Aaron Shafovaloff on the New Mormonism

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line on a Tuesday afternoon. We're back here in Phoenix.

We'll be for a few weeks before we do a swing through Lubbock and Lubbock, Texas.

Beautiful downtown Lubbock, Texas. I said I mentioned to the one of the staff members

I was talking to there in Lubbock. I said, yeah, we take in the sights and sounds of beautiful Lubbock, Texas.

And he said, I didn't realize you had vision problems. Should you be driving? And I said,

I was trying to be somewhat humorous. You know, you don't you know, they folks in Lubbock might think

Lubbock's really pretty. Anyway, I've driven through the area before and there's not that much to see, but but nice people live there.

So we're going to be heading over to Lubbock and hopefully stopping in Las Cruces on the way back, maybe getting to visit with the church there.

Haven't gotten confirmation on that yet, but working to get that put together. A fairly short trip, another sort of shakedown run.

Make sure that what we've had done to the new unit does what needs to do. We met at Renan Day Storms on that.

But anyway, so we'll be here for, you know, about another month or so approximately.

And then back in the unit for less than two weeks. And then the next big trip will,

Lord willing, be Colorado. Hey, Denver folks.

What happened to y 'all? Remember when I debated the open theist up there and y 'all showed up and rah, rah, rah?

Tough to tough to get hold of folks in the Denver area. We need to visit Denver. We have a reservation, an

RV park in Denver we need to use. And we need to use it up soon. So trying to get up there, but we'll be hitting the

Colorado Springs area on the way up or on the way back, depending on what works out. And, you know, who knows?

Maybe hit Dolores, too. Again, got great friends down Dolores and have a have a great time there.

So we'll see how that works out in July, August. Today, obviously the debate that we had a few weeks ago up in Ogden has certainly stirred up my

X feed. I don't do Facebook. I'm sure if I was running around on Facebook, it would have been even worse there.

But I pretty much just stay on X. I don't do Instagram. I don't do TikTok.

I don't do any of that stuff. Just not interested. There's, I think there's information overload as it is.

But lots of fascinating conversations, lots of interesting interactions with Mormons.

And back in December, as I recall,

Aaron Shavanov, I'll get it right. What, why don't we bring Aaron out? Aaron, what is,

I've never asked you, what is the ethnicity of your, of your last name?

I mean, that, that is interesting. Eastern European. Well, okay, but that's, that's too general.

I mean, come on, you need to have some cool story about an ancestor that like saved his people from invaders.

Come on, come up with something cool. If I remember correctly, which probably don't, an ancestor came over during the

Bolshevik Revolution. Okay, all right. There you go. That's better than nothing.

I mean, you know, my last name's White. I mean, you know, and believe it or not, people mispronounce my last name too.

Witty? And it's like, no, it's just like the color. It's as bland as the color too. Anyways, Aaron, you are up there in the midst of things in Utah.

You work with the Mormonism Research Ministries and you write stuff and you're out on the streets and you're up there with Wade and Andrew from Apologia Utah and all the good folks up there reaching out to Mormons in the rather snowless

Wasatch Front. If it's, you think it's bad there, you got to see what it is down here in the desert.

We are, we are going to be out of water so fast. It ain't gonna be funny. But anyway, you're up there in the middle of things.

You came down and you did a little presentation for us that I was very appreciative of on the new

Mormonism. And then you just posted, I'm assuming you posted or did someone with the ministry post it other than you?

I posted that one. Okay, you posted a clip and I listened to it and was sitting there going, man, we had it a whole lot easier when, and I'm not sure if I've told you the story, but the first time we came up to General Conference, it was me and a fellow by the name of Mike Beliveau and Wagner, guy named, last name was

Wagner. We trained him on Mormonism while driving to Utah. That's not generally the best way to do things, especially because we were so young,

Aaron, that we drove overnight after they got off work on Friday and we drove through the night to Salt Lake, went to Gerald and Sandra's house.

They let us use the shower in the basement to get cleaned up and look all fancy and put our ties on and stuff.

And then we were outside the temple all day and this was back in the days when

Mormons wanted to talk to you. I mean, you'd literally have a line of people waiting to talk to you.

And our new guy basically got trapped against one of those pillars at the old gates, you know, at the

North Temple because, of course, there wasn't a meeting house yet. And I rescued him and he sort of stayed stuck to me for the rest of the time because he had no idea it was going to be this intense, neither did we.

And then you know what we did? We got done that evening. We drove through the night back to Phoenix, which, when you think about it, we had to have been in our early 20s and it was still stupid.

I mean, talk about taking your life in your hands. I call that the good kind of crazy. It's a good kind of crazy, but it was still crazy.

And, you know, there was no social media back then. Nobody could pull out a cell phone and start recording things.

It was a completely different world up there in Salt Lake, just the tabernacle.

It was a parking lot where the meeting house is now. And we're not talking about a two -story.

We're just talking about a flat field. You'd park cars in it. It was a complete...

There was Main Street. You know, the east side was a road with cars driving through.

And of course, oh gosh, Aaron, tell me you did at least get to visit because,

I mean, you're not super, super young. You're not exactly my age. But please tell me you got to visit the

Deseret Bookstore at Crossroads Plaza. Before... Well, was it

Crossroads? Was that... It was at Crossroads. Before they closed that thing down because it was the greatest

LDS bookstore I've ever been in. It was incredible. I don't have a concrete memory, but I remember going to the bookstore.

Okay. I remember Crossroads and, yeah. Yeah. I remember the South Gate and the North Gate. They've even built a tunnel underneath the

North Gate, North Center Gate now, so people can go underground to get from the main

Temple Square proper into the General Conference Building. Wow. They can avoid us every way they want to now.

Back then, back then, Aaron, I got to... Have you ever heard my

Rush Limbaugh track passing story? No. Okay. I'm at the

South Gate, and have you ever seen a Rush Limbaugh tie? No.

Oh my goodness. Okay. Rush Limbaugh ties are nuclear bright.

Okay. I mean, they can be seen from space. They come with batteries in Hawaiian Yards, and everybody back then that had a

Rush Limbaugh tie, you knew anybody else who had a Rush Limbaugh tie because you could spot them from half a block away.

They're just that bright. And I was wearing mine. My son was with me. He had a little 14 -inch boys version on, and we're standing outside the

South Gate, and I see this tall guy in a real nice suit striding down toward the

South Gate from the Church Office Building direction. So from the east. And I recognized he was wearing a

Rush Limbaugh tie before I even could see who he was, and he saw that I was wearing a Rush Limbaugh tie. So as he drew near, he's smiling, and he takes a blood atonement track from me as he goes into the conference.

And it's only when he got near that I realized who it was, and it was

Senator Orrin Hatch, who was at the time a sitting U .S. Senator. And the reason he took that track was because I was wearing a

Rush Limbaugh tie. So I've used that as an example of God's providence personally. I actually did give a track to Bruce R.

McConkie too. So there you go. But yeah, it was a different world back then.

And Mormonism, you know, there were differences, you know, you had the stuff at BYU, relationship with Christ, you know,

McConkie was, Eugene England, there were things like that. And in history,

Orson Pratt, Hyde, Brigham Young, different viewpoints.

We get all that. We know that historically. But man, in 1985 -ish, that's when we really started hitting the conference regularly.

You pretty much had the same conversation over and over and over again with almost everybody.

And in fact, I remember once this young guy, we're in the south side, he points up at Moroni, and he goes, in 25 years, there'll be a cross up there.

He was a Mormon guy. And he was lamenting the changes that he was seeing. Now, this was probably late 90s,

I guess. And those stuck out because they were so unusual.

Most conversations, same topics, same issues, doctrine of God, who is

God, who is Jesus, what is salvation, sufficiency of Scripture, Latter -day Revelation, you know, if you're passing out a tract in the

First Vision, whatever, you pretty much knew what you were going to be getting hit with. Now, my understanding is you're one of the whole group of folks that stands down in Provo.

Just off the campus of BYU, talking with young Mormons, not quite the same anymore, is it?

It seems like a lot of the literature that evangelicals have published to prepare

Christians to talk to Mormons was, in large part, inspired by and informed by the

McConkie, Joseph Billingsmith, Ezra Taft Benson era. So, understandably, it's assuming a kind of predictable

LDS theology. The most helpful thing that I have found with helping

Latter -day Saints understand the gospel and helping evangelicals prepare to talk to Latter -day

Saints is to understand that Mormonism is not a monolithic, homogenous thing anymore.

There's no one Mormonism. There are arguably a half dozen thought streams or strands of Mormonism that are, in some ways, they align with and approximate certain figures, certain people.

There's percentage alignment you could talk about, and that relates to the video we're going to talk about.

But I have found it helpful. One of the projects we're doing here at Mormonism Research Ministry, I call it the Mapping Mormon Theologies Project, or the

New Mormonism Project. And it's basically helping people understand from the historical development of Mormonism and its internal competing theologies.

And I mean, internally, LDS apostles opposing other prophets and apostles on particular issues.

If when you learn the story of how Mormonism has internally competed with itself with respect to different topics of theology, it helps one make better sense of the variegated landscape of modern

Mormonism, which is sort of like a map. You could think of it as a neighborhood map where there's different streets and different influences.

And so it's just really helpful for us on the street because it helps us ask some diagnostic questions just to understand where someone's coming from.

So I'm not necessarily imposing the McConkie era brand of Mormonism on maybe a student

I'm talking to. And a lot of the apologetics oriented students that we talk to these days are very much influenced in one way or another by Blake Osler.

Yeah, so, well, let's go ahead and get into the thing because one of the participants in the clip we're going to show that you put together.

So this is edited. I mean, this isn't the whole program or something like that you were putting together. In fact, you put...

I believe there's one jump cut because they, if I remember correctly, I could be wrong, where they start joking about Bigfoot cane and then there's like a big gap and then they return to the topic.

So I did, I put two clips together that are topically relevant to each other. Right, and then you provided some very interesting quotations along the way on the screen, which they didn't do that, right?

You did. Yes, I added the overlay quotes just to show how

Blake Osler himself, for example, has conceded that the regress of deities has been a dominant or at least a majority position amongst leaders and members.

Right, and for people who just may be tuning in, just to remind you, one of the things that came up in my debate with Jacob Hansen was his unwillingness to affirm historical, you know, we have imagined, supposed that God was

God from all eternity. I'll refute the idea and take away the veil so that you may see Joseph Smith, a quote that I memorized.

I'm not sure when you were born. 81. Okay, I memorized that when you were two.

So that gives you an idea. So, I mean, and until recently,

I never had anyone even blink at that quotation.

Now, starting in the late 90s, I started noticing more and more people that had never heard the quotation.

In the 80s, my goodness, the teenage kids knew it. I mean, they knew their stuff back then.

They really did. Even if they hadn't gone on their mission yet, they would come up to you. There's a spectrum of, we know that we teach it and we're proud of it, to,

I don't know that we teach that, which is the classic Gordon B. Hinckley, or is that Hinckley?

Yeah, Hinckley says that. And then there's now today, we don't teach that. So there's a full spectrum today of different Latter -day

Saints that take different positions on that. And by the way, that Hinckley quote comes up in this clip, and I remember when that happened.

That was, I think that was 98, 99, somewhere around in there, 2000 at the latest.

And the very, that was in an interview, and at the very next conference, he made a statement, something along the lines of, we know what we believe.

It was wink, wink, nod, nod type of a thing. And the crowd chuckled. Yes, the crowd, the entire crowd.

Rich just said that right before you did. So there's two independent verifications. They did, they all knew that.

But it rhetorically functioned for some people as an out, as a permission for plausible deniability, or maybe even, hey, maybe we don't have to believe that.

For other Latter -day Saints, it functioned as a, this is how we talk to outsiders about this, even though we're very proud of this teaching.

Yep, yep, that's exactly right. And in fact, I don't have that other clip, which

I should have queued up, and I apologize, but there was another clip that came out recently where one of the participants, and I believe, yes, the professor from BYU, was basically saying, you know, we shouldn't discuss this stuff with outsiders anyways.

It's none of their business. Sort of like, this is super advanced theology, and you know, they can't handle the milk, so they can't handle the meat either.

Which is not a new perspective. I have actually had Mormons say that to me for many, many, many years.

Well, this is just beyond where you are, not going to discuss that type of stuff with you. The problem is, Joseph Smith said, it is the first principle of the gospel to know that God was once a man, like we are.

You can talk with him, you know. I mean, it's just an amazing application. For Joseph Smith and the

King Follett discourse, this is a general conference sermon before tens of thousands of people, where Joseph Smith himself stakes his whole prophetic credibility on the content of the sermon.

He basically says, if what I'm about to teach you is wrong, you can dismiss me as a false prophet. But then he preaches the essence of that sermon as a grand reveal.

It's like an inflection point for him. This is extremely important, and then subsequent Mormon leaders treat it as one of the greatest sermons ever taught in the history of the world.

So for Latter -day Saints today to say, it's inconsequential, it doesn't matter, this is idiosyncratic, or Jacob Hansen, it could be wrong, you know, he could be fallible about this.

It's a shift, and honestly, I think a lot of ex -Mormons feel gaslit when they hear this kind of discussion.

And I think some Latter -day Saints, like Jonah Barnes, in this clip,

I think we watch in real time him being gaslit with this impression that this minority position of Lake Osler, the impression given is that it's not opposing the dominant historical majority view.

Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, we should get to it, but it was, it is a fascinating thing to watch this developing.

And like I said, you're out there in the middle of it. I would struggle with this, to be honest with you, because the greatest conversations

I had with Mormons were with the Mormons who actually believed what they said they believed. I struggle with trying to nail

Jell -O to a wall, okay? I like talking to people who actually will take a stand and will say, this is, this is revealed truth.

Joseph Smith saw God the Father and Jesus Christ as separate and distinct physical individuals in the spring of 1820. Okay, we've got something we can deal with there.

I, I struggle with the well, maybe this, well, maybe that, I don't know. And maybe that's a generational thing.

But do you like, do you like carry extra Advil with you? It is admittedly much easier for me to talk to people who are convictional.

Postmodern slipperiness is admittedly very difficult for me at a personal level to interact with.

But I mean, they're humans. I will say, and I texted you this or DM'd you this on Facebook Messenger, I think, a couple hours ago.

Just a few hours ago. Yes. I didn't know if you, I didn't know if you wanted to share this, but please, please feel free to do so.

I won't share his name, but I feel like a lot of this ministry is perseverance, right?

And there's a steady drip of providential encouragement that just comes at the right time.

So we're not even open here at the center. I took the day off. I'm about to go out for a wedding out of country.

And so I was here preparing for something later tonight, even also. And this guy comes in the door and we're not even open and he thought we were open and he comes and he sits down and he wasn't a

Mormon apologist for 10 years and he said he got saved just a few years ago and there wasn't any sarcasm or snide attitude in his voice whatsoever.

He was a man in his right mind sitting down talking about how he had spent years blaspheming

God, having a low view of God. These are his length, his words. And he said that two years ago

God had changed his heart and he had come to a sudden realization of how much greater God is and that God had done a miraculous work in his heart.

And he's sitting there talking about how good God was to change his heart now to believe in this sovereign, great, majestic God of the

Bible. And he was telling us, he was explaining to us sitting down at this table how he used to come to the street.

He says, Aaron, I remember talking to you at Temple Square. I remember watching Jeff Durbin debates of apologia.

He said he just mentioned just seeing your debate, your recent debate. And he remembered being so frustrated at how

Christians could just be completely blunt about what they believe.

We can be so genuine and overt and clear and direct but he felt like as a

Latter -day Saint apologist, he had to be, he was forced into a corner to be disingenuous essentially.

He couldn't be completely upfront about that. He remembered being really frustrated by that and he went down to Salt Lake City downtown to talk to some of the people doing evangelism on the street during General Conference, just this past General Conference.

And he went to Bradley Campbell and was explaining to him how thankful he was for the

Christians who had shared the gospel with him over the years, even those, even in those kinds of contexts. So he is attending a local church now.

He, his kids are enjoying the local church. His wife has followed him out and they're now, they're now sitting under faithful preaching and he talked about how much he enjoyed a steady stream of the preaching of the

Word of God. So you have to understand like that we, he left and we were all like in awe.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we didn't do, there was no bragging. There was no silver bullet. There was no personality that did the trick for him.

It was simply God using the word to do a miraculous work in his, work in his heart.

And he, he said this James, he said, I was the worst of the worst.

And he said, I was rude to you guys. He said, I was bad. I was really bad.

And, and he's like, if God can save me, he can save some of these other guys.

So he said, so be kind to them. You know, some of these guys are, are he,

I'll end with this. He said, he thinks that a lot of the neo -Mormon apologetics happening right now is a desperate attempt to salvage the religion.

It's, it's a, it's an attempt at making it work, trying to hold on desperately to whatever they can to make the faith work.

But yeah. Yeah. Well that, again, thanks. Thanks for sharing that. Did I, and I'm not,

I'm not trying to keep you on too long. We've got to get to this clip, but did you ever hear about the 10 to 12 year gap between a witnessing situation at the conference and conversion and the starting of a church in Utah?

My story about that. I'll be real quick. I was at the North Gate late on a conference afternoon, and you know what it's like to be standing at conference all day long.

Your feet are tired. Your mind's starting to get numb. And this guy comes out, we start talking, and he seemed like he was listening.

And so normally I would carry a little pack and I had some books, but I had already given all my copies of letters away.

And believe it or not, all I had in my pack left was this little book right here called

God's Sovereign Grace. Okay. And I don't even know why it was in my, why would

I have this in my pack for Mormons? I don't even know how it got in there. But it was all

I could give them. And so I think we had talked about the gospel. I said, well, this does talk about the gospel.

You know, it's not really about Mormonism, but you know, if you'd like to take it. Twelve, fourteen years later, somewhere around there, maybe even longer,

I go to church. It was when I was at Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, a Luddite church, as far as tech went.

So we still had a phone answering machine that had a little teeny tiny cassette tape in it, you know, the microcassette ones.

And the pastor says there's a message for you on the cassette. Why don't you listen to it?

So I fired up. This woman is calling from Logan or Ogden, north of Salt Lake.

And she says, I have a book called God's Sovereign Grace, and it mentions

Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. I'm looking for James White, who wrote this book.

She said, someone gave this book to my husband outside the

General Conference years ago, and he brought it home, and he stuck it on the bookshelf, never read it.

Recently, I took it off the bookshelf, and I started reading it, and I couldn't put it down. And she said,

I believe what this book says, but I can't find anybody else up here that does.

Can you please help me? And I got hold of Jason Wallace, because this was, again, this is a number of years ago now.

And Jason got in touch with her, and they ministered to her, and that led to a church plant situation and everything else.

And there was at least a 12 -year gap between a tired guy given the last copy he had of something it wasn't even, he thought, directly relevant to the subject, to a

Mormon outside the conference. And years later, you get to see what sprouts up from that.

So, you know, we got a lot of opposition when we first started going to Salt Lake City. Why bother with them?

They're hard ground. There's plenty of easier people to talk to, la la la la la la. People don't understand, like you said, the real issue is perseverance.

It's stick -to -itiveness over time. It's planting seed and trusting God. I know we have to segue, but I'll just say that God loves

Utah. He's not done with it. He loves the people more than we love the people, and we love the people.

They're an easy -to -love people. They make great neighbors, great co -workers. We have,

I would say a lot of Christians in Utah are obsessed with reaching the people here. I don't think the

LDS people realize just how much sacrifice the church planters are making to come out here and live a thousand miles away from grandparents or having family support structure around raising young kids, and then the sacrifice that even the teenagers make changing social situations.

There's a lot of families that move to Utah who are incredibly sacrificial, who at great cost are pouring themselves into reaching these people.

And to your point, there's a lot of ministry of the word that happens that makes zero attractional sense in the traditional marketing paradigm that God uses.

And I'm really thankful that God has used the ministry of the word in ways that we can't even boast about. We're like,

I just handed a book out, or I just had a conversation I don't remember, and God has a way of providing these steady, like your story, a steady stream of occasional encouragement, just enough to keep going.

Yep, it's true. It's true. Yeah, it's hard to compete with people that are marketing themselves.

And we had 10 ,000 converts this week and stuff like that when you're doing that kind of hard concrete work in a difficult area.

But there it goes. All right, let's get into this. I'll tell you what, I'll try to keep an eye on you. And, you know,

I might stop it. If you wave or whatever it is, I'll hit the brakes on it.

But this is a, what is this from? Let's make sure people know. Yeah, this is,

I think it's Ward Radio. And they were having an interview with, forgive me if I'm mispronouncing,

Noah Ermit, Jonah Barnes, there's a guy named Greg, I don't know. And then there's Carden Ellis.

And the interview is intended to discuss, I think it's called the

LDS Theology Quiz, which was put together by LJ Saarman and Noah Ermit, who are both

BYU students, as I understand it. And the intent is to help Latter -day

Saints locate where their theology aligns within the thought streams of the

LDS faith. It's very elucidating because a lot of Latter -day Saints aren't even aware that those thought streams even exist with their diversity or variegated nature.

And so what it was doing is it was kind of fleshing out these very significant differences that exist internally. They started by playing the clip with BYU assistant professor

Christopher Blythe, who says that if you talk to Protestant critics about infinite regress, it'll put you in a position where you have to hedge and where you have to change doctrines.

And so he goes on to say, so don't do it. But then he goes on to say that such people are, that it's none of our, infinite regress is none of our business and that we aren't ready to hear it essentially.

So we've, this is very familiar language to us. But what it did is it caused a hearty discussion about infinite regress between the participants.

I'll stop there. Okay, let's let's finally get to it half an hour into the program here. Okay. So now, and I'm going to push back a little bit on something that you said, because look,

I know that ex -Mormons, I know that anti -Mormons are absolutely crazy and toxic and I don't want to ever be caught defending them.

However, one, I think their concern is legitimate because the majority members of the church and all the apostles and all the prophets since the beginning of the restoration,

I believe have manifestly overtly publicly taught the infinite regress of God.

Okay. Now I can't see Aaron anymore. So I don't know if you wave at me or something. You can see him.

Okay. Okay. All right. So Rich will tell me when to when to hit the brakes.

But so this fellow is basically saying the majority of LDS people and this certainly has been my experience down through the years, believe in and when we talk about infinite regression, we're talking about the idea that the

God of Mormonism, Elohim, was a man who progressed to Godhood. There was a God before him.

There was a God before that. It's a infinite regression of God's and that this was what was taught by Joseph Smith in the

King Follett funeral discourse, in the Sermon on the Grove, his last major presentations of doctrine and theology before he was murdered in 1844.

Yes, sir. Oh, I just want to point out I'm leaving Aaron's mic open. So Aaron, if you need to say something, just, you know, pipe up and we'll cut to you.

Yeah, I'm not sure if I mentioned that Blake Osler is in this video as well. And he, prior to this clip that we're playing, has given his reasoning for why he rejects the regress of deities.

A few things. He's arguing against the majority reading of the King Follett discourse and the Sermon on the

Grove. He's arguing that LDS scripture precludes a regress or an ancestry of backwards lineage of deities, a heavenly grandfather, right?

And so he's given us this reasoning, a short presentation, and he has mentioned in passing that there are members of the

Latter -day Saint faith that do believe in the regress of deities. But I think what happened here is that the impression given seemingly to Jonah that he's frustrated with is, it's not really overtly clear by Blake's presentation, at least in this video, that what

Blake is offering up is an extreme minority, at least with respect to the historical representation.

And I would even say that Jonah, when he begins this clip, this part of the video, he probably overstates.

He says, I think he says something like all, and then the position is moderated a bit in the rest of the clip.

So you could make the claim that they all taught this. I don't even know if that's true, but a safer claim is that it's been the majority dominant position.

Yeah. So just real quickly, I started reading through the

Sermon on the Grove on the program a few weeks ago, and we dealt with the

Revelation 1 -6 material, His God and His Father, which is an unfortunate rendering of the

King James, but of course, we know Joseph Smith, that's all he had. He tried to pretend he knew original languages, but he didn't.

What's Osler's explanation for that? I mean, it seems absolutely inarguable that the whole point

Smith is making is that this is God and God's father. So there's a father figure above God.

So how does he try to say that that's a misreading of the sermon?

As I remember Osler, he doesn't think that Thomas Bullock faithfully recounts the sermon.

He also thinks there's a textual issue with a comma, and he also thinks that the Kingfellow discourse and Sermon on the

Grove, instead of affirming a backwards lineage of deities, and by the way, I do think that this discussion, more modestly put, is about the regress of deities, not even necessarily about the infinite regress of deities, but Osler, because some

Latter -day Saints might hold to a regress with an indefinite nature to it.

It's not necessarily infinite, so we care more about the regress whether or not it's infinite. But back to Osler, Osler argues that the father, in his mortal experience, had an earthly father.

Okay, now a lot of Latter -day Saints who like Osler's revisionist reading of the

Kingfellow discourse and Sermon on the Grove, they think, aha, that's what it means for the father to have a father. He has an earthly father.

The problem is, is that under -represents Osler's position. Osler also argues that when the father takes on a mortal body, he does not for a time have the fullness of divinity, and he argues that another fills in for him.

Okay, I don't think people realize this. Osler, even his revisionist minority reading, he holds that someone takes the place of, temporarily,

Heavenly Father. And so this, so if I understand

Osler's position, he's the supreme monarch, and all other deities are subordinate.

But essentially, a subordinate deity temporarily fills in for Heavenly Father, and Heavenly Father, during his mortal experience, worships and is subordinate to, temporarily, this fill -in deity.

So Osler argues that this is not about a Heavenly Grandfather, you know, per a lineage of deities view that we get with subsequent

Mormon leaders. He's arguing that there's a kind of temporary father status that someone has over the father, be it the earthly father that the father has in his mortal experience, or this fill -in father figure deity who temporarily functions as the relational superior.

Isn't it sort of a given that no general authority of the Church ever expressed anything even remotely like that?

You know, I'm not aware of, you might have an exception with Harley P.

Pratt very early. I think this might be in 1851. But when it comes to the rest of pioneer

Mormonism, what's called the integration era Mormonism, turn of the century, mainstreaming of Mormonism, I'm talking about, this is helpful for me, like Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, Heber C.

Kimball, Wilford Woodruff, B .H. Roberts, Anthon Lund, Charles Penrose, Joseph F.

Smith, Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce McConkey, you draw a line through LDS history from pioneer

Mormonism to say the 70s and 80s. I don't, I'm happy to consider any evidence or documentation anyone else can show me, but I'm not aware of anybody prior to Osler who clearly publishes at least this position, this revisionist reading.

So I, it's like Osler's the rescuer. He is rescuing

Latter -day Saints from having to hold to a regress of deities. It just seems so completely inconsistent with a system that prides itself so much on having living apostles and prophets to be saved by a philosopher who isn't any of those things.

Think about the irony of the modern neo -Mormon apologetics apparatus or the subculture.

They're talking about the ideal of having modern day prophets and apostles, sort of the benefit or the perk is that they can help you make sense of things and interpret scripture and they appeal even to Roman Catholic apologetics and they argue that scripture is not self -interpreting in any way and that you need a modern day prophet and apostle, prophets and apostles to help you make sense of their theology.

But when I look at the interpretive LDS, prophetic, apostolic tradition of interpreting the

King Follett Discourse and Summer in the Grove, when I look at the historical theology of the Latter -day

Saint faith, I don't see any serious representation of Osler's view.

I mean, he's introducing something that isn't well represented by the prophetic tradition.

He's, I mean, the way I try to poke at this issue is it's kind of like the Oslerians, if you could call them that.

The LDS faith has a song, We Thank Thee, O God, for a prophet. It's kind of like they're saying we thank

Thee, O God, for an attorney philosopher to correct the errors of our prophets and apostles.

We're so thankful for BYU professors and attorney philosophers to rescue us from the disastrous theology of our prophets and apostles.

Blake Osler calls the theology of Brigham Young a disaster. I just can't imagine a

Christian in good faith referring to the theology, the public theology, of Paul, John, Peter as a disaster.

No, I can't either, and that results in a, whether they recognize it or not, that results in a fundamental degradation of the view of apostles and prophets on the part of especially younger

Mormons. I mean, when you have to correct those old men in Salt Lake City on the basis of the brilliance of Blake Osler, how can you not have a degradation in your view of all apostles and prophets, which would include the biblical apostles and prophets, which will end up having an incredible impact on your view of Revelation, and we haven't seen every place this is going to go yet.

Okay, so how far do I get there? I got 29 seconds in. Woo! The rate we're going, you're never going to get to that wedding.

Let's get back to it here. It's false for my survey. Yeah, well, I think you're wrong, because I didn't even realize there was another option.

I mean, I grew up in church. What you're asserting is an empirical issue. What you're asserting is an empirical issue that's demonstrated by taking a poll that's reliable, and you haven't done that, so you don't know what percentage of church members hold that view.

Touche, neither have you. No, I haven't, but I'm not making the assertion that the majority of church members believe something, am

I? You aren't. Moreover, and here's the bottom line, the church hasn't in general conference in the past 50 years really hasn't addressed this issue at all.

Well, prior to 50 years, did they address the issue? And they do. Some of them, they held different views.

This is not a cut -and -dried issue, and they held it. Okay, so this sort of touches on what we had mentioned about the

Hinckley, you know, we don't know much about that, and then at the next conference, yeah, nod, nod, wink, wink, ha, ha, ha took place.

Same type of thing going on here, and it reminds me, recently, who was it?

Was it that McClellan guy? Someone made a comment recently about how the Apostle Paul had no interest at all in the historical

Jesus, because he doesn't, like, repeat the Gospels in his epistles.

And I'm just like, well, wait a minute, why would he repeat the Gospels? That's already the common possession of the people he's already writing to.

Why would he rewrite what they already possess? In the same way, when you go to general conference, you've got, you've got the eternal marriage ceremony, man.

You've got, you've got the stuff that's being discussed in the war chapels. You don't repeat that over and over again at the general conference, going back over, you know,

Theology 101. And the thing is, I stood outside those conferences for, for 18 years, and had these very conversations with Mormons who never presented, like,

Osler's perspective. They always presented the regressive God's perspective, and they're the ones attending the conference.

So... And it's, it's noteworthy that, contemporary to Hinckley's remark, and subsequent to Hinckley's remark, their manuals were continuing to teach,

I'll call it Lorenzo Snow Couplet Theology. Yeah. They're essentially presenting as man as God once was, as God as man may be.

They're presenting segments of the King Follett discourse. And it's worth noting that the default interpretation of such language has the inertia of the

LDS prophetic apostolic tradition of the regressive deities. That is the dominant assumed default view.

There hasn't been an interpretive shift, somehow in the LDS faith, to prepare everyone, prepare everyone to interpret it like Osler does.

So there, it's continuing to be, it was continued to be perpetuated, it was perpetuated also in various language in the

Gospel Principles Manual. And why that manual matters so much to me is that it had, it has a pedigree, it has an early published date, and then it's just republished, republished, republished, republished all the way to 2009.

And so it has, it still has a tremendous inertia even today in the Latter -day

Saint faith community. I know what I wrote is the more of my brother. I did some research and this, the single sermon by Joseph Smith cited most often by general authorities, the

Mormon Church throughout the history of Mormonism was the King Follett funeral discourse. That was what they cited more often than anything else he ever said.

So to try to say, well, now you might say, well, but were they interpreting it the same way? Yeah, pretty much.

There isn't, there isn't much variation in their perspective. So yeah, it was, it was definitely there.

So these quotes, by the way, I'm just reminding folks, the program didn't put these up. You put these overlays on.

No, if you wanted to see the quotes, mrm .org forward slash regress has a number of these quotes.

It's Blake Osler in 2005 saying that, quote, I believe that Mormons commonly believe that God the father became

God through a process of moral development, dot dot dot. He goes on to say the corollary of this view is that,

I'll finish the quote, and eternal progression to Godhood. The corollary of this view is that there was a time before which

God the father was a God or divine. He also says in 2008, I believe that until recently, almost all

Mormons believed that Joseph Smith taught that God progressed to become fully divine from a lower state of non divinity.

Thus, it was believed that God the father became God. So he's, Jacob Hansen concedes in 2025 that the regress view, quote,

I will concede that that has probably been the commonly, the common held position amongst the majority of Latter -day

Saints. One more thing is that one of those quotes I gave from Blake Osler comes from an article in Element.

Let's see here. It's called, I'm going to pull up here quicker. It's called Revisioning the

Mormon Concept of Deity. So in Blake's own argument, in his own presentation, he sees his, you might call it emergentist social

Trinitarianism, his reworking of revisionism. He sees it as a revisioning, and he contrasts it with the common dominant historical view.

And it was received as a kind of like a noteworthy attempt at tweaking, changing the dominant narrative.

So I mean, earlier, at least, Blake was overt that the view he was offering up is not in historical alignment with the

LDS prophetic apostolic tradition. I think Jonah's discomfort here is that Blake, though mentioning that there are other views in the

LDS community today, is no longer being as overt, nor are other

LDS apologists like Travis Anderson or Robert Boylan.

Some of these guys are not really well behaved, by the way. It looks like in the LDS apologetics community, there's not only a divergence from LDS leadership and tradition on theology.

There's also a divergence from LDS leadership on standards and codes of conduct.

What is courtesy? What are good manners? What does it look like to relate well with people of another faith?

I genuinely believe the LDS faith top down.

I don't think it encourages aggressive, belligerent bullying top down, nor do

I think the LDS people appreciate that kind of misbehavior that we're seeing in the LDS aggressive apologetics community.

But that's just a side note. But I think that going back to the clip, Jonah is frustrated with Osler for seeming to not be completely clear with the fact that he's diverging from the historical teachings of the

LDS church. And if I recall correctly, he's about to say he didn't even know of this other view till about a year earlier, which tells you something,

I think, importantly. Let's press on here. I'll argue with you. I'm trying to help you. If you tell our critics or historians and say, oh, no, no, no, infinite regress is some fringe thing that has never been official doctrine, they're going to rightfully say you're wrong.

This is all official doctrine. I'm not wrong. It's not official doctrine. No, I'm not saying it's a sorry.

I'm not saying it's official doctrine, but it really sounds like trying to distance oneself from the teachings of our historical leaders.

I'm distancing myself from an interpretation and an understanding that I don't think is an accurate best take on what is actually stated.

And that's totally fair. That's totally fair to say, I interpret these things differently. But you've got to be able to understand when the anti say, hold on a minute, all these statements, all these pages and all of these sermons from all these leaders all the way up into the 1970s all sound like they're teaching this doctrine.

You can't just ignore that, right? That's what they're going to say. Yeah, but it wasn't taught that way.

I mean, you haven't really had it fully addressed in this way since Brigham Young. I mean, there hasn't been an express explicit take on this to make sense of it from a prophet while being prophet.

And I mean, look at what happened in the 1990s when President Hinckley was asked about this doctrine.

Okay, he said, I don't think we know much about that. That was his actual answer. Right. And so, okay, so that's what we made reference to before.

And of course, the reality is there was more to it than that.

It's, it's, doesn't he know that? Blake Osler has to know what happened the next conference, right?

Well, I mean, not just that, but Blake himself has conceded in his own published writings that this was the dominant majority view.

So he's, you know, I think what he's doing is he's being legalistic. He's saying, well, it wasn't expressly fully developed since Brigham Young.

But I mean, the idea of a regressive deities, you're getting that in some fashion through the

LDS prophetic apostolic tradition. And it's a, it's a dominant historical majority view.

He concedes as much in his volumes of exploring Mormon thought. He concedes as much in his revisioning essay in element, but he's not willing to be that clear, at least in this discussion with Jonah Barnes.

And I think, so I, I think they're picking legalistically, they're splitting hairs with Jonah.

Well, it's not official, or it's not, it wasn't unanimously taught by all of them, or it's not taught in every general conference, or it's not fully developed.

When really the heart of the issue is, is this a perpetuated dominant historical teaching and belief that there is at least a regress of deities, that the

King Follett discourse in Sermon on the Grove is referring to a heavenly grandfather. And I should also mention that this comes packaged with a view of what it means to have literal parents in heaven, and to have spirit birth.

This is very helpful to put on the alongside this issue.

Blake Osler rejects the idea of spirit birth. And from pioneer

Mormonism into the integration era of Mormonism into the mainstream 20th century

Mormon historical phase, you had a variety of views, two main views.

One was that this is the pioneer Mormon position, that in Brigham Young's view, intelligence is a kind of substance, it's an eternal substance, and spirit begetting of heavenly parents results in a genuinely new person.

That there's a genesis or an individual having, there's a genesis of an individual, of a brand new individual, with new agency by the way, that comes into fresh existence.

And so there's more of a substantial sense of having literal heavenly parents being brought into existence.

When the first presidency was blocking B .H.

Roberts from publishing the King Follett discourse in the history of the church in the early 1900s, early 20th century, it wasn't because they were denying regress.

It wasn't because they were upset with the idea of a backwards lineage of deities or that God had to become

God. They were uncomfortable with this idea of eternal self -existence, that intelligence is, plural, as individuals or egos or minds.

Basically, Joseph Smith taught in the King Follett discourse that we've had an eternal past individual existence.

And pioneer Mormonism overlooked that. And whether you take sort of a Orson Pratt tweak where the particles of eternal intelligence are like,

I call them little spirit tadpoles, where they have kind of a self -directed inherent agency and when heavenly parents have a spirit child, it's bringing together all these spirit elements into a new person.

In Brigham Young's view, that's not the case. But they both believe that an individual has their genuine beginning.

So, King Follett discourse doesn't jive with that. B .H. Roberts, like Fergus Wilson, Nelson Nelson, basically philosophically minded

Latter -day Saints, they're realizing, oh, we've got it wrong. And so the first presidency was uncomfortable publishing the

King Follett discourse because it would have overturned some notions they had about literal parents in heaven. So in the 20th century, there are competing

LDS views on whether, in what sense are we eternal or is

God eternal? Is it the substance from which we were begotten? Or is it the individuality with which we have eternal past self -existence?

So why does that matter? Blake Osler rejects all of that. He rejects both views,

I should say. And Blake Osler argues there is no spirit birth in premortality. When evangelicals are taught about Mormonism, we're typically given the

B .H. Roberts view of an intelligence is eternal and spirit birth results in the intelligence being clothed with the spirit body.

And then you have a mortal stage of existence that I think they call tripartite existentialism.

In the Latter -day Saint community, that's the dominant view. Even Blake Osler concedes that in his essay on the development of the

LDS view of preexistence. So why does this matter? When we think about a backwards lineage of deities, an infinite regress of deities, that's typically through the lens of a view that affirms spirit birth.

Blake Osler not only thinks that the LDS prophets and apostles were wrong about regress of deities, he thinks you cannot trust them on the issues of spirit birth.

He thinks they've been massively wrong about the sense in which heavenly parents are our literal heavenly parents.

So for him, there's a premortal adoption event where Heavenly Father adopts these co -eternal intelligences covenantally into some sort of cosmic family.

I'm sorry for all the weird, yeah, I'm sorry if that's a jump of strangeness. All right, everyone's going to shoot us if we don't at least get through the clip.

So we're a little over halfway through. We're actually dealing with this kind of an issue. What we ought to do is urge caution and acknowledge that there are

Mormons who believe it. Brigham Young actually taught it, okay? But there's a lot that Brigham Young taught that we're not going to adopt now.

I hope you understand that. Okay, so he has said Brigham Young's theology was a disaster.

So he was sort of just alluding to that without having to repeat it again. Yep, he's understating.

Just a little bit. Brigham Young taught things that were untrue, which I think we very reflexively and far too quickly dismiss many of the teachings of Brigham Young.

Brigham Young. I agree with you on that. What I don't agree with is that everything he taught was inspired.

And you don't either. We haven't expressed doctrine of prophetic fallibility. We haven't expressed doctrine that limits what is binding on the

Saints to what is accepted by common consent. We haven't expressed recognition that nothing delivered to human beings is a hundred percent complete because we have ongoing revelation.

And so if somebody wants to close the door and say, no, this is what Brigham Young taught, that's the end of the discussion.

Not even Brigham Young would have agreed with that. And that is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is...

Well, I mean, how does that not lead to utter skepticism?

I mean, you're left picking and choosing your favorite interpreter, but having abandoned the idea that there is actually any definable orthodox statement outside of, well, it's what's been agreed to by all.

I mean, yeah, I know Lactantius and the early church, there is a similar statement, but it was just as infamously impossible to apply because you get to choose, well, but by whom?

Who do you get to... Is Blake Ossle your interpreter? Is James Talmadge your interpreter? Is B .H. Roberts your interpreter?

Who's your interpreter? Because you get to pick and choose your sources. And what fills in the gap, what the vacuum creates is it's filled by an appeal ultimately to Bart Ehrman, Daniel McClellan, higher criticism, a kind of postmodern vibe, if you will.

I'll be honest, when I talk to Oslerians on the street, you know, you can kind of wade through the swamp of all this hyper skepticism.

Or, I mean, one of the things I do is I just ask, do you believe that belief in Jesus Christ as the risen

Lord from the dead should be necessary for continued membership in the

LDS Church? And I word this very carefully. If a member peaceably self - reports in a non -agitating way to his bishop that they have a definite rejection of the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus, should they lose their membership?

I'm not asking about temple recommends, I'm not asking about getting their initial membership through the baptismal interview.

Should belief in Jesus be necessary for maintaining membership in the

LDS Church? And I would say almost 98 % of Oslerians say, can you guess it?

No. So I mean that the standard position of Oslerians, at least the

Oslerian Mormons that I meet, do not believe that belief in Jesus Christ at all should be required for maintaining one's membership in the

LDS Church. These are the future leaders. This movement has no future if these are the future leaders.

I mean, I'm speaking as an old codger now, but the reality is people age, and if this is the foundation that they have as they move into positions of authority, no system can survive that.

I'd make the same statement about the United States of America. When you look at young people and their view of the constitutional issues is such the

Constitution is a joke, there's no hope for the nation. And for a religious group to have its fundamental tenets of orthodoxy degraded in this way by that level of skepticism, it's going to have to evolve into something else, but it's not going to continue to be what it has been for the past 180 years.

Okay, we're almost there, sort of. Not quite, but we press on. Is that if you're going to pretend like the antis are going to let you off the hook for this, you're delusional.

They don't care what you think. I have the benefit of not caring what any anti -Mormon thinks.

Right, no, and I look, I agree with you. Yeah, but we would, like, so to me... Look, it doesn't matter, hold on, it doesn't matter if the antis say this, but your youth and my youth are going to Google this and they're going to say, this has been taught for decades.

And I can't just ignore it and pretend like it didn't exist. It's pretty hard to find teachings of this. If you go through the historical record,

Joseph Fielding Smith, Lorenzo Snow, they all taught it. Joseph Fielding Smith taught it in Doctrines of Salvation, and B .H.

Roberts mentions it, but the idea that this is repeated over the pulpit regularly in every single general conference is tricky.

Which is not what I have said, and no one has said. No, no, he's saying that anti -Mormon say that. You're going to have a teenager who is going to Google these things.

Well, yeah, but that's what... And your teenager is going to say, why are you running away from these teachings? Jonah, Jonah, Jonah. And you can't just shrug and be like, oh, no, it's just like...

Totally, totally, Jonah. It's been really fun to see a lot of people take this and say stuff like, I didn't even realize that all of this theological nuance existed within the church, or that there were different thinkers who have had different opinions on these debates.

I had no idea that non -infinite regress was even an option. And I'm not being, I'm not being funny. Like, I literally did not until like a year ago.

That's so interesting to me. Did you catch that? He said, not till about a year ago. Not till about a year ago.

And... I should note, I'm sorry. I should note that the guy with the gray shirt is Noah, and he helps lead some

LDS apologetics, a group, or at least a community at BYU. That's where I made the jump cut, because they were all joking about Bigfoot and stuff like that.

So if anybody wants to know, that's where it happened. But they're splitting hairs. Well, it wasn't taught in every general conference, but Jonah is experiencing in real time gaslighting.

He, like a lot of Latter -day Saints, have assumed some form of regressive deities, and now neo -Mormon or synthetic

Mormon theology, if you will, it's a kind of reconstructed, Oslerian revisionism, is gaslighting people into thinking, we've never taught regressive deities, or it's never been a dominant historical position, or our leaders have never, with the prophetic and LDS epistolic tradition, pushed this or condoned it.

I think Jonah would have at least appreciated if Blake wants to posit his minority position, at least have the integrity and honesty to say, what

I'm about to present to you is not what our leaders have been teaching for the bulk of the

LDS prophetic and apostolic tradition. This is that he is butting heads, as it were, with his own tradition.

He's introducing something new that is not a majority position. You're not going to find a rich intellectual

LDS tradition of Oslerianism prior to Osler, at least even conceptually.

You're just not going to find the building blocks for what he has. No, that seems obvious.

And again, to all the Mormons that I've spoken with for decades, they so often emphasize the authority of the teachings of the

LDS Church, frequently tracing it through the Restoration of the Priesthood, the Aaronic and Melchizedek Priesthood, things like that.

There seems to be, amongst many of these people, a massive de -emphasis on that element of ecclesiastical authority, priesthood authority, which was so very much prevalent in Joseph Smith and in the early

LDS writings in the Journal of Discourses. It's just all over the place, but it seems to be really disappearing and being replaced with some type of philosophical intellectualism, something along those lines.

I don't know where this can go. I just don't know where this can go in the future, because this kind of stuff cannot serve as a foundation for any kind of coherent religious movement.

You have to have some level of unity around certain concepts, teachings, revelations, something, and I just don't see how it can survive.

It's fragmented, and I think YouTube is accelerating the fragmentation. It's not an institutional fragmentation, but it's a worldview fragmentation.

Guys like Jacob Hanson and Hayden Carroll, for example, Hayden Carroll, sorry if I said that wrong, they seem to be very influenced by atheists and Roman Catholic apologetics.

They really don't seem to be dipping into or leaning heavily into their own religious intellectual tradition to make their points.

They're really not leaning into their own historical theologians and philosophers.

In fact, a lot of what Hayden Carroll argues actually cuts against the pioneer

Mormon tradition where, this is fascinating to me, Peter Carmack, an

LDS philosopher up at BYU -Idaho, he critiques Brigham Young as teaching a form of creation ex nihilo.

And the criteria for, I mean, their accusation that we have a reprehensible deity is essentially that if you have a deity, one version of this, is that if you have a deity who has created your agency and has divine foreknowledge, then he cannot escape the problem of evil.

That describes a pretty big slice of LDS history. Pioneer Mormon leaders believed in what

Peter Carmack calls a form of creation ex nihilo. He argues that there's still a new person happening at spirit begetting amongst the

Mormons that don't hold to the B .H. Roberts or Joseph Smith version of intelligences. And most

LDS members gladly affirm divine foreknowledge. I mean,

I don't think people realize how divergent Jacob Hansen and Blake Osler are.

They're open theists. They don't think God knows the definite future of human choices. LDS script, distinctive

LDS scripture, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Book of Mormon, LDS leaders like Neal A. Maxwell, even after his discussion with Blake Osler, most common

Latter -day Saints by default hold to divine foreknowledge. They're basically, in many cases, violating the

Odyssey criteria that some modern Mormon apologists are giving. So you have the

Hayden Carroll, Jacob Hansen sort of corner of the neighborhood. And then you have a kind of the higher criticism focused people like Benjamin Spackman.

Oh my goodness, Daniel McClellan. He has that kind of a little bit of an LDS veneer, but he's really just a secular progressive with a

Mormon veneer. It's very strange. It's very interesting that he was able to hold his position as a translator in the

LDS Church for such a long time, given that he doesn't seem to hold the truth claims, the supernatural truth claims of the

LDS Church, at least overtly. All of what he says points in the other direction.

Yeah, definitely. His relationship, again, would have been very different back in the

Bruce HartmcConkey era of time. No two ways about it. Well, we got through the clip, but all that did was,

I think, revealed to everybody that there's a whole lot going on in Utah these days, and developments are happening fast.

I don't want to blow your mailbox up or anything like that, but if folks want to look up some of the stuff that you were quoting, mrm .org,

I believe, is the website, and your articles are there. I would imagine there's some mechanism of contacting you, or at least links to videos and all the stuff that you all are doing up there.

I know that you all work hand -in -hand with Apologia Utah, Wade and Andrew.

They speak very highly of you, and it is interesting.

There does seem to be maybe a little bit more close fellowship amongst the

Christians up there, because you're all united in seeking the benefit of the LDS people and bringing the message of the gospel to them.

I really enjoyed being up there two weeks ago, and seeing you and other folks that were there.

So, thank you for joining with us. Going out of country, huh? Not me, not anymore.

No, thanks. You're going to have to get through TSA, huh? Sorry about that.

Let me thank you personally. When I was coming to faith, latter part of high school, and being discipled in the early part of college,

I ran across a written debate of yours, where you did an exegesis of Romans 9,

Ephesians 1, and John 6. And it wasn't because I saw your personality on video, or it wasn't because of me being caught up in internet apologetics.

It was really just reading your simple exegesis of those three chapters that drew me into a much higher view of God.

And then after that was John Piper and his series through Romans 9. And I just wanted to personally thank you for your ministry and helping me take seriously what the

Word of God says, and submitting to the authority of the Word of God, over and against human philosophy when necessary.

Well, I appreciate that very, very much. That's why we're all here, is we want to pass it on.

And I think you're one of the leading people now, providing an in -depth answer during a very difficult time.

You know, I'll never forget, and we'll wrap up after this, I'll never forget the fact that when the Jehovah's Witnesses had their 1974 -75 false prophecy about the end of the world, over the next 10 years, over a million people left the

Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. Disillusioned. They knew what had happened. They saw the books being changed to try to hide that the prophecy had ever been given, all the rest of that kind of stuff.

And studies showed later that more than 99 % of those who left never went anywhere else.

They became part of the religiously abused. They never darkened the door of a

Christian church. So they may not have been still believing a heresy and in darkness, but they never went to look for the light.

And studies show that the back door of the Mormon Church is pretty darn big right now. And as people discover the truth about the book of Abraham or whatever else, they need to know there are people they can talk to that might indeed be able to direct them toward truth.

And I think you all are doing a great job with that, and I pray the Lord will continue to bless you.

And I'm so thankful that today you had some providential encouragement, and that you shared that with us, and we hope that you'll get to see a lot more of that in the future.

Thank you, Dr. White. All right. Thank you, Aaron. God bless you and the folks at mrm .org. And you can go ahead and say goodbye to, there we go, say goodbye to Aaron.

And like I said, mrm .org, if you want to see his articles, they're up there on the front lines doing the work, and we appreciate them very, very much.

A lot to talk about on the next program. My goodness, I have got so many bookmarks in X, I don't know which direction to go.

There's going to be a lot of stuff that we'll be able to look at at that time.

Maybe some follow -up on this, too. I'm seeing some things I didn't see here before. Yes. Well, yeah,

I know. Interesting.

All right. Hey. Okay. Thanks for listening to the program today. I'm going to be recording something on Roman Catholicism with the cross -politic guys here in a little while.