get plenty of that, but to take time every Sunday and voluntarily immerse myself in a community of people who have tied their religion up with these things is just…not something I’m interested any more. I still like some of the online spaces because they are not that (they still have issues, certainly, but…) I just recognize that’s not what I would get if I went back to a ward on Sunday in most places.
John tries to pre-emptively address this in his substack article when he asks if he is “insensitive to the harm the LDS Church causes and has caused to women, LGBTQ people, people of color, and abuse victims.” He puts up his body of work as his purchased indulgences and dares others to compare their indulgences to his.
But I feel like the point that is missed is that at the end of the day, he just apparently isn’t all that personally affected by the way the church is. So, for him, it’s still something to feel kinship to.
With respect to something you wrote:
There was a series of videos published on YouTube a month or two ago called “An Inconvenient Faith”. Disaffected folks will probably think it’s too apologetic to really enjoy it, but the interesting thing was that for a few weeks, there were discussions *about* the series, and John was going from podcast to podcast to discuss. And I recall him saying something precisely to the extent that he views the prophetic role as the ability to rouse people to action, bind them together in a community, and to keep that community going. So, to the extent that Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, etc., provably did this makes them prophets. This got the expected amount of pushback from the other exmormons on the discussion, who pressed him about whether any charismatic charlatan would qualify, and John basically conceded that yes, if they created a lasting community, then they counted.
And he absolutely did compare to his own initiatives and difficulties with building anything comparable.
I also want to +1 another thing you said near the end
Exactly right! It is curious to me that people think that excommunication stops them from attending. The September Six examples are really relevant, but I know excommunicated gay people who still have a testimony of the church and so they attend despite being excommunicated. But somehow, this just doesn’t seem to be an option for many people.
It’s almost as if folks like John understand that going as an excommunicated person means going as a second-class citizen (well, non-citizen, really. An outsider) and they don’t really want to do that. But they don’t continue the logic onward — yes, they are 2nd class here. This is a club many other kinds of people have been in. We can’t just choose to “be part of the club” again. But we can choose to have a sense of dignity for ourselves, a sense of self-respect, to understand that we can find our own communities and not
Wow, what a fantastic Christmas present for me to wake up to on the 23rd of December!! A really insightful analysis of an aspect of the ExMo community — with a reminder of how lively the discussion here used to be (and links for proof!)!!
I agree about how hard it must be for people to process their own feelings towards CoJCoL-dS when they make their living commenting about it after leaving. I love your metaphor about people who work every day with their ex!
You can see that personally I’m barely keeping the lights on here at MSP. It makes me absolutely no money (I have never tried to monetize it), but rather it costs me time. It also sort of costs me money, but since my real job is “DevOps and cloud infrastructure engineer,” I maintain some hobbyist servers in the cloud for professional reasons, which allows me to host websites like this one at no additional cost.
So, like you, I think about Mormonism only rarely — which is kind of too bad since I miss the friends and interesting discussions here that your post reminds me of.
At least the Brodies are still going. I think I’ll nominate this post for one. 😀
Hope can be both useful and cruel. I used to hope the LDS church could change, evolve into something better, and I tried to help that along. But that was false hope, which isn’t the same thing. Unrealistic hope is cruel. Once I realized change was never going to happen in a meaningful way, I felt I’d wasted way too much time and energy. Now I can barely bring myself to read an article about the new sleeveless garments or women going on missions at 18. It’s just become too boring.
I see the horrific things Mormons support in government, see horrific Mormon politicians, see LDS leaders NOT discipline them in any way, and I can’t imagine this organization ever becoming something I would want to associate with voluntarily. When the few believing Mormon folks still in my life after I was excommunicated converted to MAGA, I realized I no longer had to struggle to maintain these relationships, no longer needed to worry about being rejected by the last of these folks I cared about. I also no longer had any energy left to worry about “helping” them see the light. I cut them off and felt better about my “relationship” with Mormonism than ever before.
As for Dehlin making most of his income via Mormonism, that’s a choice. Most folks in the U.S. are forced to change jobs, even careers, more than once. I taught at an HBCU for ten years, then worked in a public library for four years, then worked at a bookstore, then worked as a mail carrier, a bank teller, an equity loan processor, and so on. Our options aren’t unlimited, but I expect Dehlin has a few if he wanted to unhitch his wagon. Even continuing with his current job, he’s not forced to actually support the oppressor. That’s a choice, too.
Hi Andrew—
You write, “to take time every Sunday and voluntarily immerse myself in a community of people who have tied their religion up with these things is just…not something I’m interested any more.”
One of the reasons I had to leave the church is that I would cry for hours after Sunday meetings because people so often said stupid harmful things, which other people then went along with. One woman gave a sacrament meeting talk in which she said, very dismissively, “Hard work never killed anyone, people–remember that.”
I was just like… has she never heard of chattel slavery? Or the people worked to death in forced labor camps in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union? Or people who died building dams or railroads or working in mines? Why is workman’s comp a thing if hard work isn’t dangerous and potentially deadly?
And OK, it was an Institute ward, and she was only twenty years old or so and a complete idiot, and maybe she learned how wrong she was later. But she said this obviously dumb thing with such conviction, and no one but I was horrified by her statement. At some point, I could no longer spend all week amassing the wherewithal to sit through talks like that and restrain myself from standing up and saying, “You are full of shit,” only to go home weak and enervated, because sitting through church was the hardest thing I did all week.
You write, “John basically conceded that yes, if [any charismatic charlatan] created a lasting community, then they counted” as a prophet.
Huh. Well, the community Joseph Smith created “lasted” only because Brigham Young convinced a bunch of people to walk halfway across North America after Joseph Smith was assassinated. Joseph Smith very nearly destroyed the movement he created by behaving so badly that people not only wanted to kill him, but did kill him and his brother. I don’t find that especially admirable, but clearly John feels otherwise.
I also don’t admire people who create a lasting community largely by lying to members of that community, but again, John clearly does.
You also write, “we can choose to have a sense of dignity for ourselves, a sense of self-respect.”
Yes! That is an excellent framing. I have too much self-respect and dignity to subject myself to the kinds of conversations that happen in devout LDS spaces.
Chanson, thank you for continuing to leave the lights on here! If nothing else, MSP is a really useful archive documenting some elements in the evolution of Mormon and exmo spaces in the 21st century.
Johnny, you are absolutely right that John is choosing the life he has right now, including centering the church in his life as an excommunicant. The point of this post is to examine some of the choices he has made and look at how effective they are in achieving his stated goals, such as “helping people live happy, healthy, meaningful lives.” He chose, for instance, not to pursue licensing as psychotherapist because he didn’t want to work within the restrictions that would entail, and it’s hard to imagine anyone who with no connection to Mormonism choosing to hire him, given his focus. He has chosen to lie about things that weren’t worth lying about, as I document in the Facebook post I link to in the OP. He has chosen to make statements that alienate some of his core constituents.
I find some of those choices strange, and I think his continued immersion in Mormonism explains them far better than any drift toward secularism.
After I published the post, I remembered an article from the Ensign years ago, about how a woman responded when her husband lost his faith in the COJCOLDS. This sentence always struck me: “And he no longer wanted to pay tithing, a difficult situation I thought I would never be asked to face.”
Seriously? The church has billions of dollars, and a spouse not wanting to pay tithing is really shocking and difficult? It reminded me of John’s statement about how in the wake of his statements, “Some even cancelled their donations to Mormon Stories Podcast,” along with a link to the donation page.
Like, OMG! The free market is a thing even in religion and post-religion?! People can stop giving you free money if they decide you don’t actually deserve it?!
Whatevs.
I recently had a conversation with a woman who, like me, had left the church many years ago, before the internet. When she moved to the Bay Area around a decade or so ago, she found herself looking for a friends network. Even though she’d been out of the church for most of her adult life, was married to a Non-mormon, was raising Non-mormon children, and had Non-mormon coworkers, she still went to her local LDS chapel to find friends. It was her comfort zone, after all. Part of her would always be Mormon and she wanted that connection. Also it’s sort of an ingrained practice. Move into town, call the ward, the Elders Quorum shows up to help you unload! Instant friends. She, in fact, did find a new circle of female friends in the chapel that day.
For the same reason, I spent many years throwing Ex-mormon parties, arranging meetups, and writing books and blog posts about the Mormons. I’m still doing the writing, although the socializing is limited to a smaller circle of former Mormons with whom I connect with on issues other than just Mormonism. I used to have a smattering of believing friends, but we’ve since grown apart.
I get the need for community. But I don’t get turning a blind eye to the harmful beliefs and practices embraced by that community. And I’m especially baffled by why John won’t fault the church for lying to people. He’d have done the same? Well, that says it all.
An update on the woman and that circle of friends she found at church. They are now all Exmormons too! A lovely group of women pursuing their best lives. And if it’s any comfort to him, I can assure John that doing so has not been in any way unhealthy to them.
Great post, Holly!
Hi Donna–
You write, “I’m especially baffled by why John won’t fault the church for lying to people. He’d have done the same? Well, that says it all.”
It absolutely does say it all! I had to force myself to listen to his comments at the end of the podcast, but I’m glad I did, because it’s so bonkers.
He actually says, starting at 2:21:09,
Yes, John, that’s fair, and it’s fair to say the same damn thing about you.
It’s so bizarre that he can’t see how that applies to him, in the midst of talking about how much he has more empathy for church leaders and understands why they lied and would probably lie just like them in the same situation.
Like, What The Actual F*ck. He has a PhD in clinical psychology, but he still can’t see the problems with his defenses of lying to people, and he’s surprised that the people hurt because the church misled and lied to them now feel misled and lied to by him?
“For a lot of the people that we’ve surveyed about losing their faith, it wasn’t the polygamy, it wasn’t the fourteen-year-olds, it wasn’t polyandry, it wasn’t even the book of Abraham. it was feeling misled and lied to.”
Wow. Perhaps John is just repeating the results of his survey. (Laying the blame on his guests and listeners.) But it’s still a bit chilling to hear him cast aside polygamy and “14-year-olds” as a mere faux pas made large only because church leaders lied about it. –Which John totally forgives them for doing. Would have done the same thing himself!
In a way this entire episode reminds me of when Bill Maher went to dinner at Mar-a-Lago and came away gushing about what a great guy his host was.
“it’s still a bit chilling to hear him cast aside polygamy and ’14-year-olds’ as a mere faux pas made large only because church leaders lied about it.”
Exactly! And you’d think even John Dehlin, clueless as he is about so many things, would realize why that’s a problematic thing to say (to put it mildly) right now. Has he not heard that being friends with or defending an adult man who rapes 14-year-olds can destroy people’s careers if not their lives? Does he know what happened to the former prince Andrew? Did he hear what Megyn Kelly said, or notice how horrified people were by it?
I mean, of course he knows that stuff; the shame and opprobrium attached to admitting that Joseph Smith married 14-year-olds is one of the “very good reasons” the church had to lie. And it’s a truism in Washington that the coverup is often worse than the crime. But in this case, the crime is still pretty damn bad.
Did you see this meme from “The Silver Plates”? I think it’s relevant 😉
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1147541454031709&set=a.698246085627917
That’s hilarious, Chanson!
COJCOLDS is tribalism, no different, no better than MAGA, built on repeating lies and aligning the worst aspects of human nature. Dehlin can’t let go of his sacred cow, and why would he? He can be his own self fulfilled martyr. Oh, the suffering to be excommunicated. The shame.
WTF-ever.
He should have learned from the gay community: go where you’re wanted and celebrated, celebrate yourself for fuck’s sake, not stay where you’re tolerated.
@Chanson – thanks for keeping the lights on.
@Andrew – loved your comments.
@Holly – impressive writing.
@Johnny Townsend – glad to see your name again, it’s been a while.
@Donna – We need to meet up again, it’s been too long.
Thank you for hosting those Exmo Parties Donna. Without that I wouldn’t know you and Mark and all the others!
My therapy practice is small but EVERY SINGLE PERSON is dealing with some type of issue, thought, belief or behavior that directly impacts their ability to find peace and happiness, and they are not all former mormons. The juxtaposition that John finds himself in is always stating that speaking for God gives people too much power, yet religion is the best forum for community. Hmmmmm….
I hope people can move beyond needing to be told an interpretation of a centuries old book whose origins are remarkably questionable in and of itself. And I think if humans have a desire to gather and support they can find ways to do it that doesn’t have to include cult like structures and behaviors.
Hi Donovan–
I agree with your analysis here: “Dehlin can’t let go of his sacred cow, and why would he? He can be his own self fulfilled martyr. Oh, the suffering to be excommunicated. The shame.”
The thing is, so many people who were excommunicated but lacked John’s stature have just let go of the sacred cow and the martyrdom. I’m thinking of friends who were excommunicated in the 1990s for being gay. They had to choose between their sexuality and the church, and at some point, they weren’t interested in the self-loathing involved with choosing the church.
John insists that his crime was wanting the church to be better, to live up to its ideals. And the only way he can say he wasn’t wrong to do that is to insist that the church is still fundamentally good, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Hi Dane–
You write, “I think if humans have a desire to gather and support they can find ways to do it that doesn’t have to include cult like structures and behaviors.”
AMEN!