April 27, 2016 Show with “A Tribute to William Norman Grigg”

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On April 12, 2017, a dear old friend of mine unexpectedly entered into eternal peace with his beloved

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Savior, Jesus Christ, at the age of 54. His name is William Norman Grigg, a

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Mormon convert to the true Christ and true Gospel of the Scriptures. He was former senior editor of the

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New American Magazine, an outspoken Christian libertarian and unwavering constitutionalist, and a frequent guest on the old

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Iron Sharpens Iron radio broadcast airing out of Long Island, New York. It is in loving memory of Will that I now air two one -hour interviews with him back to back.

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I hope you are as blessed listening to them as I was conducting them. William Norman Grigg will certainly be missed, but our loss is

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Heaven's gain. Welcome to Iron Sharpens Iron. The only daily live broadcast in the

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New York metropolitan and greater Long Island area on which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians have a platform to address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27, 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and direct you to have in view, in conversation, to make one another wiser and better.

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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.

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And now, here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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Long Island, New York, Connecticut, and those listening internationally over the internet. This is

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Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron. The attack on the World Trade Center here in New York City was not the only massacre conducted by religious fanatics following a false prophet on the date

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September 11th. Today we're going to be discussing an entirely different massacre that occurred on September 11th, 1857, the

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Mountain Meadows Massacre, involving the brutal murder of 120 women, men, and children by a

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Mormon militia. These innocent victims were immigrants, mostly from Arkansas, traveling to California, who had the misfortune of passing through the

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Utah Territory during the infamous Utah War between Mormon settlers and the United States federal government.

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And we're going to be discussing the Mountain Meadows Massacre today with our guest, William Norman Grigg, who is a former high priest in the

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Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, the Mormons, who converted to evangelical Christianity by the grace of God.

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And we are excited today to be addressing this very fascinating topic. We'll be right back after these messages with William Norman Grigg.

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We hope that Iron Sharpens Iron Radio blesses you for many years to come. Welcome back.

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This is Chris Arnsen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron. And as I just announced, today our guest is my friend

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William Norman Grigg, one of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron. William Norman Grigg is a former high priest in the

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Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormons, who converted to evangelical

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Christianity. And we're going to be discussing the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a horrific event in our nation's history, which ironically occurred on September 11th in 1857, involving the brutal murder of 120 men, women and children by a

04:29

Mormon militia. And as I said earlier, these innocent victims were immigrants, mostly from Arkansas, traveling to California, who had the misfortune of passing through the

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Utah Territory during the infamous Utah War between Mormon settlers and the United States federal government.

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These Mormon assassins only spared the lives of 17 of the youngest children. And this is a timely interview today with William Norman Grigg, due to the extremely controversial motion picture

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September Dawn, starring Academy Award winning actor John Voight, which is scheduled to debut on the 24th of August.

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But welcome back to Iron Sharpens Iron, William Norman Grigg. Chris, thanks so much for having me again.

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It's a blessing to be with you. Yes, and it's always a blessing to have you on the program. Well, before we even go into the topic at hand, the

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Mountain Meadows Massacre, just briefly give our listeners some background about your conversion from Mormonism to biblical

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Christianity, because some of our listeners may not have heard your interview in the past. And we are now recording our programs on downloadable

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MP3s, thanks to Alpha and Omega Ministries in Phoenix, Arizona. So this will have a lot farther exposure,

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I believe, than your previous interviews. Well, that's very good to know. As you mentioned, I was raised in the

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LDS church. I was adopted at the age of six weeks by a Mormon couple. And they are among the nicest, most decent people you'd ever want to meet.

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I think there's no man I've ever met finer than my father. And my mother has helped me in every way.

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And they are fifth generation Mormons. And at the age of six weeks, I was adopted into that family and baptized in the

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Mormon church at age eight. And at age 12, became a deacon, which was an Aaronic or Levitical priesthood, as the

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Mormon church designates that office. And served a Mormon mission to Mexico and Guatemala in 1982 to 1984.

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And it was while I was in Guatemala on October the 11th, not September 11th,

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October the 11th of 1983 that I was reading in the book of Luke and specifically about the experience of Jesus in the garden, when it suddenly occurred to me that I was completely incapable of saving myself or playing any significant role in the transaction whereby my sins would be expunged and I would be made worthy in God's sight.

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And as a Mormon, I had been taught and I had taught as a Mormon missionary that salvation consists of a transaction in which

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God does most of the work. But you have to do a certain portion of the work in order to be saved and to be put on a course for what is called exaltation or godhood.

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And it was impressed upon my soul at the time that in as much as I was going to be saved, it was

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God who was going to be doing that, that I was never going to be a being like God. I suddenly understood the personal dimension of salvation that I had been paying lip service to, which is specifically that Jesus died for me personally.

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And it obviously changed the way I looked at Jesus, because I had never really fully come to understand him as my

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Lord, my God and my savior. And it changed the way I looked at Mormonism, because Mormonism is centered on Joseph Smith and the works and palms of Joseph Smith and not the saving role of Jesus Christ.

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And from the moment that I had that experience, I had really no interest in talking about Joseph Smith.

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I wanted to be talking about Jesus and teaching about Jesus. And it took me a number of years, the better part of two decades as a matter of fact, only to reconcile myself to the fact that Mormonism was preaching a gospel as it styles the doctrines that it teaches.

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It was completely foreign to what the Bible taught about the person, the role, the identity, the teachings and the saving influence, the saving work of Jesus Christ.

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And it wasn't until actually I had been married in the Mormon temple and started to raise children in the Mormon church that I came to realize that I simply couldn't be part of it.

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I couldn't see our children having the same experiences that I had, where I was being raised in a system where my future had been planned for me and thinking was to be kept to the minimum and that it seemed to be a tremendously cruel thing to inflict that on our children.

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More importantly, I didn't want them to be alienated from the true Jesus as taught in the

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Bible, who might come to know at the most unlikely time of my life, which is while I was serving a Mormon mission.

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And through the grace of God, my wife, Corinne, and I and our then four, now five children were able formally to leave the

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Mormon church in 2003. Yeah, well, it blesses me to every time

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I hear you, your testimony, it's obvious you get very moved by retelling the story of your conversion.

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And it's I praise God that you have not taken your conversion for granted.

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It's still something that's very precious to you so much so that you are moved every time I hear you explain how the

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Lord saved you. In fact, we have to have you on once again to for a full hour just to give the longer version of your testimony, because the last time that you were on, that was truly one of the most moving programs

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I can remember ever doing. So basically this just so any Mormons who may be listening don't get the wrong idea about William Norman Grigg.

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You don't have some ax to grind about the Mormon church that you were treated horribly or something.

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This is just because of the fact that you discovered that the true Jesus Christ, the true gospel of scripture.

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And you came to realize that the Mormon church theologically was wrong on every single major point, really, of theology.

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I mean, there's nothing with the most important point, which is who is Jesus Christ? Yes. The Mormon church teaches that Jesus Christ is just like us, that he's a little bit further along in the program as if salvation were arranged through a multilevel marketing scheme.

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And Mormons, I hasten to point out, are among the most hardworking, decent, talented, intelligent people you'd ever encounter.

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And I love them. They are my people in the same sense that Paul would refer to the

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Jews as his people. And as Paul said of the Jews, I say of the Mormons, it is my wish that they would all be saved.

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And it is my earnest hope that God will make some use of me in bringing these wonderful people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.

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Well, it's very interesting how I think in only two generations or so, two, perhaps three generations, the

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Mormons went from being a despised and feared cult to being embraced as a part of Americana as much as baseball and apple pie, really.

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Indeed. It's a remarkable transformation. I can't really think of the likes of it in recorded human history, at least

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Western history. But the Mormons at the time, immediately following the Mountain Meadows massacre, were looked upon with a type of skepticism and hostility, not all that dissimilar to the attitude we have toward the

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Taliban. And the parallels are not merely facile, they're actually quite fascinating. Here you have a desert dwelling, polygamous theocracy that had been involved in a relationship with the central government in Washington, D .C.

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Brigham Young had been a federal though he was the federal government, the territorial governor of Utah, and he had also been the

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Indian agent. And by virtue of making him the Indian agent for Utah, he was able to arrange with some of the renegade

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Indian bands to make sorties against people who were traveling through Utah to get to California.

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And according to Will Bagley's book, Blood of the Prophets, Will Bagley being a lay historian from Utah who had remarkable access to a lot of the documentary evidence that had not been previously accessible.

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One of Brigham Young's objectives in helping to plan the Mountain Meadows massacre was to demonstrate to Washington at a time when there was a low grade war between the

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Utah Mormon government and the federal government of Washington, that the Mormons controlled access to California by controlling the overland routes and that by allying themselves with renegade

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Indians, they could attack wagon trains and other ventures that were being conducted at the time to to take immigrants from the

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United States out to California. And so there are some really interesting parallels here because there are elements of the

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Taliban who had been allied with Washington against the Soviet Union during the 1980s.

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And as well, you have here this horrific spectacle of mass murder being conducted ritualistically in the name of religion.

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The original plan, according to Bagley, was that the Indians would conduct the massacre. They would be a deniable asset of the

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Mormon theocracy. But it would be pretty clear that the Mormon theocracy could control the

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Indians, at least that would be the subtextual message that would be sent to Washington. But the Indians couldn't take out the

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Fancher, the Fancher train, the leaders of the the wagon train. Their last name was Fancher. And the

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Fancher train was led by some very experienced people who had been on many previous expeditions.

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And so they were able to withstand the initial assault of the Indians. And the assault was being directed or at least in some sense assisted by Mormon leaders who were on scene directing the attacks.

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And so on the final day of the siege, September 11th, the local Mormon leaders under a flag of truce had negotiated an arrangement whereby the

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Fancher train would be led out of its defensive position. And what happened was that the women and children were separated from the men and each of the men was accompanied at his immediate side by an armed

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Mormon. They were disarmed. This is supposedly the condition under which they were going to be released by the

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Indians. And as soon as the men were separated from the women and children, one of the Mormon leaders said,

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Brethren, do your duty to Israel. And at that point, the Mormon standing next to a male member of the

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Fancher party turned and shot that male member of the Fancher party. And then the massacre began where Indians and Mormons alike set upon the the women and children and killed them, all of them, except for 17 small children who are considered to be beneath the age of accountability, which is eight years old in Mormon theology.

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And by doing so, supposedly they were sparing innocent blood. If you were to kill somebody above the age of eight, the assumption was in Mormon theology to be killing a sinner.

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But somebody beneath the age of eight, below the age of eight was considered to be not accountable before God. How nice.

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Oh, yeah, very, very thoughtful and discriminating in that respect. But there were children younger than the age of eight who were killed.

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There was a mishap, a really fascinating incident that occurred in 1999 when an excavation was taking place out in the region next to the

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Mountain Meadows Memorial there in southern Utah. The backhoe unearthed a shallow grave that contained some of the remains of the victims.

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And the immediate reaction of the part of the state government of Utah was just to bury back up again. But of course, that would have been a crime because it's a crime scene and you can't tamper with a crime scene under state law in Utah and most other places.

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So they allowed some forensic scientists of the CSI variety, if you will, to inspect the remains that were contained in some of these shallow graves.

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And they found, among other things, the skeletal remains of very small children who must have been younger than eight who had been dispatched by a single gunshot, apparently at point blank range to the head.

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That wasn't the sort of thing that would have happened if you had Indians besetting these people with tomahawks and knives and so forth.

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I mean, that was clear evidence that one of the Mormon militiamen had dispatched the victim in that fashion.

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And so obviously you're dealing here with a premeditated mass murder that was conducted partially for reasons of state, because once again, the

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Mormon theocracy was was in a relationship, a relationship that was somewhat hostile with the government in Washington.

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But it was something propelled by a religious ideology. And one of the really important contributing factors to the hostility that led to the

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Mount Meadows massacre was that several months earlier, Parley P. Pratt, a very beloved

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Mormon apostle, had been tracked down and killed in Arkansas by Hector McLean, who was the legal husband of a woman

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Parley P. Pratt had converted to Mormonism and then had taken into his polygamous seraglio.

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And Hector McLean was an unbalanced man. He was an unbalanced, violent man who decided to track down Parley P.

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Pratt and kill him. And that deed was accomplished in Arkansas. And according to Will Bagley, Hector McLean's wife was present in July, the

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July 24th celebration of the arrival of the Mormons to Salt Lake. She was there on the dais next to Brigham Young.

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And that emotional resonance, this outrage over what was perceived as the martyrdom of the beloved apostle

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Parley P. Pratt, who, by the way, is an ancestor of mine. My father is a direct descendant of Parley P.

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Pratt. I don't remember which of his wives. Now, that's the miracle of polygamy is that you have a rather wide ancestral net of that.

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But Parley P. Pratt was well -beloved. And when his quote unquote widow, who, of course, was his paramour, not his widow in any legitimate sense, was there amid the sense that the

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Gentile government was going to come into the Utah Valley, their place of refuge, and wipe them out. There was a real war psychosis that took hold of the

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Mormons. And so this was something that was cultivated and diligently nurtured by the

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Mormon leadership, because every totalitarian or authoritarian government just loves to cultivate a sense of of siege on the part of its subject population.

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In fact, let's pick right up on that when we return from a break, William. Sure. Be right back after these messages with more of William Norman Grigg and the

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Welcome back to Iron Sharpens Iron. If you've just tuned us in, we are interviewing today

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William Norman Grigg, a former high priest in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day

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Saints who converted to evangelical Christianity. And he is addressing with us today the

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Mountain Meadows Massacre, a horrific event in our nation's history, which ironically occurred on September 11th in 1857, involving the brutal murder of 120 men, women and children by a

21:08

Mormon militia. William, where we left off, you were talking about the siege mentality that was being cultivated by the

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Mormons at this time. Well, starting about a year before the massacre, actually as early as 1855 or 1854,

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Brigham Young and his counselor Jedediah Grant had been preaching a series of sermons about sifting out the people for their righteousness.

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The idea that there had been a number of reverses in their just take a look at the history of the

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Mormon Church really is pretty much fraught with all kinds of adversity, much of it self -inflicted.

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Most of the persecution that they endured, I believe, consists of pretty much standard museum quality exhibits of the type of thing that happens when innocent people get the worst of fights that their leaders pick with others.

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And Joseph Smith, from the very beginning of Mormonism, had been perceived as a very presumptuous, arrogant and pushy man.

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And when they moved from location to location, Joseph Smith would conjure out a revelation declaring that said location was to be the

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God -given inheritance of the Mormon people. And of course, that didn't sit well with the people who were already living there.

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That happened in Missouri in 1831. And that resulted in about seven years of intercommunal warfare that was just horrible.

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If you remember, Missouri in the years leading up to the Civil War was the spectacle of all kinds of violence of the sort that you would later associate with places like Beirut and Bosnia.

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And the Mormons ended up in the middle of this. And so often there was an inclination on the part of the

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Mormons already to feel some of the siege by the larger world of the Gentiles, as they were constantly referred to. And so the

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Mormon Reformation of the 1850s focused on the idea that they had to purify themselves.

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They had to be rebaptized. They had to reassert their temple oaths, which is something that had started

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Nauvoo after the temple was completed, I believe was completed following the death of Joseph Smith, or was never fully completed.

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That would have been 1844. And one of the things that Brigham Young and Jedediah Grant both preached about very prolifically was blood atonement.

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The idea being that there are some sins that are so serious. This goes back to the nature of Mormon salvation doctrine that I alluded to in the first segment.

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There are some sins so serious that the blood of Christ cannot avail when someone seeks salvation.

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And so in order to accomplish salvation, someone guilty of a sin of this sort, which could be murder, adultery, ironically enough, or apostasy from the

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Mormon faith, in order to seek salvation, it was necessary that the supplicant allow his blood to be shed so that it can compensate for the fact that the blood of Christ is inadequate to cover that sin.

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Now, if there are sins the blood of Christ cannot atone for, then we can't be confident, we cannot have faith that the blood of Christ can atone for any sin.

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You see, the point is that's how the Bible teaches, you know, that that's something that's not unique to Mormonism, but it's certainly distinctive in the

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American sense. Mormonism, there are cognate teachings that you can find, for instance, in some strains of Islam.

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And you can find other cultic movements that preach very similar concepts, the idea that there's a certain type of altruism that one must display by being willing to kill somebody in order for that person to be saved eventually.

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There are some unfortunate things in Christian history where people have succumbed to that same delusion, but this is something that was being taught in 1855, 1856, what was called the

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Mormon Reformation. And of course, when it became clear that the Mormon priesthood government in the territory of Utah was unwilling to submit to civil authority,

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Washington became concerned and hostility began to escalate between Salt Lake City and Washington.

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And at the time, 1857, when all these events sort of coalesced, you had on top of that the death of Parley P.

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Pratt by Hector McLean. Parley P. Pratt had made a way with Hector McLean's wife, converted her to Mormonism, taken him on,

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Parley P. Pratt had taken her on, rather, as his ninth polygamous wife. And Hector McLean, being a violent, unbalanced man, stalked

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Parley P. Pratt all the way from San Francisco to Arkansas, where he killed Parley P. Pratt. And then

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Hector McLean's widow reportedly was there in July of 1857 as the sanctified widow of the late departed apostle.

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And so by this time, there was something, as I said, akin to a war psychosis that had gripped the

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Utah Mormon community. And it was cultivated by the Mormon leadership. George Smith, another apostle, he was somebody who was sort of a vainglorious individual.

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He he wore a girdle and a toupee and he had false teeth and glasses.

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And some of the Indians he dealt with refer to him as the man who comes apart. Sounds like a televangelist. Yeah, really.

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Yeah, this individual, known by the Indians as the man who comes apart, did the circuit writing preaching tours of the settlements down through southern

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Utah, where he was talking about, among other things, blood atonement and the evil of the

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Gentile world and how the time had come for a confrontation between God's people, the

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Mormons, as they styled themselves, the Gentiles, and how perhaps someday in the near future you would be using the blood of the

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Gentiles to water your fruit trees. That's that's a particular illustration that he used that I found particularly offensive.

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And all this was coalescing just as this wagon train showed up from Arkansas in the late summer of 1857.

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And the rumors started to circulate. And I have a distant ancestor who was involved in circulating these rumors that this this

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Arkansan wagon train contained members of the Missouri Wildcats who supposedly boasted that they had they had killed and otherwise oppressed

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Mormons in Missouri, that they had raped Mormon women, that they supposedly had the very gun that was used to kill

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Joseph and Hiram Smith in July of 1844 and so forth. There's not so much as a particle of truth to any of those rumors, but they had been circulated in the summer of 1857 and they have been more or less canonized through repetition in Mormon folk history.

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The idea being that this was a this was a degenerate band of wastrels, that they were disreputable people, they were violent, they were abusive, and that they boasted about doing horrible things to Mormons.

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None of this is true. As a matter of fact, a fellow by the name of Ronald Esplin, actually, I think it was Richard Turley, Ronald Esplin and Richard Turley are

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Mormon church historians who are putting out the Mormon church's version of what happened on the morning of September 11th, 1857 in the forthcoming book.

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And they have both admitted that there's no truth to any of these rumors about the misconduct by the by the

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Arkansan emigrants that they reached Salt Lake, the Salt Lake Valley. It was just their misfortune, or not the

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Salt Lake Valley, it was Utah. It was their misfortune that they happened to be Gentiles in a wagon train approaching

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Utah at a time when Utah was being primed to hate Gentiles and to expect war with the

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Gentiles. Everywhere they went they were denied forage, they were denied supplies, they were denied the opportunity to trade and conduct commerce to resupply the wagon train.

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This is this is a decree that was set up by Brigham Young. They were not to trade with the Gentiles. And those those who actually went so far as to do so were punished, often quite brutally.

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There were a couple of instances in, I believe, Spanish Fork, Utah, where on one occasion a man who actually sold,

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I think it was onions, to a member of the Fancher wagon train was beaten and punished by his local church officials because he was trading with the

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Gentiles. But they were driven down to this remote and and fairly inaccessible place near Cedar City, Utah, called

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Mountain Meadows. And the the Mormon priesthood leadership of the Cedar City stake working with under the under the guidance of Salt Lake City, this is what

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Will Bagley has documented, is that they were they knew that that this wagon train was to be used up.

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And the idea, once again, was that the Paiute Indians were supposed to conduct the attack.

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But because they weren't adequate to the task, the Mormons, who were more or less backing them up and giving them advice and direction, took the matter in hand themselves and consummated the dirty deed.

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There is a journal entry that Will Bagley located and published in his book in which

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Brigham Young is talking with an Indian leader and offers them the cattle and the wealth contained in that wagon train, and this specifically referring to the

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Fancher Party wagon train. And the only reason to do this, obviously, was so so as to induce that the

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Indian leader and in his band to attack that wagon train and plunder it. And the

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Indian leader in question, whose name eludes me right now, was somewhat reluctant to do so. I mean, he thought that the

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Americans have been treating them quite well. But there were there were some elements of the Paiute tribe who were willing to carry this out.

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So they basically hired assassins, the Indians. Yeah, they didn't really want to be doing the dirty work for the for the

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Mormon hierarchy. And that was the theme, by the way, that you could see in Brigham Young's speeches of the of the period.

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He talked about Brother Lemuel, and that refers to the Book of Mormon passage where Laman and Lemuel, who were the older brothers of the main character,

30:47

Nephi, Nephi being the good, righteous brother, Laman and Lemuel being the rebellious brothers. Laman and Lemuel were cursed by God and spitting with the dark skin as a token of divine disfavor.

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And they're supposedly the ancestors of the American Indians. And as it happens, I am what

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Mormons call a Lamanite. That is the Mormon expression for an American Indian, a Native American, a

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Mexican of Indian ancestry. I'm a dark brown individual who has that ancestry. And that that played a role in my perceptions of the

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Mormon church, because I found it puzzling that God would color code people for righteousness. It seems a summarily unscriptural.

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But in any case, Brother Lemuel, the Indians were supposedly going to be the strong arm of the

31:32

Mormon hierarchy in in rebuking the the iniquitous government of the Gentiles.

31:37

And you can you can we can see from the documentation in Will Bagley's book that there were covert plans being made to bring this about that led to Mount Meadows.

31:47

So basically this wagon train could have been any non -Mormon group that would have been massacred anyway.

31:54

Probably in this case, because they came from Arkansas, which is where probably

32:00

Pete Pratt had been killed. There was that much more inventive reaction on the part of Mormons to this particular wagon train.

32:08

And the fact that Arkansas, of course, borders on Missouri. And that led to speculation that there were

32:14

Missourians who were part of that train that added another layer of rancor, if you will, to the perception of the

32:20

Mormons of those wagon trains showed up. I do think it's interesting to point out that the Fanchers, the brothers who led that wagon train, were of French ancestry and they were

32:31

Reformed Christians. They were descended from Huguenots who survived the

32:36

St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Wow. Boy, that is a family that has that has a little bit of baggage in its genealogy.

32:44

Well, I never heard that before. Yeah, that's another thing underscored in Will Bagley's very fine book and in a couple of other sources

32:50

I've seen where they talk about the lineage of the Fancher party, that you have people who survived the hideous, horrible, world historic atrocity called the

32:59

St. Bartholomew's Day massacre who end up in the United States and get wiped out by a group of Mormons on September 11th, 1857.

33:07

Wow. What's really interesting about that particular date, by the way, is that on exactly the same day or within within a 24 hour period of the

33:15

Mount Meadows massacre, there was a steamship that sank in the Gulf of Mexico called the

33:23

S .S. Central America that contained a rather large quantity of gold that was being taken to eastern banks in order to help finance some of the agricultural businesses that were then thriving.

33:37

And so you had this really weird juxtaposition where suddenly it looked as if people couldn't travel the overland routes to California and the

33:44

S .S. Central America started out as journey and started out with people in California going across the Isthmus, then into the

33:51

Gulf to get to Florida. It seemed like you couldn't travel. You couldn't travel on the sea lanes either because your steamships are going to are going to sink.

33:59

And it led to a mini depression. These two events together really threw a scare into people, the same sort of way that our

34:06

September 11th threw a scare into people about air travel and other means of transportation. And it had that kind of emotional impact for a lot of people.

34:16

They were really concerned about the possibility that until this fanaticism was arrested and somehow dealt with, that really the country was going to be very badly off.

34:27

And that makes it all the more dramatic to see that within a couple of generations, Mormons were being brought into the mainstream.

34:33

And now there's a university named after Brigham Young. And it seems to me almost if you were to put yourself in the mind of an

34:40

American circa, say, 1861 or 1870 or so, the fact that Brigham Young has a university named after him would strike that American as being as bizarre as if you could look 200 years, 100 years in the future and see a university named after Osama Bin Laden or Hitler.

34:58

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37:28

This is Chris Arnsen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, and we are interviewing William Norman Grigg, a former high priest in the

37:35

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons, who converted to evangelical

37:40

Christianity, and William is addressing the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and this is largely due to the fact that there is a movie coming out this month, debuting this month on August 24th, actually, called

37:54

September Dawn, starring Academy Award -winning actor John Voight, and I'm very eager to see this movie.

38:02

I don't know how accurate it is. Obviously, I haven't seen it yet, and I don't believe you've seen any preview of it, have you,

38:08

William? I've seen very short previews of the film, and I've read a couple of fairly extensive interviews with the director, and the thing that I find really interesting is that while they have created for John Voight a character who is extraneous to the historical setting as a way of just,

38:28

I guess, helping the audience identify with what's going on. The character John Voight plays is a fictive character.

38:34

For the most part, they have hewn pretty closely to the actual record, particularly whenever Brigham Young is actually speaking, from what the director said, and I haven't seen the film, so I can't attest to this firsthand, but he said that all the lines of dialogue spoken by Brigham Young in this film are documentable.

38:51

They're taken either from the publicly available sermons, which were digested into the

38:59

Journal of Discourses, which was an authoritative chronology and authoritative record of the public sermons, the

39:06

Tabernacle, and elsewhere, or they're taken from diary journal entries that are contemporaneous to the period, and the role of Brigham Young is being played by Terence Stamp, which is sort of interesting because he played

39:16

Zod, the great antagonist of Superman's father in Superman II.

39:22

I don't know if you remember that film. Yeah, that's right. He's apparently making a very fine living playing megalomaniac.

39:30

I think an Academy Award winning British actor. Sorry about that.

39:36

I don't know what I understand. The Brigham Young character will be heard preaching blood atonement sermons and such like, talking about the supposed virtue of hewing down apostates and Gentiles, splitting their throats so that their blood may be spilled on the ground and ascend as an incense that's up to the

39:56

Almighty, so as to provide them with some hope of redemption is purely macabre stuff, but it's all historically accurate.

40:03

That's very much faithful to Mormonism of that period. Now, although you and I would view presidential candidate

40:10

Mitt Romney as a liberal, one can't help but wonder if, since this is a Hollywood production, that this movie would never have been made, perhaps, unless there was a

40:21

Republican candidate for presidency who was a Mormon. The timing just seems to be very interesting. Wouldn't you agree?

40:30

William, we've lost our guest. I believe we have our guest back online.

40:36

Willie, are you there? Will Gregg, are you there? I think we are now reconnected with William Gregg, correct?

40:43

Yes, we are. Yes, I was starting to wonder if Mitt Romney's campaign volunteers had cut the lines to your phone or something because you went dead immediately when

40:55

I was somewhat tongue in cheek, but actually somewhat seriously suggesting the possibility that this movie was created just because of the fact that we have a

41:04

Republican candidate for president who's a Mormon, and although you and I would view him as a liberal,

41:10

Hollywood is known for their hatred of anyone who was a

41:15

Republican, regardless of what their ideology is. Yeah, that much is certain. John Voight, by the way, considers himself to be some kind of conservative, which strikes me as ludicrous.

41:25

I mean, here's somebody whose breakthrough is an X -rated role in Midnight Cowboy. Yeah, but he could have changed his ideology.

41:34

Yeah, sort of a Mark Foley -style Republican or something of that sort.

41:40

I don't know. But he was asked that question by Robert Novak, the columnist for the

41:45

Chicago Sun -Times syndicate, a number of weeks ago after the film

41:50

September Dawn released a preliminary cut of the film was screened for the

41:55

Motion Picture Association of America. And what John Voight said is, well, no, I'm a conservative, but I don't really want to be doing any injury to any of the

42:04

Republican candidates. And he said he doesn't have anything against Mitt Romney as a man or as a politician.

42:09

He said, however, that he thinks that it's timely and necessary to take a serious look at what happens when you're dealing with the fusion of politics and religious fanaticism, where you have a sense that somebody who is anointed by God has the right to rule over others and to impose his will through terror, which is what he sees happening during the reign of Brigham Young.

42:32

And I think that's a very accurate perception of what it was like to be living in the Utah Territory under the reign of Brigham Young and Jedediah Grant and people of that ilk.

42:41

You were making reference earlier to the Sedevac and to the school of Catholicism, yeti, that there's no legitimate pope for quite a while in the

42:50

Roman Catholic Church. Well, not commenting upon that specific controversy, I think it's interesting that in Mormon fundamentalism, you find a very similar perspective on the prophetic succession in the

43:04

Mormon Church. I mean, Brigham Young was the successor to Joseph Smith, and the Mormon Church today claims that there was a discontinuity between, say, 100

43:15

A .D. and 1830, when Joseph Smith organized the Mormon Church, which they claim is the restoration of the original primitive church founded by Jesus Christ and led by his apostles and disciples.

43:28

But they say that since 1830, there's been an unbroken continuity from Joseph Smith to Gordon B. Hinckley. But there are those in the fundamentalist community who say that, no, that thread was broken when the church repudiated polygamy in 1890, and it only repudiated polygamy under the threat of being expropriated by the federal government.

43:47

And it did so, the Mormon Church, as part of a grand bargain to allow Utah to achieve statehood a few years later.

43:54

But it was also still practicing polygamy, sabrosa. You had people who were still going out and contracting polygamous unions as late as the 18, or forgive me, as late as the 19 -teens or even into the 1920s.

44:09

And off of that movement has budded a number of fundamentalist communities who are really much more faithful to Mormonism as practiced by Brigham Young than the current mainstream

44:21

Mormon Church, represented by Gordon B. Hinckley and increasingly represented in the public mind by Mitt Romney, whose father, by the way, was a polygamous

44:29

Mormon, who, or forgive me, his father was not. His father, his grandfather, that would be a news item, that would be breaking news.

44:38

George Romney, who ran for the presidency in the 1960s, had been a polygamous. No, it was his grandfather who lived in the

44:45

Mormon colonies in northern Mexico, where a lot of the polygamous Mormons sought refuge after 1890 or the early years of the 20th century.

44:56

And the colonies in northern Mexico are really an interesting, most easily cantina -type environment.

45:03

You remember that line from Star Wars about the Mos Eisley spaceport being a wretched hive of scum and villainy?

45:10

Well, the Mormon colonies are a little like that, because on the one hand, you have relatively respectable people who no longer practice polygamy and who are trying to live lives of decency and uprightness.

45:24

On the other hand, you've got some elements of the LeBaron clan and other really hyper -violent, serious

45:30

Mormon fundamentalists who see nothing at all amiss in practicing blood atonement and doing all the other things that characterize

45:37

Mormonism and the pure, unalloyed malignance of its original incarnation under Brigham Young.

45:45

And it was out of that ambit that the Romney family, interestingly enough, came from.

45:50

And if people poke around in that a little bit, they'll be somewhat mortified with some of the things they'll find out. Behind the facade of Mitt Romney, who's a gregarious, engaging guy, he looks like the world's oldest living

46:02

Osmond brother, or sort of like what Ted Danson would look like if Ted Danson hadn't lived a life of such dissipation.

46:10

He's somebody who really does put a photogenic and appealing face on Mormonism, which is why he's so valuable to the

46:17

Mormon hierarchy and why this film is somewhat problematic to Mitt Romney's campaign chances.

46:25

As Novak pointed out, there are a lot of people who are very wealthy and very influential in the upper realms of business and politics who are very devout

46:35

Mormons, who are no doubt very upset about this film, because if it finds any traction, any commercial traction this summer, that's going to be a difficult thing, because it's not exactly your standard popcorn epic.

46:50

If this film does find its audience, however, it's going to have an impact on the way people perceive Mitt Romney.

46:57

I think that's potentially a very good thing, because it would give us some room to start talking about the fact that Mormonism is a religion of human construction.

47:08

It was the fabrication of somebody who created a religion for the same reason that all religions are created, and that is to satisfy his appetites for money, power, and sex.

47:19

It's very much akin to what Muhammad did. Take a look at Muhammad's religion. What Muhammad wanted,

47:24

Muhammad could get through revelation, and what he wanted were money, power, and sex. The same thing is true of Joseph Smith, who once referred to himself as a second

47:32

Muhammad. And the works that were done by Brigham Young in Joseph Smith's name, and the disciples of Joseph Smith on September 11, 1857, were very much the works of what you would expect from people who were the disciples of a second

47:44

Muhammad. Well, I don't want to claim to be a prophet, no pun intended, speaking more than that, but if you recall, one of the first times

47:52

I interviewed you, William, I said to you, in wonderment, why isn't the liberal media giving us information about the

48:01

Meadows Mountain massacre, Mountain Meadows massacre, and exposing this because of the fact that we have a

48:07

Republican candidate for president, and sure enough, there's a movie coming out.

48:13

How honest or dishonest has the LDS church been regarding this?

48:19

They have a history, a notorious history of rewriting history. I mean, even the

48:25

Book of Mormon has been rewritten, I don't know how many times. Several. Yes, and cover -ups and so forth, and you just mentioned that there's a new book coming out by Mormons that seems to be fairly honest about it, but how recent is this honesty that's been occurring?

48:41

Well, they often will make a virtue of necessity when they have no other choice, and once it's widely accepted that the standard version of history that the

48:51

Mormon church has been promoting is no longer being taken seriously, then they will yield to the inevitability of the moment, and they will admit what everybody already knows to be the truth.

49:01

They may be at that point with respect to the Mountain Meadows massacre. When I went to the Mountain Meadows site 11 years ago,

49:08

I spoke with the missionaries who were at Cedar City at a local visitor center, and I was really upset because the depiction given of what happened on that horrible morning was entirely antiseptic from the

49:22

Mormon point of view. There was no identification as to who it was who actually attacked this wagon train.

49:29

It's something that apparently just materialized out of a cloudless sky and an unbroken horizon.

49:36

Suddenly, somebody came along and wiped out this wagon train. I said, that's not true. And to the credit of this missionary, a very nice lady in her 60s, she said, no, that's not true, and we really don't like it.

49:46

We should be telling the truth about things of this sort. That once again testifies to the basic resilient decency of the

49:54

Mormon people. They don't like being put in the position of having to lie for their faith. I remember just by way of a good example of another problematic issue here, when in June of 1978, the

50:06

Mormon church ended its ban on ordination of black men to be priests in the Mormon church.

50:11

I remember the palpable relief of my parents. They no longer had to defend the indefensible. They no longer had to say, well, we're taught that black people in the previous existence, the spiritual existence prior to obtaining mortal bodies, had been less than valiant, and that at some point they will have these blessings given to them.

50:31

But they obviously didn't like having to recite that line of thinking. And once the policy was done away with, they felt a great deal of relief over it.

50:40

And I think that there's a certain catharsis that's going to happen, as the truth is made more widely known and more widely acknowledged in the

50:47

Mormon church as to what happened on September 11th of 1857. But that will put a lot of Mormons in a really problematic position, because what does that say about the priesthood leadership of the

50:59

Mormon church, about the prophetic leadership, supposedly, of Brigham Young? What does it say about the fact that when these innocent people were under the power of people who were supposedly the exponents of the one true

51:13

Christian faith, that those people were butchered horribly? And that for 20 years, the

51:19

Mormon president, Brigham Young, was at very least an accessory after the fact, and an active participant in the cover -up that blamed one man for this massacre.

51:29

That they're going to ask questions like that. And once people start thinking, it's difficult to get out of that habit.

51:35

And independent thought is the one thing that a cult cannot afford to cultivate. Well, William, any plans to write a book of your own on Mormonism?

51:44

You have such a rich knowledge of their history and teaching. I would love to. But as it happens, right now,

51:51

I'm busy getting another book published. Hopefully, in the next couple of weeks, that will come out.

51:57

And then I've got another writing project I'm involved in with a very nice gentleman from Texas that's next in the queue.

52:05

And after that, I've got another book project I started about a year ago that I finally want to get off my desk.

52:12

But after these three things are finally out, and after I've cleared my desk of these other projects, maybe there's something

52:19

I could do. I'd sure like to. I've got a lot to say on this subject. Yes. And how can our listeners contact you, your website and so forth?

52:26

The best way to contact me is through the RightSource, which is a web portal for news and commentary.

52:33

RightSourceOnline .com, not the RightSource, just RightSourceOnline .com. If you look at the left side of the screen, about a third of the way down the screen, if you scroll down, there'll be a photograph of yours truly.

52:45

And it will have two links. One is to an e -zine, and the other is to a blog. They're both called Pro Libertate, which is

52:51

Latin, meaning for freedom. And the blog is updated between three and five times a week.

52:57

The e -zine, rather more austerely than that. But if you're interested in seeing what

53:02

I have to say, that's the best way to do it. Great. And the website for the movie September Dawn is

53:07

SeptemberDawn .net. SeptemberDawn .net. And interestingly enough, they have a link for a very good

53:14

Christian organization to that website for the Utah Lighthouse Ministry that was founded by Gerald and Sandra Tanner, former

53:23

Mormons who became Christians. It's probably the most popular Christian outreach to Mormonism in existence.

53:31

The Utah Lighthouse Ministry's website, if you're interested, for further information, www .utlm .org.

53:38

That's utlm .org. And also, my friend James White, Alpha and Omega Ministries is aomin .org.

53:45

Don't go away. There's one more interview left to be heard, conducted with the late William Norman Grigg back in 2007, after these messages.

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forward slash Iron Sharpens today. Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am

01:03:29

I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man,

01:03:36

I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, pastor of Providence Baptist Church. We are a

01:03:42

Reformed Baptist Church, and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689. We are in Norfolk, Massachusetts.

01:03:49

We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how God views what we say and what we do than how men view these things.

01:03:57

That's not the best recipe for popularity, but since that wasn't the Apostle's priority, it must not be ours either.

01:04:04

We believe, by God's grace, that we are called to demonstrate love and compassion to our fellow man, and to be vessels of Christ's mercy to a lost and hurting community around us, and to build up the body of Christ in truth and love.

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If you live near Norfolk, Massachusetts, or plan to visit our area, please come and join us for worship and fellowship.

01:04:22

You can call us at 508 -528 -5750. That's 508 -528 -5750.

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Or go to our website to email us, listen to past sermons, worship songs, or watch our

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01:05:34

That's wrbc .us. Welcome to Iron Sharpens Iron, the only daily live broadcast in the

01:06:32

New York metropolitan and greater Long Island area on which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians have a platform to address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

01:06:44

Proverbs 2717 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

01:06:51

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and direct you to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

01:07:04

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.

01:07:13

And now, here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

01:07:19

Long Island, New York, Connecticut, and those listening internationally over the internet. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron.

01:07:27

We have one of my favorite guests on the program today, William Norman Grigg.

01:07:32

Those of you who listen to Iron Sharpens Iron regularly will probably remember that William Norman Grigg is a former high priest in the

01:07:40

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormons, who, by God's grace, converted to evangelical

01:07:46

Christianity. And he's going to be speaking about his testimony today. Many of you may remember that he was recently on our program on August 7th, actually, discussing the

01:07:56

Mountain Meadows Massacre, which was a horrific event in our nation's history, where a

01:08:02

Mormon militia in the 1800s brutally and savagely murdered 120 men, women, and children who were innocent victims, really, just passing through Utah on their way out to California from Arkansas.

01:08:18

Well, I thought it might be a good idea to have William on again to discuss his personal testimony, because it's one of the most moving testimonies

01:08:26

I've ever heard. And especially since this movie is debuting this Friday, it will give our listeners some more background on Mormonism before they may see this movie.

01:08:36

I want to call up your family and friends during the station break, especially if they're Mormon, and have them tune in to 1440

01:08:42

AM on the dial if they live on Long Island or the coast of Connecticut. But they can listen anywhere in the entire world at www .wnygspiritofny

01:08:51

.com. That's www .wnygspiritofny .com. We'll be right back after these messages with William Norman Grigg.

01:09:30

Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, and welcome to Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio, where we share with you the story of William Norman Grigg, a

01:13:30

Mormon bishopric counselor to my father, who was a bishop in the Burley, Idaho ward at the time.

01:13:37

So I was adopted at the age of about six weeks, and raised from the time of my earliest memories in a

01:13:44

Mormon household. I was baptized at age eight. At age 12, I was ordained a deacon, which seems sort of a peculiar thing to people in Christian denominations who are accustomed to seeing deacons as older men who take responsibility for a congregation.

01:14:01

But I was ordained a deacon at age 12. That was a matter of some controversy before I was ordained, because I'm a very dark brown complexioned man, and I was a very dark brown complexioned child.

01:14:12

And this all happened before 1978, and some people thought that I had African ancestry because of my features and physiognomy.

01:14:19

Yes, you might want to let our listeners know the Mormon view in the 70s and prior, going all the way back to its origins, of racism.

01:14:28

Sure. The idea was that people who were of African ancestry, men of African ancestry, could never be ordained to the

01:14:34

Mormon priesthood because of a curse that was symbolized by the color of their skin, that they were supposedly the descendants of Cain through Ham.

01:14:41

That's not a belief which is exclusive to Mormons, but it's a belief that is exclusively taught scripturally in Mormonism, because one of the volumes recognized as scripture by the

01:14:50

Mormons, the Pearl of Great Price, does teach that doctrine. And it was codified as an official doctrine of the

01:14:55

Church until it was repealed by supposed revelation in June of 1978. But there's a cognate teaching in the

01:15:02

Book of Mormon about the supposed origins of the American Indians, the Polynesians, and the Latin Americans, anybody who would be considered an

01:15:09

Indian, supposedly as descendants of a pair of evildoers by the name of Laman and Lemuel, who were the wicked elder brothers of Nephi, who was sort of the heroic character of the first part of the

01:15:22

Book of Mormon. And they were supposedly cursed with dark skins as well, but no priesthood ordination band obtained that cursing.

01:15:29

But as I said before, there's this peculiar belief in Mormonism that God has color -coded people for righteousness and acceptability.

01:15:36

And as an eight-, nine-, ten -year -old child, I would occasionally be asked if I had lineage problems that would prevent me from being ordained to the priesthood.

01:15:44

I didn't understand what that meant until I had a conversation with my parents that was also triggered by an experience

01:15:51

I had at a family reunion that was attended by a distant cousin who had married a wonderful man who was black.

01:15:58

And they were treated with sort of cold formality, a certain distant politeness.

01:16:04

And I couldn't understand why people were treating them with such reserve. My mother explained that because this cousin of mine had married a black man, their children wouldn't be able to hold the priesthood.

01:16:14

I couldn't understand then, and of course I can't understand now, although in a larger sense perhaps I can, why so much significance attached to the melanin content of a given individual and why

01:16:23

God would see fit to withhold certain blessings to people because of the color of their skin, as if he'd somehow made a mistake, or as if somehow his prejudices tracked the lines of those of the people who surround him.

01:16:37

But as I said, that policy was repealed in 1978 in large measure because of political expediency. And in my case, because I was a quote -unquote

01:16:44

Lamanite, as opposed to a quote -unquote descendant of Cain, there was no problem with me being ordained to the

01:16:51

Mormon priesthood as a deacon at age 12. So it was only those who were descendants of Africa, if you will, of African descent, that were barred from the priesthood?

01:17:01

That's correct. And Brigham Young went so far as to say, and he said this repeatedly as a matter of emphatically preached doctrine for over a decade, that it was a capital offense for somebody of the chosen seed, meaning the primarily

01:17:16

Scandinavian or British, fair -complexioned, blue -eyed

01:17:21

Mormons to marry someone of the accursed race, meaning people of black ancestry, and that the penalty under the law of God was always and always would be death on the spot for somebody who would so intermingle races.

01:17:35

Wow. He was somebody who was very candid about his beliefs, which is convenient because the beliefs are very repellent, and they're also still foundational to Mormonism.

01:17:43

And so if you have access to the Journal of Discourses, which is this Talmudic collection of writings and speeches by the founding prophets and apostles of Mormonism, you can go back and read where Brigham Young said all these abhorrent things, and you can see how they are intimately connected to the teachings of Joseph Smith, and they're integral to the worldview and cosmology and doctrine of Mormonism.

01:18:08

Now, I don't want to belabor the racist issue, because we did dedicate an entire program on that one theme of the racism of Mormonism, but I do want to just ask one more question regarding that.

01:18:18

Was there any other restrictions given to those of African descent, other than being barred from the priesthood?

01:18:25

Well, the biggest issue that naturally descends from the ban on priesthood ordination was the fact that African men could not be sealed in the

01:18:36

Mormon temples, which meant that they could not proceed as candidates for exaltation, which in Mormonism means godhood.

01:18:43

The idea is that there is this plan that exists independent of God, and the plan was what

01:18:49

God followed in order to become God, and that if you follow the same program ascending the ladder of the

01:18:55

Mormon doctrine and gospel, you will eventually achieve deified status yourself, and that was foreclosed to people of black ancestry before 1978.

01:19:04

They couldn't be ordained to the Melchizedek priesthood in Mormonism, which means they didn't have access to sealing, which meant that they would be, according to the doctrine preached by Brigham Young and his successors in Tel Aviv in 1978, and still believed today by many fundamentalist

01:19:18

Mormons, blacks would in the eternities be the servants of those who are entitled to exaltation.

01:19:25

So the best they could hope for would be a doorman, I guess, at the gates of the celestial realm.

01:19:31

It's amazing that there were still blacks who joined the Mormon church. Yeah, it defies my understanding, but there are people who've converted in recent decades.

01:19:43

Yeah, Gladys Knight. Gladys Knight. That ancestry. I'm sorry? Gladys Knight. Yeah, Gladys Knight is perhaps the most conspicuous and most puzzling example.

01:19:52

There have been a number of people as well who have converted overseas in Africa. For a while in the early 1990s, there was actually a great deal of missionary activity by the

01:20:03

Mormon church in Africa. It's since sort of lost traction, as it has elsewhere in the developing world, particularly in Latin America and some other places.

01:20:11

In the 1960s and 1970s, I had a seminary teacher who recalled that period for my benefit during one of our conversations when

01:20:18

I was in high school. The seminary, I should point out, refers to release time religious instruction for Mormons who were attending public schools.

01:20:25

I didn't go to a seminary in the sense of special training for theology. But my seminary teacher had been to Brazil on his mission.

01:20:33

And Brazil, of course, as you know, is riotously diverse in terms of the ethnic mix and composition of those who are

01:20:42

Brazilian. It's almost impossible to find somebody in Brazil who doesn't have a little bit of African ancestry.

01:20:47

The Mormon doctrine inflexibly taught that anybody who had a bloodline supposedly contaminated by so much as a single drop of African blood was banned from priesthood ordination.

01:20:58

And so he had a lot of difficulty because it's almost impossible to find who is and who is not a person of African ancestry in Brazil.

01:21:06

I suspect that's what led to the change in policies. As a matter of fact, the former Mormon, Apostle Grand Richard, said so on the record,

01:21:14

I believe, in an interview with Reverend Wesley Walters about 25 or 30 years ago. And so it once again is a case of expediency rather than principle.

01:21:24

So let's return to your childhood. And you were told that when you were being examined, was it for the diaconate that people were somewhat cautious because they were worried that you might have

01:21:37

African ancestry and so forth? Yes, there was a great deal of concern about that.

01:21:43

And once that concern had been relieved, I had another experience. It was almost as unpleasant. It really made an impression on me.

01:21:49

I once again have been attending seminary. One of my seminary teachers, and this must have happened when I was about 14 years old or so.

01:21:56

And of course, when you're 14 or 15 years old, you're already a pudding of insecurities to begin with. I was attending a seminary class one morning and the topic of the

01:22:05

Lamanites of the Book of Mormon came up. And the Book of Mormon teaches that if the so -called Lamanites accept the

01:22:11

Mormon gospel and they exercise faith and diligence in improving themselves in the context of the gospel, at some point the curse will be removed and they'll become white and the lights in them.

01:22:20

My seminary teacher was teaching that. That's something I didn't really need to hear. I didn't really need to hear that the color of my skin supposedly represented the defect for which

01:22:28

I couldn't be held accountable. Because, well, that I was being held accountable for in spite of the fact that it was the supposed result of something ancestors hundreds or thousands of years earlier had done.

01:22:40

And that happened when I was about 14 or 15. And then I went to an LDS -owned and operated junior college in Rexburg.

01:22:48

My family had moved there when I was 16. And it is now called

01:22:53

Brigham Young University, Idaho. At the time it was called Ricks College after the founder of the city of Rexburg.

01:23:00

And then at age 19, I served a full -time Mormon mission in Mexico and in Guatemala. And prior to that time, although I had read the

01:23:08

Book of Mormon and had attended church and gone to Sunday school and done many of the things, if not all the things that were expected of me,

01:23:16

I really hadn't studied the doctrine all that carefully. And the biggest issue, the most important issue, is one that I'd spent the least amount of time focusing on, and that was the question of who is

01:23:27

Jesus Christ. And it's not really, I think, to denigrate my parents to say that that wasn't really the focus of the things that they had taught me, because Mormonism really doesn't focus on Jesus Christ, in that he is depicted as somebody being fundamentally like the rest of us, as opposed to being the incarnation, the literal incarnation of the one true

01:23:51

God, the self -existing being who spoke the universe into existence. Jesus is depicted in Mormonism as a created spirit brother of all of us who is following the same program.

01:24:04

As a matter of fact, I taught a Sunday school class once in which somebody said the only difference between the Savior and the rest of us is that he's a little further ahead in the program.

01:24:13

And this reflects the idea in Mormonism that salvation is basically like a multi -level marketing program, and God is just your upline.

01:24:20

But when I was in the missionary training center in Provo for the first time, I read a book by a Mormon apostle named

01:24:26

James E. Talmadge called Jesus the Christ. I didn't know it at the time, but that was essentially a palimpsest, or better stated, an outright plagiarism of Farrar's life of Christ, which

01:24:37

I've since read, and I can certainly see where Talmadge, if not stole, then at least borrowed shamelessly huge portions of Farrar's much more credible and doctrinally reliable work,

01:24:49

The Life of Christ. And it finally started to dawn on me that Jesus Christ was somebody much more important than Joseph Smith.

01:24:57

I had reached the age of 19 without starting to get a glimmer of that understanding, and I look at that in some ways as sort of a prelude to what later happened in my mission.

01:25:09

In fact, we're going to pick up on that point of your testimony right when we return from these sponsors, messages from our sponsors.

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01:26:51

Welcome back. This is Chris Zarnes. And if you've just tuned us in, our guest today is William Norman Grigg, a former high priest in the

01:27:00

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormons, who converted to Evangelical Christianity.

01:27:07

My co -host in studio with me is Pastor Mark Grimaldi of Grace Reform Baptist Church of Long Island in Merrick, New York.

01:27:14

But if you could pick up where you left off, William, you were talking about you were just starting to get, as someone in your late teens,

01:27:21

I believe, you were getting a glimmer of how, in reality, Jesus Christ was a far more important figure than Joseph Smith, I believe you were saying.

01:27:32

That's exactly right. I was 19 at the time. The Missionary Training Center is a facility, a campus in Orem, Utah, that is used to train prospective missionaries in languages and also in sales approaches.

01:27:45

And while I was there, I made relatively short work of that book, Jesus Christ by James Talmadge, which

01:27:52

I didn't know at the time, had drawn heavily, to the point of plagiarism, I believe, from a much more estimable book,

01:27:59

Farrar's Life of Christ. And I started to understand that Jesus Christ was not like us, that he was and is

01:28:08

God. And I actually had a telephone conversation with my parents after I finished that book saying,

01:28:13

I think I finally begin to understand here that Jesus Christ is actually not only a figure whose birth we celebrate and whose resurrection we celebrate, but that he is literally

01:28:26

God. And that's something that I took with me when I went to Mexico. I spent six months in Mexico and then ended up in Guatemala.

01:28:34

My visa was not renewed after six months. And it's interesting that in order to obtain a visa,

01:28:40

I had to lie about what I was going to do in Mexico, because the law at the time, I don't know if it's changed since then, but the law at the time made it impossible for non -citizens of Mexico who were not

01:28:50

Catholic to proselytize. And so as one of these little transparent falsehoods that are altogether common in some circles,

01:28:58

I had to get a visa saying that I was a sports instructor, but I was nothing of the sort. I proselytized for the

01:29:05

Mormon church. But I ended up in Guatemala in early 1983, and I was there for the coup that took place in the spring of that year, which was an interesting experience.

01:29:14

And as my mission began to wind down, I should point out at this juncture, incidentally, that I only served 18 months rather than two years because at the time they had shortened the length of the mission for young men to a year and a half and two years on account of the economy at the time.

01:29:31

But as my mission began to wind down, I began to reflect a little bit more deeply about some of the things I was teaching and some of the things

01:29:36

I was really trying to understand regarding my beliefs. It was in October of 1983, on the 11th day of that month, as I recall,

01:29:46

I was in a little town called Zaquina Law in Guatemala, which was basically a juncture, a little point in the road.

01:29:53

You had a major interstate that had branched off at a right angle and went off in another direction. And where those roads joined, there was a little town called

01:30:01

Zaquina Law. I was living with a companion. Obviously, you have a 24 -7 companion as a

01:30:08

Mormon missionary in a building that had been a bar. We were surrounded by bars, and we had converted one of the rooms into a meeting area, and we were holding meetings in that room and then using the other as our living quarters.

01:30:21

We were having companionship study that morning, and the subject was the atonement of Jesus Christ, which is obviously the most important subject you can discuss or contemplate.

01:30:30

We were reading some passages from that book by Talmadge, which once again derived whatever of any value it had from the life of Christ.

01:30:40

We were also reading the 22nd chapter of Luke, which talks about the... Take your time, brother.

01:30:47

I know you get very emotional when you relate to your conversion.

01:30:53

Yeah, it discusses the events of the night of Christ's betrayal and his prayer at the garden.

01:31:11

Well, it is very moving to me that you continually have such a heartfelt reaction whenever you give the account of your testimony of conversion.

01:31:28

I can't keep my composure as I discuss this with you, because as I read those passages,

01:31:41

I came to understand that I put Jesus on the cross, but that I betrayed him, that my sin was what put him there, and that I, in spite of everything

01:32:01

I had been teaching, I could not possibly deserve salvation of my own merits, and that for whatever reason, and I still can't understand it,

01:32:16

I'm sure that nobody can comprehend it in the slightest, for whatever reason, Jesus did that, that he claimed me, and that simply as a gift of his love and his grace, he paid the forfeit for my sin, and it broke my heart,

01:32:39

Chris, and it still does to this day, whenever I think of it.

01:32:45

Amen. Well, it's very obvious that it still does, brother. If we would all be that moved by her own being rescued by Jesus Christ in his mercy and grace, rescued from sin, death, and hell.

01:33:05

That experience is really strange, because as I mentioned, I was in the middle of studying with my companion, and suddenly

01:33:13

I broke down and cried for probably about 15 minutes. I'm sure he didn't know what was going on, and I'm just as sure that I didn't adequately explain it to him.

01:33:24

You really had no biblical concept of the atonement provided by Christ before then, did you?

01:33:31

No, I really didn't. I had been taught the Mormon view, which is that salvation is essentially a team effort.

01:33:44

This is an example, actually, that we would use in our discussions with missionaries, that you would have

01:33:49

Jesus essentially co -signing a loan with you and serving as the default debtor in the event that you couldn't pay the entire amount.

01:34:00

It would be sort of like an 80 -20 mortgage arrangement or something of that nature. I didn't understand until that moment that I was entirely different from Jesus, that he's the eternal

01:34:13

God and I am his creation, and that it's not a partnership in any sense apart from his grace and his condescension reaching out to claim me as a fallen created being through his grace and applying his blood to blot out the consequences of my sin.

01:34:34

I didn't understand that my contribution to this transaction was, first of all, being a sinner and, secondly, recognizing that and turning myself entirely over to the sovereignty of God.

01:34:48

I didn't understand that. I thought that there had to be some other element in which I would somehow qualify myself and make myself worthy and then on the momentum provided to me by the atonement,

01:34:59

I would go on to become a being like God. So it was a complete shock to me and, of course, it put me in a really difficult position because I still had more than a month and a half of my mission left and I didn't really want to be preaching

01:35:11

Mormonism for the balance of my mission. I wanted to be talking about Jesus. When I came back, literally a day and a half after I got back from the mission,

01:35:20

I was back in school in Rexburg. I had a full -ride scholarship in the music program, the performance program, and so I immediately went back to my routine for all intents and purposes as a then 20 -year -old return missionary who had his life and program all sketched out for him according to the teachings and programs of the church.

01:35:46

I had been changed. I didn't see Mormonism the same way. I didn't see

01:35:52

Jesus the same way, obviously, and I found myself in a really peculiar position in that I still had callings and assignments in the church, but I didn't want to talk about Mormonism.

01:36:04

I didn't want to talk about Joseph Smith. I wanted to talk about Jesus Christ. Do you have much communication with evangelical

01:36:12

Christians at this point? Well, Rexburg, Idaho at this point was about 95 to 97 percent

01:36:18

Mormon, and so the answer would be no. I mean, as I mentioned, it was sort of one of these little stagnant pools, if you will, that remain after the tide of Mormon theocracy retreated, and I say that not disrespectfully because Rexburg is full of wonderful people, and Mormons by and large tend to be people of great achievement and some of the nicest neighbors you could ever have.

01:36:44

In the same sense that Paul would say of the Jews, they're still my people. The Mormons are still my people.

01:36:51

My prayer for them is that they all come to know Christ and be saved, and people have got to understand that when you're dealing in a business or political enterprise or when you're trying to do something worthwhile in the community, chances are you're going to be running into a lot of people who are

01:37:08

Mormons. They tend to be overrepresented where you're talking about achievement and performance in those realms.

01:37:15

Basically, the only thing that Mormonism has in common at all with biblical

01:37:21

Christianity is probably their views of morality. Exactly. They live chaste, abstemious lives.

01:37:29

They believe in community service. They believe in having large families. They're very family -focused.

01:37:36

What they lack is what the young man in the scriptural encounter with Jesus lacked.

01:37:41

We talked about how I've lived my life this way. I've obeyed all the commandments since I was a child. Take up your cross and follow me.

01:37:50

That's the one thing you lack. You cannot make it on the basis of your own performance and your own righteousness.

01:37:56

And Mormons tend to be strapped to this Pelagian treadmill, and they don't understand that the burdens that they're taking on themselves are not doing anything to put them in a position that will lead them to salvation, genuine salvation, where they come to understand and know the real

01:38:17

Jesus as opposed to this artifact of Mormon teaching. When I was in Rexburg, in a

01:38:23

Mormon -intensive environment, we were taken there for that reason. My father wanted to raise his children at the time, and he went on to adopt.

01:38:31

I've mentioned this before just by way of illustrating the tremendous generosity of my parents. They adopted seven children.

01:38:37

They adopted six of us. They had seven children altogether. Six of us were adopted. But there were very few people who were evangelical

01:38:46

Christians. One that I remember very well was Mark Kargis, who was the wrestling coach and my football coach, backfield coach.

01:38:54

I played football at Madison High School in Rexburg. A wonderful man, just a terrific man, who was very bold when occasion called for it.

01:39:03

He would rebuke people about their unchristian behavior, and he would feel no confunctions against speaking in outright biblical terms in school.

01:39:14

He probably helped me more than I realized. I had a couple of evangelical Christian friends with whom I played football and baseball as well, and they probably helped more than they realized as well.

01:39:23

Less than that as well. In fact, we're going to pick up right where you left off when we return from our break. All right. Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages.

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That's lynbrookbaptist .org. Welcome back.

01:40:21

This is Chris Orens and your host of Iron Sharpens Iron. Our guest today is William Norman Grigg, a former high priest in the

01:40:27

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormons, who converted to evangelical Christianity by the grace of God.

01:40:34

And William, I want our audience to be crystal clear on this in case this may have slipped by them somehow.

01:40:40

Your conversion testimony is not like going from Methodist to Baptist or something.

01:40:46

These are two religions, Mormonism and Christianity, that could not be more antithetical toward one another.

01:40:52

That's correct. On every issue, on the nature of man, on the nature of God, on the nature of the atonement, on the issue of creation.

01:41:00

A lot of people may not realize that Mormons do not believe in creation, correct? That's correct. That God merely organized matter?

01:41:08

Is that it? That's exactly right. And on the issue of heaven. Authority of scripture. Authority of scripture, heaven and hell.

01:41:16

I mean, on every single issue, the only thing, as we said, that they really have in common is a basic decent morality, biblical morality, which isn't even straight across the board, because you do have some flip -flopping, it seems, on the abortion issue, which actually surprised me greatly when

01:41:34

I had learned that Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate, was at one time pro -abortion, and I was wondering, how on earth could a

01:41:42

Mormon in good standing remain a pro -abortionist? That is an interesting perplexity.

01:41:48

I think it's interesting to point out as well that, as is often the case in Mormonism, Mormon culture,

01:41:55

Mitt Romney and I share a common ancestor, and that would be of all the unlikely people, John Lathrop.

01:42:01

I just found this out yesterday, that Mr. Lathrop's sons include some people who begat the lineage that gave us the

01:42:11

Pratt brothers, who were the apostles in the early era of Mormonism.

01:42:17

Parley P. Pratt was the great martyr, supposed martyr in Mormonism, who was murdered by the legal husband of a woman whom

01:42:26

Parley P. Pratt had converted to Mormonism and made his, I believe, ninth polygamous quote -unquote wife.

01:42:31

I'm a direct descendant by adoption of Parley P. Pratt, if I understand it correctly. The Romney line also goes through the

01:42:38

Pratt line, so for some reason we're distantly related, not that I take any pride in that connection. But Mitt Romney's position on abortion, as he has pointed out himself, when he was pro -abortion, meaning he believed that abortion was a legitimate and moral choice in some circumstances, was in many ways compatible with the practice and standards of the

01:42:59

Mormon church today, but 125, 130 years ago, you could see and hear sermons being preached by people like Orson Hyde and Orson Pratt, who said that abortion was nothing other than murder.

01:43:13

And the reason why they did so at the time was they wanted to contrast what they considered to be the moral liabilities of monogamy to the superior morality as they sought a polygamy.

01:43:22

They believed that monogamy was a human creation, that it was a product of a pagan concept that was inherited by the

01:43:33

Christian world from Roman and Greek antiquity, and that polygamy was actually the divinely ordained pattern of marriage, and that at some point

01:43:43

God would stretch forth his hand and smite down this backwards, apostate, monogamous nation and enthrone polygamy as the standard.

01:43:52

And in that context, they were trying to say that these were the Mormon church at the time, that because monogamy rather limited the sexual outlet of the husband, that he would seek some other way to express that desire, and that led to such things as prostitution and bastardy and abortion.

01:44:13

And so it was in the context of trying to vindicate the doctrine of the Mormon church regarding polygamy that the Mormon church leaders 125, 130 years ago were describing abortion as what it is, which is murder, child murder.

01:44:25

Today, however, in the interest once again of political expediency, and largely because of the influence of Gordon B.

01:44:33

Hinckley, who's the incumbent president of the Mormon church, the LDS position as contained in the

01:44:38

Handbook of General Instructions given to Mormon bishops is actually much more latitudinarian. A Mormon woman can obtain an abortion for any reason.

01:44:46

She can convince her bishop is suitable. And Mitt Romney has been a bishop, when he talked about his embrace of the so -called pro -choice view, said that he had seen in his own family the horrible consequences of illegal abortion, and that's why he supported, supposedly with all the passion of his being, the idea of keeping abortion legal and supposedly safe.

01:45:10

It's never been safe. It never will be safe. It certainly isn't safe to the primary victim, the baby, but it's not safe to the mother and the procedure as well.

01:45:17

And I don't doubt for a second that as a bishop, he probably counseled women that, if they considered it to be an excessive burden, that they could probably go and have their pregnancy ended through the death of the child.

01:45:29

Wow. But when you talk about the moral basis of Mormonism, I have to make a very important distinction here.

01:45:35

There is something that Michael Quinn, D. Michael Quinn, a former

01:45:40

Mormon historian of some note, has pointed out, a concept called theocratic ethics. And theocratic ethics literally led to mass bloodshed, mass murder at Mountain Meadows.

01:45:51

Yes. The theocratic ethic dictates, this is something Joseph Smith was preaching in the context of polygamy, once again, that whatever your church leader instructs you to do is right.

01:46:02

And that if you do it and it's wrong, God will honor your obedience in defiance of whether or not what you did is objectively moral or not.

01:46:11

Wow. Now, when I was working my way out of Mormonism, it took me decades to do it because of family connections and because of the fact that I was completely immersed in the culture.

01:46:21

I spent basically 22 years trying to work my way out of the Mormon church to give you some idea of how tenacious that hold can be on somebody who desperately wants to have communion with fellow believers.

01:46:33

When you come to know Jesus, you feel his absence very keenly. And I was spiritually emaciated when

01:46:41

I would go to Mormon services every Sunday and hear the administrative matters. A Mormon service is much more like a business meeting than a worship meeting.

01:46:51

And hear people talk about all these things that have nothing at all to do with Jesus Christ. I wanted to talk about Jesus Christ.

01:46:56

I wanted to celebrate him. I wanted to worship him, serve him. I wanted to exhaust my lungs in singing praises to him.

01:47:04

You don't do that at a Mormon service. But the thing is, while I was working my way out of Mormonism, I had interviews with my state president.

01:47:14

And he once again recited to me this whole idea that the highest principle of the celestial kingdom in Mormonism is obedience.

01:47:22

And you should adhere to your leaders. And if they tell you to do something that is wrong, and you do it anyway, then

01:47:28

God will bless your obedience. And I said, well, President, doesn't that imply that the Mormon priesthood leader is superior to God?

01:47:35

Because you're supposedly saying, or you're saying rather, the Mormon leader can supposedly bind

01:47:41

God to reward sin. Isn't that what you're trying to tell me? And he stopped for a second.

01:47:47

He said, I never thought of it that way before. I said, well, I hadn't thought of it that way before either until recently.

01:47:53

I'd never really given it serious thought. Don't feel so badly. But now that it's on the table, what do you think of this?

01:47:59

Yeah. And by the way, Pastor Mark Romoldi has a question for you, William. Yes, hi, William. I wanted to just to ask you a question regarding my own experience.

01:48:07

I've had some experiences where I've gotten to seek to have some interaction with Mormons, be it at my door or at the park.

01:48:15

And generally, it seems like the average lay person would almost, at least on the surface, agree with everything we say.

01:48:23

And I'm wondering if the lay people of Mormonism are ignorant of a lot of the theological issues that are there, like the priesthood would understand and so on.

01:48:32

Sure. Yeah. Mormons don't study theology. What most Mormons do on Sundays, as I mentioned, has little to do with worship or actual instruction.

01:48:41

Almost everything that is taught on any given Sunday in a Mormon meeting house, whether you're talking about Salt Lake City, Utah, Sakinalog, Guatemala, comes out of a manual that has been specifically prepared and processed to excise most of the theology from it.

01:48:58

And so much of what they're taught has to do with clean living, public service, and allegiance to the authorities, the church.

01:49:07

And so they don't think about theological issues. The only time where they're likely to be exposed to deep theology is if they happen to study it at BYU or BYU -Idaho or some of the church -owned operating university, or if they take an interest in it as laymen, if they become apologists, for instance.

01:49:23

Most of what Mormons believe is really rather anodyne. They generally don't believe a lot of what the church actually teaches.

01:49:33

And the church goes to great extents, really, to conceal from the public or, frankly, to misrepresent what is actually taught.

01:49:42

You don't get that until after you've been to the temple and you're ritually committed through a quasi -Masonic ordinance to support the church at all hazards.

01:49:51

At that point, they feel safe in providing you with what they call the meat of the gospel. Yes, I spoke to, not too long ago,

01:49:58

I spoke to two or three young Mormon ladies who were at a campground where we were with some of our people from the church and were talking to them about the gospel and it's

01:50:08

Christ alone and not your works and so on. And they were totally agreeing with everything. They were saying, yeah, I almost felt like I didn't know where to go because I was giving them the right gospel, you know, and so on.

01:50:19

Well, the way to go from that is to say, well, if you can rely on Christ alone, for your salvation, then why is it necessary to undergo all these additional impositions and rituals and ordinances?

01:50:33

I mean, at some point, if they've studied the issue, they'll say, well, because there's something beyond salvation. They will admit that there is a category distinction to be drawn here between what the

01:50:44

Mormons call salvation and what the Christian world calls salvation, because salvation is merely preparatory in Mormonism for exaltation.

01:50:50

You become a candidate for the celestial kingdom once you're saved. And in Mormonism, salvation consists of the physical resurrection, which is to be extended to all men.

01:51:01

And under that perspective, as taught in Mormonism, you're saved because Christ has already guaranteed that whatever you've done, you'll be raised from the grave.

01:51:10

Beyond that, you enter into a graded and works -based assignment in the next realm.

01:51:16

And by the way, one of the things... In fact, William, could you pick up right after the break? Sure. We'll be right back.

01:51:30

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01:52:05

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01:52:12

We hope that Iron Sharpens Iron Radio blesses you for many years to come. William, you were just about to make another point.

01:52:26

I believe that you were contrasting the salvation of grace alone through faith alone, and Christ alone in the

01:52:31

Mormon ritualism and works of merit. Exactly. One other thing that people don't understand is that Mormonism is actually universalist.

01:52:39

It actually teaches that apart from a few people who are sons of perdition, everybody is going to be saved and receive some degree of glory or the other.

01:52:48

The only way you can become a son of perdition, quite frankly, is to become an apostate like myself in Mormon theology.

01:52:53

Yes, hell is only reserved for former Mormons who left the Mormon church. That's essentially it.

01:53:00

The thing about the Mormon concept of salvation versus the

01:53:05

Mormon concept of exaltation, once again, if you assume that everybody does some good,

01:53:10

I mean, that's more or less the pitch that Gordon Hinkley makes. He'll say, and he's said this time and time again, the purpose of Mormonism is to make bad men good and good men better.

01:53:20

It's difficult for me to think of a more humanistic approach to life. Because we're all bad men, and the only thing that can make us better is to be redeemed by Jesus Christ.

01:53:30

It has nothing to do with a program or an organization. It has to do with his grace and his sovereignty. But the thing is,

01:53:36

Gordon Hinkley will often say, when he's been invited, for instance, to address the World Affairs Council in California, as he has a couple of times, what we say to the world,

01:53:46

Hinkley will say, is, come bring all the good that you have and let's see if we can add something to it.

01:53:52

In other words, it's more of a sales pitch than a type of evangelism. What they will say is that any

01:53:58

Christian faith, and they actually say the same thing about Islam, as a matter of fact, and this is something

01:54:04

I've documented on my website, is that Mormon apologists have actually said that there are ways that Islam is more nearly similar to Mormonism than conventional

01:54:13

Christianity, which is something that they do not want to emphasize right now, but is, as a matter of fact, true. But they'll say that any good

01:54:20

Christian denomination is enough to bring you to a state of salvation, to bring you to an understanding of who

01:54:28

Jesus Christ is, and because we're all going to be resurrected, that's all we need to worry about in terms of salvation.

01:54:34

But in order to be put on a track for celestial glory and godhood, you have to become a Mormon and progress step by step up the hierarchical ladder until you receive your endowments in the temple and become a candidate for the celestial kingdom, and thereby, by adhering to everything your leaders teach you, will eventually be put on a course for godhood.

01:54:55

And that, of course, is completely contrary to what Christianity teaches. Yes, in fact, Mormonism is so intensely polytheistic, they would make

01:55:04

Hindus blush, because they have an infinite number of gods. Yeah, well, they actually say they're hanafiistic, in that they believe that there's only one of this immense congregation of gods who is our god, but they believe that there are more exalted beings than there are particles of sand on the beaches of all the oceans of the world.

01:55:26

That's actually something that was published in a series of essays called The Seer that was published back in the 1800s to validate polygamy.

01:55:34

And Pastor Mark Romaldi had a question for you. Yes, William, I was just curious, too, about when you had converted to Christianity up to this present time, how have your parents, your adopted parents, how have they responded to you?

01:55:49

Well, they'd understood that something had changed in me, but it wasn't until my family and I formally left the

01:55:56

Mormon church, had our names stricken from the records at our own request a number of years ago, it was 19, forgive me, it was 2003, that things became a little bit dicey.

01:56:05

And there was a certain sterility that developed in our relationship that I'm happy to say is being overcome now.

01:56:15

I mean, we moved out to Idaho a couple of years ago because my parents are getting older. My dad is in his 80s.

01:56:21

My mother's in her late 70s. That's sort of high middle age for a Mormon. The Mormon's life expectancy is in the 90s somewhere.

01:56:29

But still, they're slowing down. They're expending what remains of their time here in mortality.

01:56:35

We wanted to be close to them, to help them, to love them, to serve them, and hopefully to be the means whereby

01:56:41

God can lead them to salvation. And for the first year and a half or two years, it was really difficult because they are required by the conditions laid out in the

01:56:52

Temple Recommend interview to avoid contact with apostates, to have no sympathy or affiliation with apostates.

01:57:02

That would include members of your own household. And so they're required by their obligation to the

01:57:08

Mormon church not to be on the same convivial, loving basis with me that they were before my so -called apostasy.

01:57:18

And I, until very recently, was employed by an organization in which my boss was a member of the local

01:57:27

Mormon stake presidency. And that put me in an interesting position there as well. I mean, I was surrounded by friends and co -workers and family, all of whom were very faithful Mormons and who were required to look upon me as somebody who was bound for petition because of my apostasy.

01:57:44

And living here in Western Idaho, as opposed to Eastern Idaho, there's not nearly the concentration of Mormons in Western Idaho that there is in Southeastern Idaho, but they are still a very prominent presence here.

01:57:57

This little town, Payette, Idaho, I live in is fewer than 8 ,000 population, but we frequently receive visits from the

01:58:04

Mormon missionaries who are sent my way by well -meaning but misguided members of my family.

01:58:09

The local Mormon ward here has a bishop, Grant Gregg, who is my cousin. And so I'm really situated in a really interesting position here in that these people know me and they know that I'm not malicious, that I am not evil in the sense of actively seeking to do ill to others.

01:58:29

They see that I'm a responsible family man and husband, but by virtue of the teachings that they've received, they believe that basically

01:58:37

I'm in Satan's power because I've broken my temple vows and now I am until such time as I supposedly repent under Satan's power.

01:58:45

Well, William, I knew that it was going to be an impossible task to interview you in one hour.

01:58:52

Next time I'm going to demand at gunpoint that I have a second hour for this broadcast when I'm interviewing you.

01:58:58

But I look forward to having you back, William. Quickly, let our listeners know how they may contact you and your website.

01:59:04

Okay, my website is accessible. My blog is accessible through the right source, www .rightsourceonline

01:59:11

.com. There you can find a button that will take you to my blog. It's entitled Pro Libertate.

01:59:18

Well, I eagerly look forward to having you back on again on the Iron Sharp Bazaar and program, William. Perhaps after we both see the

01:59:27

September Dawn movie. Let's do that. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mark Romaldi, for being our co -host today in the studio.

01:59:34

Quickly, let our listeners know how they can contact Grace Reformed Baptist Church in Merritt. Yes, at 516 -379 -2408.

01:59:41

516 -379 -2408. Thank you who listened today. And always remember that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater