August 5, 2016 Show with Lynn K. Wilder on “Unveiling Grace: The Story of How We Found Our Way Out of the Mormon Church”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. Now here's our host Chris Arnson. Good afternoon. Cumberland County, Pennsylvania,.

And the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Friday on this fifth day of August 2016, and I'm so delighted to have for the very first time on my program Dr. Lynn K. Wilder, who is a former Mormon who converted by the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ to biblical Christianity, and we're going to be discussing her book today, Unveiling Grace, the story of how we found our way out of the Mormon church, and there's a lot of interesting things about my guest's background.

Dr. Lynn K. Wilder is a wife, mother, grandmother, scholar, and author with a doctorate in education. During more than a decade as a professor and researcher and 20 years as a public school teacher, she has produced more than 50 scholarly publications, written four books, and mentored hundreds of students.

Her experience, passion, and expertise lie in how to advance the academic and socio-emotional success of marginalized students who struggle in school. Once tenured faculty at Mormon church-owned and operated Brigham Young University, commonly known as BYU, Dr. Wilder resigned from BYU and then from the LDS church, which is the Latter-day Saints.

She resigned from the LDS church in 2008 when she experienced a crisis of faith. She currently teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University, speaks, writes, and ploys time with seven much-loved, vivacious grandchildren.

And our guest was raised as a Protestant Christian, and she and her husband Michael joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and accepted the gospel according to Mormon church founder Joseph Smith.

As a young married couple, they were looking for a church home when the Mormon missionaries knocked on their door in Indiana in 1977, and Mike and Lynn had no children at the time and immediately dove into a life of active participation with their new church family.

For 30 years, Michael and Lynn were Temple Recommend holding active members of the Mormon church and held numerous leadership positions. Eventually, they had four children, all of whom were faithful and active in the LDS church like their parents.

The three oldest children's sons served missions in Russia, Denmark, and Florida, respectively. Before their missions, the sons had served at stake youth leaders, seminary president, and their third son, Micah, worked in the temple.

Their daughter held leadership positions as well. They all bore testimony of Christ, often in church, and were sincere and contented members of the LDS church. The Wilders moved from Indiana to Utah in 1999.

When Lynn finished her doctorate and was hired at BYU, Mike established a business in Utah, and the family continued to serve their church in the perfect Mormon life. Then in 2006, everything changed, and we're going to be hearing that whole story in more detail, and I thank you so much for joining us today for the very first time on Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr. Lynn K. Wilder.

Thank you, Chris. It's wonderful to be.

On. You know, the stories that God puts together, no one could make up. You could not make this stuff up. So it's really kind of fun to get the opportunity to tell what God's capable of,.

And this one's a wild one. Well, you have a very appropriate last name now, though. Absolutely. Well, from what I was just reading off of your website, you were raised in a Protestant Christian home. If you could let our listeners know what kind specifically of a Protestant Christian home that was, because obviously, as you know, Protestantism is a very wide spectrum of people, some of whom even many Christians would not count among their brothers in Christ.

So you have all different kinds of people calling themselves Protestant, but what was the situation where you were raised? My parents took us to church.

Every week. Most of the time when I was growing up, they were going to a Presbyterian church, sometimes to a Methodist church, but I don't recall ever, ever opening the Word of God outside of that church.

You would be really interested to know that the Pew Institute says that more than 80 of people who convert to Mormonism come right out of Biblical Christianity, just like I did. People that, when offered this Mormon gospel by their friends or by Mormon missionaries, accept it as a Christian option, and that's exactly where my husband and I were.

He was raised Baptist, and I'd been raised Presbyterian, but we did not know the Word, and I could not articulate for you the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was more of a cultural thing,.

Probably, something I felt that we needed to do. And so you were a young married couple by the time you had this encounter with Mormon missionaries. What was it about what they said and about what you had learned at the time about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that found you so spellbound, if you will, got you so...

You and your husband, Michael, got you so excited and enthusiastic that led you to eventually join this organization?

Well, you know, as a young married couple, we wanted to find a church. We kind of wanted to have a family and have some kind of moral stability, right, in our family. So Mike and I were kind of trying this church and trying that church, and they seemed, honestly, a little bit stuffy, and not being saved at the time, we just didn't connect very well.

But I started doing a correspondence course. You know, back in those days, they would send me a packet, and I would fill it out and send it back, and this was a correspondence course where I was learning about the Bible.

So I started with the Old Testament, and I remember going through the Old Testament and thinking, oh my goodness, when I get to Ezekiel 37, Jerusalem and Israel have come back to our homeland! That's like a major fulfilling of this prophecy, at least that's what it looked like to me at the time.

And so I'm thinking, I'm really interested in this idea of last days, you know, this Latter-day Saint thing, because I'm reading about some of this, and it looks to me like some of this might be being fulfilled, right?

So when Mormon missionaries come to the door, their badges say, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which of course is the King James version of last days, and they told us they were the experts on Latter-days.

They knew all about them,.

And that kind of was my hook. They were experts on the end times, the last days,.

Is that what you were saying? Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. They say their church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They believe that this is the Latter-day Dispensation, they say, and that Joseph Smith actually ushered in the Latter-day Dispensation, and that he restored Christ's original church, which of course Mormons say was lost.

Mormons believe that after the original Twelve Apostles died, that the church that Christ had set up.

Through his Apostles died with the Apostles. That's an interesting, very interesting point, because it appears as though since you were a Mormon, there has been a radical shift in propaganda in public relations, if you will, and perhaps we could delve more deeply into it later after we hear more of your personal story.

I don't want to derail your personal story here, but it just jumped out at me what you said, because my personal encounter even very recently, I would say about four or five months ago, here in the streets of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, when I saw some Mormon missionaries, young men, walking down the street, I could tell even from about 50 yards away that they were Mormons because of the white shirts, black ties, and black badges on their pockets of their shirts.

And I called out to them, I said, are you Mormons? And they stopped in their tracks, and they said, yes, we are. So I said, hold on, and I went up to have a conversation with them, and they were giving me an entirely different pitch than I had received from a Mormon in the 1980s.

They were saying to me, you probably heard that we think we're the only true church. That's not true, we're just Christians like you. Just another different kind of Christian. And they were giving me a whole different kind of public relations speech than the evangelism I had received in the 1980s when I had become a brand new Christian and invited Mormons into my house to have a theological discussion.

So this seems to have been more of an old school presentation that you received, them being the one true church because of all other churches being false, and as you were just saying, the Church of Jesus Christ that he founded dying with the Apostles in need of being restored on the earth.

Well, Chris, if you look on their website,.

They're still going to be teaching the idea that they're the only true church, okay, and it's in their scriptures. So although it's not something they would profess to the outside world, the last maybe 15 -20 years there's been a huge push in Mormonism to say we're Christians too.

Literally, when Mike and I encountered those missionaries in 1977, they did not want to be called Christians. Really? In my first days of Mormonism, we considered anyone outside of the Mormon church Gentiles, and then we considered ourselves as Mormons the only true Christians.

In fact, Mormons believe that they are gathering lost ten tribes of Israel. So let me read you this passage from the Book of Mormon. It says, after the Bible had gone forth through the hands of the great and abominable church, see, that would be the Catholic and then the Protestant churches, right?

Because they are the great and abominable church to the Mormon church according to their scriptures, that there are many plain and precious things taken away from the Bible, which is the Book of the Lamb of God, and because of these things which are taken out of the Gospel of the Lamb, an exceedingly great many do stumble, yea, in so much that Satan has great power over them.

That is currently in the Book of Mormon and in First Nephi, which tells the Mormon point of view toward the Gospel, toward the Bible, but also toward the church. So although they don't say it publicly in this day and age, they have this teaching in their scriptures that they are the one true church, that the Christian church is actually an abomination, and that the Bible is not reliable because many plain and precious things, like I just read, have been removed from.

It by the great and abominable church. So was this a part of the actual attraction to you and your husband? Some people would be immediately offended by that kind of an exclusivistic stance by a person in a religion, as many liberals are even with Christianity, they find it reprehensible that you would say that Jesus Christ is the one way to salvation, but was this something that attracted you and Michael, the fact that this is the real deal, this is the true church Jesus founded, and everybody else is wrong, was that a part of the allurement?

This particular scripture.

In the Book of Mormon, the missionaries did not ever present to us. It was years later that it was founded. One interesting thing about Mormonism and about the Mormon missionaries is Mormons have what they call deep doctrines, and they are certainly not going to present those deep doctrines to people who are looking at investigating Mormonism.

The Bible for Mormons is a kind of a hook to offer other people who believe in Jesus and have had some exposure to the Bible, but then Mormon missionaries immediately kind of use the Bible then to transition you to the Book of Mormon, saying that it is another testament of Jesus Christ.

So Mormons actually have four standard works of scripture. One of them is the Bible, but their own articles of faith say, we believe the Bible to be the Word of God, as far as it's translated correctly.

So in other words, the three books of Mormon scripture are perfect, and the Book of Mormon is supposed to be the most correct book on the face of the earth. The Bible, they say, has been mistranslated in several places and who knows where, so you can't really trust it, right?

But it is something that they use in order to have people convert to Mormonism, and like I said, more than 80 of people that join Mormonism as converts to the Mormon Church come out of Biblical Christianity.

So people who know a little bit about Jesus have had a little bit of exposure, you know, to the Bible, but certainly do not understand how to separate a false faith from one that's true.

Yeah, I can recall years ago, my friend Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, who has written about Mormonism himself, he wrote a book called, Is the Mormon My Brother?, and he wrote a book called Letters to a Mormon Elder, and did a lot of evangelism to Mormons in, not only in Arizona, where he lives, but in Salt Lake City, Utah, and other places during very prominent events that Mormons were having.

And he still does reach out to Mormons, but not to the very frequent degree he used to, but I can remember him telling me that he encountered a woman who was a Baptist prior to becoming a Mormon, and when he was telling her some of the things that Mormonism teaches, such as that faithful Mormons will become gods of their own planet and so on, she was totally shocked.

She had not known any of that, and so I'm assuming that a lot of people, when they become Mormons, they may think that they're just joining some kind of another Christian denomination, but then when they actually learn more after becoming Mormons, when they learn more in depth about the teachings, they may be discovering things for the first time like I just mentioned years later.

Am I right on that? Dr. Anneke Vandenbroek. Years later,.

When you're already so ingrained in the culture. Mormonism actually calls it milk before meat. We were taught not to offer some of those strange, deep doctrines to people outside of the Church unless we detected they were ready to accept them.

So you will sometimes even have Mormons just plain lie about whether they believe certain things, and sometimes Mormons don't know even things are in their scriptures. I was LDS for nearly 30 years until I taught diversity, actually multiculturalism, at Brigham Young University, and my students started telling me about this thing they called the Curse of Cain, how skin was a curse, and I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard, but I eventually realized that those ideas came right out of Mormon scripture, right out of the Book of Mormon and the Medal of Great Pride, and yet I had taught Mormon seminary and never seen that.

But this is how kind of controlled that system was. When I taught Mormon seminary, I had a manual, my students had a manual, and I had to keep to the manual, and often the scriptures that we looked at, especially if we were looking at Bible scriptures, were imprinted right into the manual, so we didn't actually open our scriptures and read it in context.

But of course I totally trusted the Church. You know, I trusted the Mormon Church that what they were putting together was sound doctrine, and now I know it often wasn't. It was a matter of cherry-picking things out of the Bible that looked like they supported Mormon doctrine, but Mormon doctrine in many ways is very, very counterintuitive and contrary to what Christ himself teaches in the Bible.

Yeah, I mean, the religions are nearly polar opposite. The Mormon religion and Biblical Christianity, the only thing that I can think of after learning a lot more about Mormonism myself, after doing reading and knowing my friend Dr. James R. White and our mutual friend Latain C. Scott, who I've interviewed on this program, the only thing that we seem to have in common is some of the basic tenets of Biblical morality.

Perhaps most or all of them, but it really is, the more you get to know about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the more it seems to resemble Greek mythology or the pagan religions of the Norse gods and so on.

It just seems to be really nothing in common, because of the fact, would you say that one of the things that confuses people is that Mormons very often use the same vocabulary,.

But they have a different dictionary? Absolutely. Absolutely. There are not two religious words between Mormonism and Biblical Christianity that mean the same thing. So you can pick any word. Angel, even angels are different.

Angel, salvation, grace, God the Father, all of those things are very different in Mormonism and Biblical Christianity, but because Mormons are using Christian-like language, Christians are so confused, and or they assume that these folks must be Christians.

They say, I'm saved by grace, Jesus died for me on the cross, but even those two phrases, if you dig down, don't mean the same.

Right. So first of all, let me announce to our listeners our email address. If you'd like to join us on the air and you have a question for our guest, Dr. Lynn K. Wilder, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Please include your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA, and if it makes you feel more comfortable remaining anonymous, perhaps you are a Mormon, perhaps you are married to a Mormon, or there's some circumstance where you'd rather remain anonymous, you may do so, and we will honor your request in that regard.

So chrisarnson at gmail .com is our email address for those of you who'd like to join us. Before we even get more in-depth about the teaching of Mormonism and how it contrasts with Biblical Christianity, I wanted to hear more about your personal journey in and out of this cult.

One of the things that is clear about Mormonism is, as opposed to Christianity where salvation is all of grace, it is all of Christ, it is a rescue of a merciful God to helpless wicked sinners who do not deserve any measure of grace or kindness from God or Christ, and it seems the polar opposite is true in Mormonism about basically it being a religion of merit, and a religion of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, and that kind of thing, and then eventually if you're diligent enough becoming a god yourself one day.

Was there anything about these elements of that religion that were frightening to you, or was it something that also was appealing to you, or did you just not know about it until later? I knew very little about all of that until later.

The manual that Mormon missionaries use is called Preach My Gospel, and they have very kind of prescripted places that they go with investigators when they're in your home, and literally Preach My Gospel tries to get someone baptized after three visits, or after you've been through three little teachings.

You know basically nothing about Mormonism at that point. You do know before you can join Mormonism that you have to accept Joseph Smith as a prophet of God and the one who restored the one true church before you can be baptized into Mormonism.

That's kind of a major thing, but of course they built up Joseph Smith so big to me, and they always go through this argument, God spoke to man through prophets in the Old Testament. Don't you think he loves us as much as he loved them?

I didn't know that the Bible says the prophets were until John the Baptist, you know, now the Gospel is preached. I just didn't know the Bible, and really the only antidote to all of these false teachings is to know your Word, and so there was a point, and it was the Word that brought me out of Mormonism.

What took me in? The wonderful people, the culture they loved on us, they became family for us, but that's a bit of a dangerous thing, Chris, because as soon as the Mormon Church replaces your family, it really does begin to replace your biological family, and I had Christian biological family, and all of a sudden everybody I saw, everybody I hung out with, I had callings in the Mormon Church became Mormon, and everyone my kids hung out with were Mormon.

Literally when I left the Mormon Church after 30 years, I didn't know anyone outside of the Mormon Church. I didn't know how people dressed outside of Mormon bubble, except for my family, my Christian family.

That was it. It took me a while to readjust, believe me. No, I can believe it. Well, we're going to be going to a station break, and we've already got several listeners waiting to have their questions asked, and if you'd like to join them with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com.

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Of iron sharpens iron radio welcome back. This is chris arnds and if you just tuned us in for the full two hours of our program today we have on the program dr lynn k wilder. She is a former mormon who by god's grace and mercy was rescued out of that cult and became a bible believing christian a born again sister in christ.

And she has written a book unveiling grace the true story of how we found our way out of the mormon church forward by dr john anchorberg. And before i return to that book in our discussion i just have a couple of important announcements on august 12th one week from today at 7 p .m at 7 p .m pacific time my dear friend dr james r white of alpha and omega ministries is going to be involved in a theological debate with steve tassi on calvinism and that is going to be moderated by lane chaplain and it's going to be held at calvary fellowship in norwalk california.

And if you'd like more details about that you can call 714 -353 -6976 714 -353 -6976. You can also go to facebook .com forward slash calvary fellowship norwalk that's n-o-r-w-a-l-k and uh you can also go to the alpha omega ministries website at a-o-m-i-n dot org a-o-m-i-n dot org.

And then finally on friday september 9th a very good friend of mine staff sergeant david karnes is going to be speaking in carlisle pennsylvania the hometown of iron sharpens iron radio. He is going to be speaking at the war college at a 9 -11 memorial that the war college is having.

And i was honored to help the war college the u .s army war college arrange this event with staff sergeant david karnes. One of the things that's remarkable about this brother in christ david karnes is that he was primarily responsible for the rescue of several police officers transit police officers in new york city who were trapped beneath the rubble of one of the twin towers that had collapsed on them during the terrorist attack on september 11th.

And david karnes went into an area of the ruins of the world trade center that had already been thoroughly searched at least they thought and basically had been given up on by the those who were involved in the searches for surviving individuals.

And david karnes went back into that area. And thanks be to god he did that because he was able to locate and get assistance to rescue these police officers who otherwise would have perished. And he is a remarkable christian man.

And so if you can make it to that event here in carlisle pennsylvania we would be delighted to see you there and the website for more details for the christian businessmen's connection of carlisle who are actually running this event in cooperation with the u .s army war college.

That website is centralpa .cbmc .com. That's centralpa .cbmc which stands for christian businessmen's connection uh .com centralpa .cbmc .com. And we hope that you are there on friday september 9th for this wonderful event with staff sergeant david karnes a true american hero and true christian hero.

And we now return to our discussion with dr lynn k wilder author of unveiling grace the story of how we found our way out of the church before we find out more about her own personal testimony. I just wanted to read a couple of the endorsements by two women who have been guests on iron sharpens iron radio.

One is my dear friend latain c scott mutual friend of my guest today. This is the story of how a whole family did its own heart transplant a young man on his lifelong dream of a mormon mission his siblings father deeply enmeshed in lds priesthood and the author lynn wilder a tenured professor at brigham young university.

One by one they plucked the lifeless works-driven core of mormonism from their breasts and replaced it with the vibrant grace of jesus christ. A remarkable tender account. That's latain c scott former latter-day saint and author of the mormon mirage.

And unveiling grace is the inspiring account of one mormon's family journey from error to truth from lying relying on priesthood authority to faith from trusting in temple ordinances to trusting in christ alone.

The wilder story demonstrates the love of the shepherd as he seeks his lost sheep. And that's sandra tanner great great granddaughter of brigham young and president of utah lighthouse ministry. And it was my honor to have both of those women on my program and those are very powerful endorsements for this book.

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for lynn wilder our email address is chris arnson at gmail .com chris arnson at gmail .com. So you you and your husband join the church of jesus christ of and then you actually uh become eventually a professor in one of the most world-renowned mormon institutions of education known brigham young university.

Tell us about that.

The mormon church actually has four. They own four colleges that they run. The foremost one is in provo utah 36 000 students at brigham young university and it's a research to university you know kind of well thought of in the united states.

Yeah a lot of the.

College sports fans immediately recognize byu when they hear that name. Yes uh jim mcmahon.

You know got to start there. So mormonism tries though very hard to have kind of a public presence and to be influential in the important institutions around the world. Of course higher education is one of them so it would not be unusual for a prominent mormon to go to brigham young maybe undergrad a lot like mit romney did and then step up into one of the ivy league schools like yale or stanford or harvard you know and then even go on and get a doctorate.

Mormons will often then go into politics go into um the fbi the cia military um and those things help mormonism kind of have a presence uh so that other people could look to us as mormons and want the life that we had.

Um it's. It's a little bit of a prosperity gospel. The book of mormon says those who are um righteous. Of course you believe you can make yourself righteous. Those who are righteous will be blessed both temporally and spiritually.

So literally when i was in mormonism um i believed that life would be good i wouldn't have cancer i'd have a nice.

Home i'd have a nice job. Wow are you sure you weren't in joel olsteen's church.

And if those things didn't happen to me then i was doing something wrong. I was not keeping up my part of the bargain with god. It's very workspace and there's lots and lots of pressure on mormons to be perfect.

Literally they believe the scripture that says be perfect. They don't understand. The only way that you get that way is to be found in christ. Who who is your only perfection right. But um mormons actually believe that through their works they can please god.

And then if they do enough good works and they endure to the end and they are worthy to go to the temple then at the end of their life if they've done enough god's grace might kick in. But you never know that you have eternal life on this earth.

So uh you uh were so sunk into this that you were soaking up education and you eventually became not only a professor but a tenured professor at this prestigious college. And when was it that you started to think that.

Perhaps you are actually leading young minds astray into very dangerous damnable evil error. Uh as a professor representing that that religion of.

Mormonism. Well there were certainly red flags around the world. In the 1980s i read a book called emma hale smith mormon enigma about joseph smith's main wife emma hale smith. What i did learn through this book was that joseph had been a polygamist and that he'd actually lied to his wife about being a polygamist.

And i learned all kinds of things that made me sick. But i just ignored it and put it on a shelf. I really did think mormonism was the one true church. The next thing that started to rock me was when i went to byu.

I was hired at byu in 1999. In the year 2000 i was assigned to teach multiculturalism because our accrediting agency at byu required it. Right. Most schools are required now if you want federal money to teach diversity.

And so since i was kind of the baby the new hire and nobody seemed to want to do it i was assigned to do it and i was thrilled to do it. My background is in working with gangs and kids and drugs and homeless shelters and i've had a lot of diversity kind of experience.

And so i was thrilled to do it. But the way god began to tug at me with this diversity topic was that my students at byu began to tell me that dark skin was a curse. I'm laughing at them. I'm trying to teach multiculturalism cultural pluralism.

Right. And they're they're telling me okay okay okay. But but not those with dark skin right. Wow. So i'm asking my students where they're getting this. And one of my students said oh it comes out of the bible.

And i remember thinking oh that unreliable stupid bible. Right. And because i had that um point of view i didn't even go back and read it. It was years before i actually went back to the bible and tried to see what that whole curse of cain mark of cain thing was when i finally read it in the bible it's like okay there's a god put some mark on him.

Wait doesn't say anything about skin color. And the mark was actually to protect him to keep other people from killing him. Wait a minute. That's not all what the mormons were telling me. Well i eventually learned that the book of mormon and the pearl of great price which are are two uh mormons standard works of scripture.

There are 26 scriptures in those two books that say things like dark skin is a curse. In fact to this day it says in the book of mormon when the unrighteous laymanites joined the righteous nephites and became righteous their skin turned from dark to white still says that in the book of mormon.

So i'm thinking this is crazy. There's no merit to this. And then i began to um kind of dig into the history of mormonism. And i found out that blacks could not hold the mormon priesthood until 1978. I found out blacks could not attend byu.

In the 60s i found that other universities were boycotting and wouldn't play um byu in football because they didn't have any blacks on their football or basketball teams um i was finding all kinds of things i had not known in 30 years of mormonism.

And many mormons are not even aware of. And it's.

Fairly recent history and well you know uh i i mentioned an encounter not the one i had in the streets of carlisle here but in the 1980s when i was a new christian and i actually was responding to a commercial for the mormon church that said if you want a book of mormon hand delivered by a mormon elder to your home.

Call this number. So i did because i wanted to confront mormons with the gospel. I was a very aggressive young christian who wanted to i guess probably test my own abilities or something. But when the young mormon came with an older man uh i was expecting the older man to be the smarter one of the two but time after time when i mentioned some uh controversial unpopular mormon teaching the older man was saying what you are saying does indeed sound strange but i think that you have probably heard wrong things about the mormon church as if he was reading it from a script and the younger man was constantly bowing his head and saying uh no that's what we believe.