Transcript of the podcast Mormon Expression Episode 221: Top Ten Ways the Church is Like North Korea. Featuring John, Cody, and Brian.
John: All right, welcome back to another edition of Mormon Expression. I'm your host, John Larsen, and today I've assembled another fine panel. First of all, returning in his triumphant glory, Brian Jolly. Hey Brian, welcome back.
Brian: Thank you. Great to be here.
John: It's good to have you. And tan, rested, ready and sober: Cody!
Cody: Hi John.
Brian: And Harry.
John: Harry. Yeah, he's trying to show me up.
Cody: I'm calling full Duck Dynasty on this one.
John: Today we're going to do a podcast I've been threatening, or promising, or whatever, to do for about six months now. We want to take and compare the Church to our friends in North Korea. This is kind of timely; our friend Dennis Rodman was out there just a couple of weeks ago at the time of this recording. And the beloved leader, he passed away last year, was it?
Brian: Yeah. Kim Jong very, very ill... now Kim Jong dead.
John: So North Korea has been a thorn in the side of US policy for quite some time,
Brian: Generations!
John: It's a fascinating study in all sorts of things. And I think it's a useful question for us to compare it to the Church in terms of methodology and how they go about things. So we do hereby present: the top 10 ways that the Church resembles North Korea. Thoughts, boys, before we jump in?
Brian: Oh, just that we were threatening to challenge the listeners to listen to our talk about North Korea and not think of the Church.
John: Yeah, we talked about doing this and just talking about North Korea and leaving the listener to draw their own conclusions, but we decided we weren't disciplined enough. And there's probably more of these... and I should confess, right off the bat, that none of us are policy experts on North Korea. We get what we know from the 5:00 news. Just putting that out there.
John: All right. We'll start at number 10: Loyal members calling for reform or change are purged or otherwise silenced.
John: Now I think the key word here is loyal: in North Korea—and really, I should've said at the beginning—North Korea is a stand-in for all sorts of organizations like this. One of the reasons I wanted to use North Korea, as opposed to, let's say, the Scientologists or whatever, is because people oftentimes will talk about "cults." Evangelicals talk about "cults" all the time as if it's some sort of religious problem—
Brian: Without a sense of irony.
John: —without any sense of irony. But I think there's a broader question; there are these organizations that take this religious or quasi-religious belief in this "central authority." It can be a dogma, it can be a person, it can be all sorts of things. I think there's this false dichotomy that sometimes religious people bring up, and they say, "Oh, well, you atheists, you have your own same problem because you have Pol Pot or Stalin or—" They'll even throw out the Nazis, even though the Nazis were awash in Catholicism. But, they say, "These were atheistic organizations! They were just as bad!" And myself, as an agnostic, would say, "Precisely!" Because I don't believe in any sort of god. So the Mormon Church, Scientology and Pol Pot are all products of the human imagination—
Brian: Birds of a feather.
John: —and you can substitute nationalism for religion. They're interchangeable in my mind, and they take on a lot of the same trappings. So that's why we want to compare these two.
John: So going into our list: the loyal membership. I think this is key to these types of organizations: there is no loyal opposition. That is not allowed and you won't find it. You'll always find critics, and the critics are always silenced and purged and whatever. But in the case of organizations like North Korea and the Church, there is no avenue for any sort of loyal dissent.
John: There's people who will disagree, but think about any sort of stake conference, or ward meeting, or anything where somebody can go out and say, "I respectfully disagree with this policy or disagree with this doctrine or disagree with this decision." There is no avenue for that whatsoever.
Brian: Yeah. Who do you tell if you feel like there are just too many meetings? It's in the handbook, what're you going to do?
John: Right. Or something more fundamental. One of the Church's shell games is oftentimes that in the present it's doctrine, and in the past it was just "policy." So when you read through the Improvement Era in the sixties, when they were defending the racist doctrines, or—
Cody: Or pooh-poohing the ERA.
John: Yeah, the ERA is another great example—there's no ambiguity that the brethren are talking about this doctrinally, that this is a doctrine of the Church. And now we say, "Oh, that was just policy." But, in the present, there's never a way to say, "I disagree with this policy." You can't do so.
Cody: Well, in the priesthood, who's the person that has the authority, the keys, to receive revelation for the whole Church? It doesn't even matter whether people disagree or not, because if they disagree, it's because they're not "interpreting the Spirit" properly. So it's fine to disagree, but it's not going to ever do anything. They'll just talk to you and say, "Well, the brethren feel this way about it, and they're the ones who receive..."
John: Well, when you say "They'll talk to you," that's key. I mean, if you get up in priesthood meeting and say, "Hey, stake president, I don't agree with this policy..."—like, you know, if they're saying that they don't want kids dating at all until they're 18 or something—stake presidents can do things like that, make dress and grooming standards and decisions like that. Or, here's one from when I was a member: they said every man had to shave off all of his facial hair! The stake president dictated that. There's no... you're not allowed to voice any dissent at all.
Brian: It's gotten worse in the last few years. I mean, they actually tell you that you're not to write the brethren directly, that you should follow the chain of command. And you'll never get, really, past your stake president.
John: Yeah. And we'll come to that again here in a little bit. We'll circle back to that one.
John: Okay. Number 9: the organization is overly focused on winning vulnerable populations such as the youth, those who are grieving, or those who are in financial distress. And the more cynical among us will accuse organizations like the Church of keeping people in a state of emotional distress.
Brian: One miracle at a time, John. [Laughter]
John: They will extract enough tithing or enough taxes from you that you are forcibly in a dependency on the Church. I mean, you look and see what the Church does. It takes 10% of your income, and then it gives you back canned peaches. But those canned peaches come at a price, and it's the double bind.
John: Governments like the North Koreans will do the same sort of thing—and this is what our right wing friends were always railing against—where governments can overly tax the people, then send it back to them in a sort of aid, but then they keep them in this dependent cycle. I'm not against any sort of aid for vulnerable populations, but it can be used as this manipulative tool, and then the governments focus on that. Governments like North Korea always have big youth programs of indoctrination, because youth are vulnerable to this sort of thing.
John: All of us who've been on missions know that—in a backhanded sort of wink, wink way—you were taught to focus in on vulnerable populations. When I first got out, I was out about two months, and this missionary about to go home was sitting in the lobby, and he was like, "I sure would like to baptize somebody who was not retarded." [Laughter] Everybody out there knows that a large percentage of the baptisms are people who are in emotional distress, people who are mentally deficient, children—
Brian: —Easier to persuade.
John: Easy targets.
Cody: Well, yeah. I'm thinking about something that happened to me when I was out going to school. I remember a friend of mine's daughter, she was a less-active lady and her husband was not a member. They had a major crisis in their family, and I actually sent the missionaries over there right then. I said, "Look, you guys go over to this family and, you know..." As a member, you don't think that's really that bad because you're like, "They need this..."
Brian: You know they're in emotional distress and this will "save" them.
Cody: But either way you look at it, it's still, that is exactly what was going on.
Brian: Wasn't it Boyd K. Packer who said you should go to funerals because people are contemplating the afterlife and they're open to the Spirit? "They've been humbled and they're feeling contrite and vulnerable," was the essence of the talk. I think it was Boyd K. Packer!
John: Yeah. He has a rather famous talk where he talks about that. He said, at his funeral, he doesn't want them to even talk about him—
Brian: Don't talk about the deceased. It's a teaching opportunity!
John: Yeah. That's a classic example of that sort of thing. And you can see this in other organizations, like the Nazis before they rose to power and swept the election. They started the Hitler Youth and that sort of stuff. They turned that into a sort of Stasi, where those kids were turning their parents in. And we've seen the same thing in the Church, where there are stories about them, in the Young Men's and Women's, training their kids to rat out their parents, and tell their parents not to do this or not to do that.
Cody: I think one thing that also applies to 9 is how they lowered the age for the missionaries.
John: Absolutely!
Cody: Why did they do that? I mean, obviously they did it because they didn't want them going to college and learning how to think for themselves.
John: They're gonna hand them right off.
Cody: You go on your mission, you focus on nothing but the Church for two years, you're much more likely to get indoctrinated.
Brian: Right. Commit yourself to it, so that when you get out, you don't want to feel like you've wasted two years of your life. So you'll just stay focused, get married, have a baby, and then you are locked in. Good luck gettin' out of that.
John: Right. All right. Number 8: the group is willing to break up families or other social structures to further or preserve its own organization. Now this one's tricky, because oftentimes, organizations that do this will be talking about family all the time. I mean, look at Manson. They were "The Family!" They'll couch themselves in that sort of light.
John: So how does the Church do this? Well, when I was a missionary—I think this is still the case—we weren't even allowed to call our mother. How many people, when you were a missionary, were you embarrassed to tell that? You know, when people outside the Church would hear the rules: "Oh, we're only allowed to read mail once a week. We're only allowed to write our family. We're not allowed to contact them."
Cody: "We can only read what our mission president told us we can read..."
Brian: I wasn't embarrassed. I remember thinking, "Yeah, that's how committed I am to the cause!"
John: And that's just one example. A lot of people who've left the Church—I'm sure you guys have enough experience, you've been in the community long enough—there's people who, one of them will leave the Church, and the bishop tells them to divorce, and not to pay attention to them. They'll break up families, they'll disown... I've said several times, Zilpha and I got written out of wills...
John: So, you put this social structure up that causes it to break up families. North Korea, famously, when the line was drawn between North and South Korea, wouldn't allow contact between the families that were separated by the collision. And there's reports of moving families around and breaking up those social structures.
Brian: Once in a while you hear a story about someone who got to visit South Korea and see someone they haven't seen for 50 years.
John: Who are close family members!
Brian: Like a brother.
John: They would control that! Because these types of organizations want to be supreme. And that's why sometimes—like the Manson family—they will own the language of "family" because they don't want anything that subjugates them. So the Church will put a lot of language out about "family." But if you read it very carefully, even though they say "family is first," it's always subjected underneath the Church.
Cody: They both hold the family for ransom too. In Korea, if you somehow sneak out of North Korea into South Korea... I was watching on that documentary, and they interviewed this guy and they asked him, "So what happened to your family? And the guy, just like, the look on his face was just... and he just said, "I'd rather not talk about it."
Brian: East Germany was like that, even as late as the eighties. I have family, my cousin's step-uncle or something, he defected. He jumped off a boat. And they were terrified for the lives of their family, because if the government got wind of it, there would be hell to pay on the family members. That's just brutal.
Cody: So now, how does that apply to the Church?
Brian: If you don't pay your tithing, you don't go to the temple. If you don't go to the temple, you're not going to the Celestial kingdom. "I will take your child from you for all eternity because you didn't give me 300 bucks."
John: Well, how does it apply to the Church? One of the most important life events is a wedding. So they're going to not allow you to attend the wedding. They're going to break up, they're going to force on both sides of that: the person who's not allowed to go in, and the person who's getting married and can't have their brother or sister or mother or father there. They're going to manipulate people based on their familial relationships.
John: Then there's the one that ex-Mormons puzzle about all the time: that if you leave the Church, they hand your parents—they say, "Check this over," and they hand your parents this membership record that says everybody you're sealed to. There's been plenty of ex-Mormons who have been outed by the fact that their parents say, "Where's Johnny? How come he's not on my records anymore?" So they will passive-aggressively notify other people that you've left the Church.
Cody: Yeah. And then on the same thought, with my family personally, it's like, they may not force them to not hang out with me, or not spend time with me, or not care about me, but all these genuine relationships that I had with my family are now fake. And the reason they're fake is because I know full well that every single one of them look at me as a bad guy now, either a bad guy or somebody who has been deceived by the Devil.
Cody: My brother, who's a mission president, straight up called me... [long pause] Sorry... [choked up] Maybe we should move on...
Cody: [long pause] It's rough because I feel like I'm doing what's right, you know? And for the people that I love and respect to... [pause] Sorry... [sniffling] ...to all of a sudden just do this 180 on me and look at me like I'm a bad person just for, just for questioning, you know? And wanting... I was actually trying to salvage my testimony, you know? I wanted to understand it and make it work...
Cody: We're probably gonna edit this all out, huh...
Brian: No, dude, this is the best part.
Cody: I'm sorry, I'm such a baby, but god, it's freaking hard, man! And my family is... I have no relationship with my family. I made a last cry for them to like, listen, to watch this... you know that thing that John Dehlin did about trying to get families to not get torn apart? Not one of them would watch it. Not one.
John: And I haven't met your family, but I'm sure they're all decent people.
Cody: Oh, they're super awesome.
John: That's the point: this organization has socialized that, has ground that into people's heads in such subtle ways that they can believe they're a family oriented organization.... they can split up families and still pat themselves on the back. And that's why the organization is so damnable.
Brian: Well said.
John: Number 7: members are encouraged to look and dress the same. Uniformity is encouraged or required in clothing, haircut, jewelry, and—these two seem unrelated but they're very close together—the organization is preoccupied with the personal life of its members. Their sex life, what they're doing at night... all these sorts of things that really don't have any bearing on the way Korea governs itself or the way the Church runs, but the Church or the government becomes preoccupied with those very personal things.
John: You look at photos of the North Koreans when there are big rallies, and they're all dressed the same. There is no individuality in terms of haircut. They're encouraged not to wear jewelry. Exact same thing in the pictures of the Mormons. They're encouraged to dress exactly the same. You can't wear even an off-white shirt when you're a missionary. It's forcing that individuality out. We don't want tattoos, we don't want multiple piercings, we don't want anything that makes you stand out, because you are a subject of the organization.
Brian: There's a Powerpoint presentation that I remember seeing not that long ago. It had side by side pictures of a North Korean massive gathering in a beautiful opulent building. And then, the conference center during conference. And they're lit the same, and they were about the same size, and everybody's dressed exactly the same... creepy, creepy, creepy.
Cody: The leaders are all up behind...
Brian: ...in their own special uniform that's different from everybody's...
John: And the preoccupation with the personal life... it just speaks to the control of the organization, because if you think about it in the abstract, why does the Church care how many times you pierced your ear? It has nothing to do with ear piercing. It has to do with control.
Brian: Talk about "Not important to your salvation..." the number of earrings!
John: Masturbation is the same way. Why do they care? If you look at most Protestant organizations, like, in the 19th century, everybody was occupied with that stuff. But, it's a personal matter, it really doesn't affect anything, and more modern, more progressive organizations would say, "Hey, we really don't care about that." But they're going to be preoccupied with every little detail.
John: Okay. Number 6. We sort of touched on this with number 10, but I think it bears circling back to. First of all, the government structure of the central organization is ambiguous, hidden or unknown. That extends to finances—no one can understand the finances—and then, this is the one we started talking about, there's no means for membership to appeal a decision.
John: Let's focus in on those things a little bit. People might say, "What are you talking about?" So there's this great big building downtown, 3, 4, 5,000 employees. And we know there's the first quorum of the 70. We know there's the 12. I challenge you to find one member of the Church, anywhere, who could draw you an org chart for the Church. We know that there's these corporations. We know that there's the Corporation of the First Presidency, there's the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop, we know there's all these holding Deseret properties... nobody outside the central organization, and I would dare say—it's been levied before—that there's only one or two people who even have the full financial picture. That even members of the 12, there are things that are hidden from them, that they don't know.
John: I'm talking about operationally. Those of you who are doubting, think about your stake building. How does the lawn get mowed? Who pays the bills? When things show up, like a snow shovel or rock salt, where does it come from? No one has any idea because it's all couched in secrecy. And of course the finances have been talked about over and over again. No one has any clue what's going on there.
John: So in terms of redress, there is absolutely no means for that whatsoever. If your stake president tells you something, and you disagree with that decision... like, your stake president says, "Only men can pray in church." And we know the Church has talked about this, and tried to address this, and tried to stop that practice—that practice is still out there—but you're a member in the Timpanogos 1st Stake or whatever—
Brian: You still can't do it in conference! In general conference, a woman has never said an opening or closing prayer.
John: But let's say they do. Let's say your stake president makes that rule, right? The state president makes the rule that, you know, all women have to wear nylons.
Brian: Yeah! Who does your stake president answer to?
John: Well, who do you appeal it to? If you know the stake president does something, that you can point out in the Church Handbook of Instructions is against the policy... what is your avenue of redress?
Brian: Yeah! Who does he answer to? I have no idea who my stake president at the time would speak to. I guess there's some general authority, vaguely, nebulously....
John: There's a 70 area authority that is on the chain of command. But you have no access to that guy. And I would guess that 99% of the membership has no idea who their area authority is, let alone how to contact them.
Cody: All it would take, too, if you tried to go over somebody's head, is just for the stake president or whatever to say, "Oh, this guy, you know..." and he could easily squelch whatever you're trying to do.
Brian: Well, you'd get reprimanded from the general authority! You've got to go to your stake president.
John: The Church says over and over again: "If you send us a letter, we will send it back to the stake president, unopened." Now, the Church is making progress. They do have a sex abuse hotline. But you'd have to have a copy of the Church Handbook of Instructions, which is not given to you, to know what the hotline is...
Brian: Good grief.
John: It's not something they publish out to the membership. Which they could! They know where everybody lives. They could send a letter directly to the members.
Brian: There's a bulletin board in every ward!
John: They could say, "Guys, if your stake president is touching girls, this is the number to call to get in touch with Salt Lake!" Nothing like that. There is no redress. Same thing with the Korean government. It's always top down.
Brian: Is this what were we talking about? The feedback loop? That there's no feedback loop? Or is that a later one?
John: Go ahead. Go ahead and talk about it.
Brian: So, in North Korea, the leader sits at the top and he's praised by everybody who's immediately around him, because the dear leader has all the power, and all they can do is kiss his ass, and they assume his command is divine, and it works top down. But if something's going wrong, nobody's got the guts to tell him, because they might look disloyal! And that's exactly how the Church works. The dear leader's at the top, he's surrounded by fawning sycophants, and if there's something wrong with the Church, well, it's probably because the people are sinners and they're not implementing it correctly or whatever, but all the programs are perfect.
John: That idea, that the programs are perfect, goes hand in hand with "the programs are unknown." How much does the Church spend on its welfare farms? If you drive through the Wasatch front, you'll see these great big grain silos that the Church brags they keep filled up to the brim all the time in case of the apocalypse or whatever. How much does that cost? How much does it cost the membership to keep a full supply of red winter wheat laying around?
Cody: Wouldn't they count that as charity, too?
John: I dunno! That's the point! The membership goes on and on and says, "Hey, you know, I have faith that everything's being run in good faith." But you can ask people, like, "Why does the Church run the single largest cattle operation in the United States in Florida?" And no one has an answer for it! And, matter of fact, you can't find that fact anywhere in Church published material! People talk about it all the time, so if you Google it, you'll find a lot of, you know, "Why do they have 40,000 acres in Florida and all these cattle!?" and all that kind of stuff. But members have this naïve response, because they don't have any view at all.
John: And if there's anything we know, even from Church history, even if you accept a faithful Church history, you will look back on all of these things and say, "The Church is constantly being directed by men who make bad decisions." That's the standard apologetic defense for things we've mentioned before. So why do we never apply that standard to the present!? Why don't we ever say, "Holy shit, we've had all these times where the prophets have been off! Let's do an audit!"
Cody: John, they were just acting "as men." That's how that works.
John: But they're never acting "as men" right now, right?
Cody: Right.
John: Always yesterday.
Cody: Until tomorrow. And then, "Oh, whoops! Gay marriage? Uh, sorry about that."
Brian: "Oh, that was never doctrine."
Cody: "They were just talking as men!"
John: Gay Marriage?
Brian: Eventually they're going to have to keel on it. They'll find some sneaky slimy way to wipe...
Cody: Just like they did with birth control. You know, "it's between you and the Lord." The Church is just going to step back on that one....
John: You know, that's an interesting thing, because there's this deniability. And it's interesting because the governments do this all the time. It's really detailed in 1984—we could have done this same thing, maybe we will—where the government knows there's a black market. And they know the black market has to be there. And if you watch documentaries on North Korea, they'll talk about that. What I'm arguing is that the birth control doctrine is the black market for the Church. Because you can go—not on the Church's official site, but if you go get like a disc, you buy it on Seagull Book and search the thing—you can find plenty of talks and books and stuff that say birth control is evil. Birth control is wicked.
Cody: Oh yeah. Brigham Young said it was next to murder.
John: But you won't find anything that says birth control is okay.
Cody: Until Gordon B. Hinckley.
John: Even then! They'll say things like, "It's between you and the Lord to figure out how many kids." What I'm saying is if you have a thing saying, "this is okay," and "this is wrong," then you have neutral. What we have is a whole bunch of people saying "it's wrong" and a whole bunch of neutral people. A negative plus a neutral does not equal a positive! But it gives the Church this plausible deniability. They don't have to ever contradict the other brethren, and they can always go back to the old doctrine, and they don't have to have this situation where they contradict themselves.
Cody: That's what freaks me out about all those doctrines that are messed up, where they never apologized for it or said, "That was wrong." Like all the crazy stuff that Brigham Young said, they say, "Oh, he was speaking as a man!" But they don't say he was wrong! They just say, "We don't focus on that now." Which means, at any time, they could go back and use that same thing to justify redoing it again.
John: The best exercise in this, the most stark example of this— it's probably going to change soon, but I have photographs of all this; I can dig them out and post them—if you go down to the Mountain Meadows Massacre site, the Church controls the bottom side, where the massacre happened, and there's a big monument to the Church building a monument to the Mountain Meadow! If you go to Mountain Meadows, there's this big sort of pillar monolith, and then there's a big plaque that tells you about the Church building the monument! It doesn't tell you anything about what happened! If you go up to the state site, which on a hill above there, then there's this great big thing that tells you exactly what happened, and lists all the people that were killed, and you'll notice that everybody over eight was killed... so the nine year olds, 10 year olds, they killed because they were, by Mormon doctrine...
Brian: Just gross.
Cody: Do you think those guys were evil, or do you think they were faithful? Or both?
John: Both!
Cody: And they were following orders. Right?
John: But the point is that the here is, set in stone, a way that this is done. Where the Church is building this monument, but not acknowledging any wrong whatsoever. The monument talks about Gordon Hinckley dedicating the monument. And it's this crazy, crazy mind fuck that you only realize if somebody points it out to you. You're like, "Oh my god, there's nothing about the actual occurrence here on this site!" It's a great lesson on how the Church never backs itself up.
John: The problem with it is, it lets the fundies keep going forward, because they can rightfully point out to you, "Where has the church ever retracted the birth control doctrine?" And they never have. Which unfortunately leaves a burden on the people.
John: Because what does the Church want to have happen? Brian, you mentioned earlier, they don't necessarily want people to have 14 kids anymore, because then they're gonna eat off of the Church welfare. What they want is they want 25 and 26 year olds to have kids. So I'll give you my cynical theory here. People go to BYU where they're still fairly conservative, and these bishops and stake presidents will pull this stuff out and talk about how birth control is evil—that was still around when I was at BYU in the nineties!—and then people crank out three or four kids when they're young, which, like you were saying, locks them in. So, the Church really isn't interested in people having 10 kids, but they want you to have three kids really early. Because then you're not gonna, you can't—
Brian: You feel invested and your time is full and you don't have—and we talked about this in another podcast—the luxury of being able to contemplate and think and come to conclusions. If you're so busy with your kids and you're working your calling all the time, there's no time for that kind of reflection. You're so invested and so occupied that leaving isn't really ever on your radar.
John: Absolutely. Okay. So number 5. Number 5 is very much related to number 6: there are elections with only one candidate for each office and all members are expected to vote in unison.
John: This is one of those things that you grow up with in the Church, but when you see this on stock footage from other governments, it seems so creepy and so bizarre when you see, like, the Stalinists all voting the same. I remember in school as a kid—because I was in elementary school in the height of the Cold War, right in the eighties—and we pointed out that you could tell America is God-blessed because we have these elections, but the Ruskies, they only have one candidate! And then we'd go to conference and vote in lockstep unison for a single candidate.
Brian: I remember laughing at the election results before we invaded Iraq. Saddam Hussein got 100% of the vote! I was like, "Oh, what an obvious sham!"
John: Right. Now, you can talk to people. This has happened to them, so I'm not making this up. If you go to your stake conference, and they have the voting of the officers, and you stand up, make sure you get seen, and downvote, they will come down and they will take you out of the meeting and take you into a private room. If you saw a government doing that, you would immediately say, "That is prima facie evidence that they are corrupt and they are an evil government." But the Church is doing this exact thing.
Brian: Where the Church does have a leg over North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Iraq is, when they took them out into the other room, they were shot.
Cody: Well, they're socially getting shot. If you stood up and did that and you didn't have a good reason, just you didn't think he would be a good stake president...
Brian: That's still a preferable option.
John: Now, some would argue that when the Church had that power, like when Brigham Young was the governor...
Brian: Ohh, yeah... Porter Rockwell would assassinate apostates! Cut their balls off! Yeah.
John: So, the argument could cynically be made that the reason the Church doesn't do that is because they don't have the power to do it, but when you allow an organization the power, then they do it. Because they can say, you know, "One bad apple, blah, blah, blah..." And we talked already how, socially, they'll assassinate people.
Cody: It's okay to cut somebody's head off, because, you know, you don't want a whole nation to dwindle in unbelief. It's better to murder someone, right?
John: So, when you have the single elected officer and everybody's expected to vote in unison, that is, to people outside the Church, that is way super creepy.
Brian: And you're given the candidate.
John: And the candidate is not... yeah, there's no balloting provision.
Cody: What's the point?
John: The question I asked before, about, "How is the Church governed?" You see that big building... here's the other one. "How are candidates selected?"
Brian: Well, the 12 pray about it, blah, blah, blah...
John: Yeah. Okay. So how do they pick a member of the 12?
Brian: Yeah. It's a great question.
John: And I'm not saying they don't have a good method for it. I'm saying it's telling that it's completely secret.
John: It's the same thing with North Korea. We have the guy at the top, and then there's this big mysterious amorphous government structure, and you have buildings with no windows and that sort of thing, you know, but no one knows how the place is run.
Brian: It occurs to me I know way more about how the Catholic church picks the pope than how the Mormon church picks apostles.
John: Because it's open! You know all about the structure, and yeah, you know you have to be in a seat of power... I mean, hell's bells, we're in a republic. We don't vote for the president, we vote for the electoral...
Brian: I can hear Glenn Beck just having a seizure. [Laughter]
John: But the point is, that in organizations like North Korea and the Church, it is going to be secret.
John: The other one related to this point, our number 5 here, is the community leaders are also chosen by the central government. So we have the central government choosing its own people, putting the one candidate on the ballot that you are voting for in a sham. The fact that the Church has no balloting mechanism, it has no mechanism to figure out... because it's a foregone conclusion, that when you vote at conference... what's really pernicious about this is they use it against you. Saying, "Well, you..."
Brian: "You sustained them!"
John: In a good representative government, the local community selects their leaders. So we vote for our congressman, we vote for our city, we vote for the school board, county mayor, and then we have a say in participation in government. It's telling that the local congregations do not pick their bishop. As a matter of fact, a general authority, usually a 70 or a member of the 12, will come in and pick the stake president and the stake president, he picks the bishop, but he has to send that to Salt Lake for approval. So you have no say whatsoever in the governance of your day-to-day life in the Church.
John: Same with the North Korean government. There's no representation. Every local official is put in place by the central government, who retains full and complete control.
Cody: And they have a lot of power, too. I mean, one bishop to the next can be totally different.
John: Bishops have a huge amount of power. And stake presidents... an enormous amount, over the daily lives of the members, over the things we've talked about.
Brian: "You need to shave."
Cody: Right. In Arkansas, it was like, "Drink caffeine, go for it." And I've had bishops that are like, "No caffeine!"
John: I had a bishop—I told this story before—he's the guy I worked for when I was at BYU, and he announced, the spirit told him that all his members should go to the temple once a week, and he would pull people's temple recommends if they didn't commit to go to temple once a week. That's a huge investment of time! We're talking four hours a week by the time you drive there. And a huge burden in terms of child care—
Brian: Got to find babysitters every time.
John: But there's no appeal, there's no way to stop that. And, he had the blessing and seal from central authority, which you don't have access to.
Brian: Well, there's another angle to this, that I was thinking about: from the members' point of view, this is all Jesus's will being filtered down. And these guys, these men, are tuned in to Jesus's will, and they know what's going on... and, "Gosh, I don't feel that. I'm probably not as worthy. I shouldn't question it, or I'll reveal that I'm not getting the radio waves from Jesus." That's a control mechanism all by itself.
John: And we talked about this obfuscation, where you can't see it... I think I've talked about this before, but when I was in college, I read this study, where they took these college professors that were ranked very highly by the students in terms of their knowledge... but their peers, the other college professors, ranked them very low. And the researchers concluded that the people who were really confusing—like they just weren't good lecturers—the students always assumed it was them. They'd be in this philosophy class, and this guy might just be spouting nonsense; their peers would be like, "This guy's a moron!" but the students would be like, "I just don't understand it. I just don't get philosophy."
Brian: "He's way smarter than I am."
John: Right. And I've seen that when I've been in graduate school, where I've taken subjects where I knew the material. I'd go in, and the guy doesn't seem as authoritative. I'd be like, "No, that's not exactly right. No, he explained that badly." But if you don't have any view to that, then you just assume that it's you. That's part of the reason the Church does all this stuff, because you assume, like we're pointing out, that you're the one who's in error.
Brian: "It must be me."
Cody: Well, that's what happened with me as a teenager. Like we were talking about, I questioned it as a teenager, and then I was like, "But all these people I respect and trust believe it, and it seems so obviously messed up, but god, I must be missing something. So I've got to give it another chance. I've got to pray harder! I've got to..." Because god, there's no way all of these people... you don't want to accept the fact that that many people are that indoctrinated. But that's the reality.
John: It's reality. It's all over the place. I mean, that's the scary thing about North Korea. It's the George Bush fallacy. The Bush doctrine was that when we liberated Iraq, the people would celebrate us in the street. And the neocons were flabbergasted when it didn't happen, right? They were expecting this "looking at Americans as liberators." They were expecting France in 1944, right? And it didn't happen. And that's one of the reasons we don't topple the North Korean regime, because the government's smart enough to realize that the people are all on board. They ain't all becoming Texas oil barons.
Brian: Yeah. My mental model of what North Korea is like, it's this giant country surrounded by razor wire, full of mud, it's always cloudy, and the people are miserable, dying to get out. But the reality is, they are hook, line and sinker into the government, and going with it because they're too terrified to do anything else.
Cody: And they don't know anything else either.
John: It's in their DNA. It's like your family, all of our families! I hear ex-Mormons sometimes posit, "What if, what if the brethren got up, what if the prophet got up, and said..."
Brian: Wouldn't matter.
John: Yeah. It wouldn't matter. They would just re-form. Just like they did in Colorado City!
Brian: Warren Jeffs went to prison for being accessory to rape of a child and they're still taking orders from him.
John: Yeah. I was down there one weekend, I went to the Walmart in Virgin—I had to get my kids a toothbrush, they had left their toothbrush at home—and there were the cohabs at the Walmart, you know? There's no central authority telling them to do their hair up that way and wear those dresses—overalls—but there they are. So that's why those organizations are powerful. That's why we can't just "topple the North Korean government."
Brian: Right. Because they're willing captives.
Cody: They don't know any better.
Brian: It's Stockholm syndrome, run wildly amok.
Cody: It reminds me, in one of those documentaries, they were doing these cataract surgeries on people, and some of them had never seen their whole lives...
John: These are North Korean citizens?
Cody: Yeah, North Koreans, sorry. And when they took the bandages off and they're seeing for the first time, every single one of them would go up to the front of the room and just cry tears and praise Kim Jong-il. Didn't say a word to the doctor. Didn't say, "Thank you for fixing my eyes!" It was, "Kim Jong-il is the greatest leader ever!" And everyone would shout, and it took, like, all day. It was exhausting just watching it. I can't imagine actually being there, but it was just like, holy crap, these people...
Brian: I wonder if my believing mother sometimes has that feeling after she's worked her ass off all day to make a nice dinner, and then someone gets up and says, "Thanks, Jesus, for the food!"
John: And you know, lest you think we're great... next time you go to an assembly at your elementary school, or on Independence Day... Americans get into this sort of stuff too. We're not immune from that propaganda sort of thinking. It's something to be cautious of.
Cody: You're talking about the Pledge of Allegiance?
John: Well, just all that kind of stuff where you start seeing yourself as super blessed and super set apart and everything. America, for example, is very resource-rich. That's one of the reasons America is rich. We have lots of natural resources, lots of uranium, coal, all sorts of things, and that helped build this great nation. I'm happy to be an American, but we start perverting that, and start saying, "Oh, we're God-blessed!" Well, we were blessed by dinosaurs who happened to die in the right place and give us the right resources... but it's easy to turn that into this sort of exceptionalism.
Brian: "Divine manifest."
Cody: "Where much is given, much is expected," is what it should be.
John: Okay. Number 4. Now we're getting into the good ones. The organization history is overly sentimentalized, and unflattering information is edited out of official documents. [Immediate laughter]
Brian: I'm not sure if this one applies to the Church! [More laughter]
John: You know, it's funny, because sometimes you grow up in the Church—I was in the Church until I was 33, 34—and when Zilpha and I moved out to North Carolina, I remember going to the local museum there. They had a whole section dedicated to lynchings, and there were photos of lynchings that happened in town, in the museum there. They had this really great room that had a 1950s classroom; they had a line going down the middle, so the left half of the room was the 1950s white elementary school classroom, and the 1950s...
John: This was the history of the people, and it was all there, all the unflattering information, because that was part of what the South was! And it was acknowledged openly that there were lynchings, you know? And it was so jarring for me, because I'd only really been to, like, the Utah... if you go back into the Daughters of Utah Pioneer Museum and you know where to look, you can find some unflattering stuff, but you won't find anything that's even remotely unflattering.
Brian: Yeah, I'd love to see a picture of 66 year old Brigham Young with his 23 year old pregnant wife up there. Like, "Here's what actually happened," you know?
John: In this age, in the age of Google, this is one of those things that used to be something that was really bad. Now, for the North Koreans, they've taken control of Google. The Church tries to control that sort of stuff, but they don't succeed at it. This is just one of the things that's flipped on its head and it's bad for the Church.
John: So, to the Church: keep editing your manuals, please. Because we live in an age where people can go and figure that stuff out and they can see exactly how you're whitewashing everything. And matter of fact, the recent changes, in the addition to the scriptures, show an awareness of this sort of stuff happening.
Cody: Unfortunately people just don't care.
John: But it's not just putting things down the memory hole, which happens all the time. A great example, just so people know what I'm talking about, was about 10 years ago. The Church started this series of manuals from the teachings of the presidents of the Church. And they actually changed... at least one quote I can think of was Brigham Young; he was talking about his wives, and they changed it to "wife." That's a deliberate obfuscation of the truth. That's a deliberate lie.
Brian: The Joseph Smith book makes no mention of other wives. None.
John: So that's where the Church has changed stuff. But there's this glorifying of things, you know, like the story of Joseph Smith not drinking when he got his leg operated on.
Cody: You just automatically assume that, well, he probably never drank for the rest of his life, right? Because if he rejected it as a 14 year old...
Brian: How old was he?
John: He was like, nine, or seven. He was little.
Brian: What seven year old would drink whiskey and go, "Oh yeah, I'll have some more of that!"
John: Right, right, right. You're exactly right. I couldn't get my kids to drink whiskey if I tried. So we glorify these stories and turn them into saints. And there are some really fascinating stories about Kim Jong-il, where they talk about these signs at his birth and these events that happened...
Brian: First time he played golf, he had like seven holes-in-one...
John: Yeah, all those things! They look so silly when you look at them in North Korea, but there are all sorts of things like this about Joseph Smith. He'd wrestle and win everybody...
Brian: Put in your mind, a poster of North Korean propaganda, with a soldier, and he's got the square chin, and it's kind of this up-angle, and it's backlit, and kind of, like... [angelic choir noise] ...I don't know how to put that in words, but it came out as a sound. [Laughter] And now think about that picture of Joseph Smith, where he's blonde, and he's got that blue jacket on, and it's got that same up-angle, it's sort of soft art, and beautifully lit... same exact propaganda.
John: I think about the two paintings of Joseph and Emma that are hanging in the Nauvoo temple right now, where they're both standing... we've romanticized this relationship, and we ignore the fact that he was writing letters: "Keep this secret! Don't tell Emma!" And Emma's chasing him around, and he's catting around the city, and all this kind of stuff. So, not only do we edit all that out of the official history, but then we turn these things into these glorifications.
Cody: How lame is it that the history is so bad that we have to write The Work and the Glory so we can pretend what the history was? I was always thought that was weird. What's the work and the glory?
Brian: They're nice enough to call that fiction, though.
John: Another example, that doesn't glorify the leaders, is 17 Miracles. That movie, which I admit I haven't seen but I've talked to people who have... the Martin Willie Handcart company is a lesson in bad governance. It is one hundred percent a mistake of the leadership. They sent them out there—they were told not to do it!—There was hubris on the part of the 12 and the leaders, and then, of course, they famously rode into camp and the people were saying, "Dude, this is not looking good..." They were in a buggy so they could move fast—this is Hinkle and those guys—and they had them kill a calf! And they ate the food of the Martin company to show them who was boss, and then they headed off to Salt Lake.
John: Of course, everyone knows the story that they "got notified" in Salt Lake early because they sent back the rescue team. What they don't tell you is it was those same sons of bitches who ate the calf, who were in the buggy! They knew! They knew that they left those guys back on the plains. They knew that they'd sent them. And it was the same member of the 12 who sent them out in the first place, when he was told by the cart-makers, "This wood is green, it's too late in the season, you can't do it!" But that son of a bitch made it to Salt Lake, and he didn't go on the rescue mission!
John: Anybody who looks at this from the outside sees it's this government problem, but they turned it into this holy epic. And that's the same sort of thing that the Korean government has done. The comedy of errors that turned them into famine and this wasted place, it's all turned into this glorification. It's really quite sick.
Brian: Yeah, talk about a case study in discernment gone wrong. Uninspired, as clear as day.
John: At least today, the Church couches common sense as inspiration—like regular business sense; the Church runs like any other corporation—in the old days, they used to make stupid decisions and call it revelation, and they don't do that as much.
Brian: Well, yeah, but again, I would posit that it's in self-interest. Because they know if it goes wrong they're going to look stupid, and they—oh, we haven't gotten to that yet. I think that's later.
John: Alright, well, let's get there. So number 3: leadership tends to speak of the victimhood of the organization, even in endeavors where the organization has a majority or controlling influence.
John: Those of us who live in Utah see this all the time. You have this controlling majority. Not only are Mormons the majority of the population, they're a super-majority of the elected leadership. I've seen the stats breakdown—like mayors and local congresspeople—the Mormons are overrepresented in Congress and Senate. So in the US government, they're overrepresented for their population; they exhibit a lot of control there. And in Utah politics, the key stakeholders—the key decision makers—are overwhelmingly LDS. So, you have a LDS population of 70%, and not all of those are active, but for leadership positions it's like 90%.
John: The Church is known, it gets caught all the time—you read the Tribune and about every three or four months, there's a story—the Church gets caught meddling in politics. And the way they do it is they call them into the church, and they let them know the way the brethren want them to vote. But the key is not that they're meddling in the government. The key is that they're always playing the victim card! They are a super-majority who hold all the keys of power. But if you listen to them whine, you would think they were oppressed by this, by this... this silent minority that's oppressing them all the time.
John: Same thing with the Koreans! They exhibit complete control of the economics of North Korea. Now, you know, there's external factors, but everything inside is their control. But they're going to blame everybody else for whatever goes on.
Brian: Well, you get that from the Christians in America. They're always saying how persecuted they are because they can't say prayer in school. "Oh, Christian persecution is rampant!" You guys are the majority by, like, a ton!
John: Right, yeah! It's this constant, "We're being persecuted by the minority!" And they know what they're doing when they play that card, and they have sophisticated media machines to crank this stuff out... and we'll get there in a second. So yeah, the victimhood. And once you start seeing it, you'll see it all the time. This weepy, sad story of how they're being oppressed by the people who don't want to pray, or the people who...
Cody: Does that include, like, the persecution that all members feel, like...
Brian: Persecution complex?
Cody: Because they love that. It's kind of funny.
John: And here's a classic example: missionaries, to go back, are the aggressors. When you were a missionary, you're dressing in the uniform, you're going out onto people's turf, you're going into their homes, knocking on their doors. Missionaries all have a persecution complex, right? But you're the aggressor! You're the active one in this exchange!
Brian: You're the one who's showing up uninvited, wanting people's time.
John: Right. But they will see themselves as being oppressed. So if they show up on your doorstep and you say, "I'm not interested," the missionary will take that as a victimhood. "Why do people persecute me!?" Well, you're the one who's going around trying to convert other folks!
Cody: Yeah, you're the one who has to defend your plane, your belief.
John: Okay, number 2...
Brian: Try not to think of the Church, I dare you.
John: The organization controls media as much as they can, including television, radio, newspapers... all outside media, outside of their control, is cast as suspect. In the case of North Korea, nonexistent. And, the group has an almost obsessive focus on the outward appearances of the organization. Buildings and property are meticulously kept, grass is cut, no litter is ever found, grounds are always perfect. A great deal of time and resources are spent on the outward appearance.
John: So you have these two things hand in hand. I remember a documentary about North Korea years ago, and there were US dignitaries visiting, and somebody had snuck a camera on, and... they had people cutting the grass with scissors. They have these people on their hands and knees measuring and getting each blade of grass cut. You go down to Temple Square and everything is meticulous, right? There is this obsessive...
John: And it's funny, you go anywhere in the US... when I lived in Wilmington, we were on the beach, and Kentucky Bluegrass does not grow in Wilmington. It's a sandbar! And you wouldn't see it anywhere... except the LDS church. The LDS church there looks exactly like it was picked up in Sandy and plopped down on the beach.
Brian: I hadn't thought about that before... I was just thinking of mission in Brazil, and, yeah, the church had a lawn. I can't even think of anybody else who had a lawn.
John: And if you compare the churches to a lot of places in there, they're extremely opulent in comparison. Now, the ones in Sandy or whatever... if you go up on the bench and go to Park City, the churches are built with nicer material there. Obviously the churches are spending more. But in a lot of places, that church looks really out of place. It's a lot nicer than the other things around. There's this casting of outward appearance.
John: And going back to the media: the Church owns a lot of media companies. A fascinating story that came out in the Tribune—which is, of course, the paper of the Gentiles—I can't remember the dude's name, but they brought in the grandson of Hinckley or whatever to take over the paper, and then he wanted to turn it soft focus.
John: So the Church has media outlets—KSL television, KSL Radio, the Deseret News—a couple years ago, they turned more propaganda-ish than they have been for a long time and their viewership tanked... but, you know, the Church controls and has all that media because they really carefully want to control their message. It's fascinating to read both—a lot of people do this—when something happens in Utah, to read the Tribune article and then read the Deseret News and how the Deseret News scrubs things. When you have an organization like North Korea, when you have an organization like the Church, they will always try to control the media. They're always trying to control how they're seen.
John: If you go to the Church's webpage and go to the newsroom and go for, like, the style guides, the Church is obsessed with, you know... the famous one is The Mormons. "You can't call us Mormons! But you can't call anybody else Mormons. We control this term. We control how it's used, you can't call it The Church, you have to use the full name..." Just this obsessive meticulous control, that really has nothing to do with reality, but it has to do with controlling the image.
Brian: Image over everything, including your family, your dignity, your home. It doesn't matter. Church first. Oh, you have to buy medicine? You have to buy food for your family? No, no, no. Tithing first. Us first, not you.
Cody: In one of those documentaries, they let them go to one of the people that was getting the cataract surgery done, to their home. It was downtown Pyongyang or whatever. And in every house, they have to have a picture of Kim Jong-il, the grandpa, and then Kim Jong-un or whatever. And you cannot have any other pictures up in your house, and it has to be right up at the top, perfect. And when they were taking pictures of it, the guy explained, "You cannot take a picture below this line right here." And she was like, "Why?" She wasn't even being rude. She was just like, "So why is that?" She was honestly asking a question. And man, [snaps fingers] the second she said that, the guy grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the picture. It was obvious that you just do not ask questions.
John: Yeah. I remember hearing a reporter who was in North Korea a couple of years ago, and they would stage every photo. And if the reporters got caught just even turning 90 degrees to the left and taking a picture, then they would take the cameras away.
John: And you'll see in these sort of organizations that their central buildings are always opulent, even when the members are... the morality of building these temples, even these many temples, that are lit up—I can't imagine what the Church’s electric bill is!—when they know in South America they have members who are living who don't have clean water. You sing these songs about Primary children being all over the world, and Jesus loves all the children... the Church won't even ensure that all the kids who go to Primary have clean water, but they will import the finest mahogany and the finest stone to build these temples, these "houses of the Lord."
Cody: Well, that's God's will, though. That's what he cares about!
Brian: Greedy bastard.
John: In these organizations, it's always the same. The central buildings, the central control, is always very beautiful, no matter how poor and how ravished the people are.
Cody: Even the chapels are... I mean, not to that same extent, but in Chile, that's how it was. The chapels were the nicest building in most of the cities that I was at.
John: Absolutely. And this is where we're going to hold the Church's feet to the fire. They're claiming 14 million members. And if they're claiming 14 million members, what percentage of that membership live below the poverty line, south of the Rio Grande? It's a huge percentage. The majority of members, or a huge plurality of members, are living in abject poverty! When you look at the temple in Sandy, you say, "Well, look at the houses around Sandy..." But you have to average it out to what the standard LDS person has. And that's not much! The justification of that spending just just isn't there. But you'll always see that. Because they have to maintain the illusion of control of the central government.
John: So let's get to number 1. Cody, you already hinted at this one. This is the one that's most chilling to me: The term "beloved" is applied to a living leader by other leaders of the organization and the membership, and you will see photos of the leader. If you want the number one sign of an organization you want to stay away from: any organization that puts up photos of its leadership. And not just, like, in the hall of presidents, but like, if you're a bank or something and a picture of the bank president is on a cubicle wall... run. That is scary.
John: The idea of calling any leader "beloved"... I mean, think about it! If we called them, "Our beloved president, George Bush," or, "Our beloved president, Barack Obama..."
Brian: Creepy.
John: Gives you chills, right? But that's the way we talk about the "beloved prophet" and that's the way they talk about themselves! The other members of the 12 who are ostensibly in line to become that prophet will use that language. And that's what's used in North Korea. You'll see pictures on everybody's wall of the leadership and it's so eerily striking to the LDS church. Even other organizations we call "cults," like Jehovah Witnesses or Scientologists, they don't do that! You don't go to a Scientologist's house and have the beloved trinity of leadership on their wall.
Brian: Like, I've never seen a picture of Charles Taze Russell—that's the Witnesses founder—up.
John: There is a central control, the...
Brian: The Watchtower Society.
John: ...but they're not "beloved leaders."
Cody: "No evil speaking of the Lord's anointed"... Like, that's out there, right now.
John: In terms of healthy organizations... and this is what's funny, because Mormons can become uber-Americans, like they really dig on American... theology, let's call it. And part of that is "the power of the government comes from the people," right? The right to govern comes from the will of the governed, right? This is one of the central tenants of Americanism. The Church couches itself in nationalism, wraps itself in the flag—
Brian: It does now.
John: —but it is the antithesis of the principles that underlie the American government.
Brian: [Laughter] It's the opposite of democracy. It's the opposite of freedom. Oh man...
John: That's right! That's the whole point here. We compare it to North Korea because North Korea is the opposite of the principles that America embodies. Now, we all always fall short, right? Or I would say the west, because all of our industrial peers are all on the same boat. It's not like America is more blessed than, say, Norway or whatever.
Brian: But yeah, that's great. The Church has compulsory taxes...
John: A regressive tax, mind you. Because 10%, at the poverty line, will keep you from buying bread. 10% when you're rich is chump change. So it's a regressive tax, meaning it hits the poor harder than hits the rich. It's compulsory; you have no say in the government whatsoever. It's mysterious; no one knows what it's doing...
Brian: It's as big a government as you get! "We don't like big government telling us what to do"... I can't find an organization that tells me more of what to do. There are rules governing virtually everything in your life.
John: Not virtually.
Brian: There must be exceptions. Literally everything?
John: To some extent or the other.
Brian: Yeah. "Literally" is just tricky.
John: But, I mean, they have their hands absolutely in everything. And they have a blank check! This goes back to our thing with our bishop and stake president. They can give you advice on anything, which is one of the reasons that the Church falls prey, so often, to multilevel marketing scams and Ponzi-based things.
Brian: Once you believe that an angel can carry a lead book up into the sky, what myth won't you accept?
Cody: And if you trust your leader—he's a great guy—and he hits you up for some multilevel marketing ploy, why wouldn't you?
John: So the counter—and you brought it up to all this—what we're drawing out here, is we're saying: if you take and strip away the idea that the Church is divine, and you just look at it in the abstract, its governance—the way it runs itself—any rational person would say, "that is a corrupt government." If you just eliminated all the Church of Jesus Christ stuff and you presented it to the standard, average, even educated Mormon, they'd say "That, that is a dictatorship. That is awful." But then they would say, "Well, because it's run by Jesus... then it’s okay."
Brian: Revelation!
John: But we brought up the problem before. The problem is that when you look at the history of the Church, even the doctrinal history, there's so much of it we have to disown now. There's so much that we have to discard, that there's no way really for a thinking apologist to make any sort of argument that the Church now is free from corruption or free from falsehood or free from the thinking of man. Because it is so apparent... even a faithful member would have to discard 60%, 70% of the policies and actions and doctrine of the Church, historically speaking.
Brian: Yeah, I have a hard time thinking of any single doctrine that hasn't undergone radical change.
John: I've laid this gauntlet down before, and I'll lay it down now: show me one core tenant of the Church that has not been monkeyed with in a substantial way. Just one! There isn't one!
John: And even practice! Like, the way the Church ran sacrament meeting 120, 130 years ago... there were no chapels, even!
Brian: You only have to go back to when I was a little kid; they didn't have the three hour block. You were going back and forth to church all the time.
John: We used to take the sacrament at Sunday school... well, you're younger than me, you probably don't remember that.
Brian: Yeah, I don't remember that. Is that true?
John: Eh, you guys are just babies. [Laughter] Yeah, and we'd go to church in the morning, go to church at nine... do you guys remember how Primary was in the middle of the week and that sort of thing?
Brian: Mmhm.
John: You go to the Wayback Machine and you notice, you won't find any chapels that are more than 110, 120 years old, because they didn't have them! They only had tabernacles. The ward didn't meet weekly... that came about after Brigham young died, the late 19th century. The idea that the bishop was an ecclesiastical leader, yes, but he was more concerned about temporal things. They didn't have anything like... sacrament was served on the stake level.
John: So, you know, the Church has gone through radical, radical reformation and—"reformation" is too kind—re-imagining, restructuring itself over and over again. And, to the point we made before, it's all hidden. It's all down the memory hole. You should be able to, at a college level course, take a course in "the history of the structure of LDS services." Right? That should be something that the Church itself is teaching and has a book on. But they will constantly try to take whatever the Church is doing right now, and then re-pattern history as if it's always been this way.
Brian: Yeah, “the unchanging and Everlasting Gospel.” What!?
John: Same with North Korea. They'll rewrite history. The real shame about North Korea is that the North Koreans—we talked about this before—are completely oblivious to what's going on in the world, their own history... all that kind of stuff has been rewritten.
Brian: They have no way of knowing.
John: They have no way of knowing. Yeah. And unfortunately it breeds zealotry.
Cody: You know, it makes you wonder how many people do know in North Korea... because there are a lot of people who leave, you know what I mean? So it makes you wonder.
John: Are there?
Cody: Well, they sneak out and go to South Korea.
Brian: Well, I wouldn't say there's a lot...
Cody: Well, a lot of people are trying to get out. Say, hundreds. I think hundreds every year go to China. But anyway, it makes you wonder if things are going on in the background. Where they're like, "I love Kim Jong-il because I have to, but when I'm at night laying down, talking to my buddy or whatever, we're saying this sucks."
John: Well, there's always the fifth column or whatever, that wants things changed. Or people who say they don't believe it but stay in because it's "good" or "good for their families." You'll meet a lot of people in Utah, if you hang out with professionals who drink, you'll meet a lot of dentists and doctors and stuff who say, "I don't believe the Church, haven't believed in years, but I know if I leave the Church... half my clientele is the stake, and it will just decimate my business."
Brian: It's not worth the cost. It's easier to just play pretend.
John: It's not worth the cost. And that's probably another item we could have added, the way the organizations deal with apostates—people who leave—we hinted at it a little bit with the family thing, but they'll try to marginalize them and pretend they don't exist and write them off the will.
Cody: It's not like people who leave the Church want everyone to leave the Church, necessarily! Because we know that everyone has their own brain and they can decide what they want. But the big problem, for me at least, is the bigotry, and the people who refuse to look at history and acknowledge the things that are facts. I mean, my family was like, "I will not hear one word of anything that puts the Church in a negative light. Not one word." Whether it's true or not! Even if it comes from the Church. If it's coming from you... and that's part of where the demonization comes.
Cody: It's like, why wouldn't you listen to this? If you're so, like, strong in your testimony and your beliefs or whatever, why wouldn't you listen to what I'm saying and help me? Instead of just, like Richard Dutcher said, pull out the high-powered rifle and blow your brains out? That's what they do.
Brian: Well, it points to insecurity. I mean, if you have the idea that "the serpent is subtle and he might trick me, and I don't want you to know but I've got all sorts of doubts, and if I hear anything you say the devil might trick me... so I'm not listening to anything, because I've already said that I have a testimony and I'm going to stick with that."
Cody: The limitation with that is that it doesn't leave me with any options other than my role as the evil guy.
Brian: No, it doesn't. It's self-preservation.
Cody: Which basically ruins the relationship.
John: How many Mormons get up and say, "If it wasn't for the Church, I'd be out raping babies right now"? [Laughter] Right? People honest to god say that! "I'd be a rapist," "I'd be dead in a ditch," or whatever.
Cody: I know someone that says, "If it wasn't for the Church, I'd be cheating on my wife..." And I'm like, dude... no, you wouldn't.
John: Yeah. As an agnostic, let me tell all you religious people: stop saying that! You're scaring us! You're telling me the only thing between you and mayhem is this belief in God!?
Brian: I say, "That may be true, but only because you just said that. That's the only reason."
John: It probably rhymes with the statistics that atheists are underrepresented in the population in prison. If you look at the population that classifies themselves as an atheist, it's like 8% or 9% of the US population, but the prison population, it's like less than 2%.
Brian: Did you hear Penn Jillette's response to that? The "Why aren't you out there raping" question? He says, "I rape exactly as many people as I want to: zero! I murder exactly as many people as I want to: zero!"
John: I think to your point that you were making, Cody, that's what's so telling about this. Because the whole point of this podcast is you can take this thing, the nation that probably most Americans would identify as the biggest evil nation, and there are so many parallels between the Church, where the Church operates the way they operate, but they will not see it. They will sit through those sham elections every six months in the Church and they will not look around and say, "by god, this is a sham election! I'm voting in a sham election!" And that's what's so pernicious about this whole thing, because of the way indoctrination works: you don't see it in yourself.
Cody: So is it fear on both sides? Is that what we're...
John: I think it's pre-fear. It's pre-cognition. The mind control is so strong that the question never gets raised.
Brian: The control mechanisms work really well in North Korea and in Iran.
Cody: I was accused of "giving in to fear" for leaving and... that boggled my mind. Like, how? I don't even know how you're even going there.
John: I think to that point, they see it as this big black cloud, this unknown, this scary... the great and spacious building. And even that metaphor is so wonderful and so telling; we need to tear it apart. They're all in a cloud of darkness, a mist of darkness, right? ...Absolutely! I agree! [Laughter] You guys need to climb a hill and get out of the fucking darkness and look around and see what's going on! You acknowledge that you're in it!
John: They just are conditioned to see any sort of question as being out of order. So it's fear that they feel in response, where I think, Brian, you bring it up before, the natural response should be, "Hey, I have the truth. Bring it on! Bring Hitchens to Salt Lake! We have a prophet of the Lord! We'll take him on in a debate! Bring the CNN cameras! Let's go! We have the truth!"
Cody: Exactly. That's how I feel now as an agnostic. I'll talk about anything!
Brian: Yeah. Please!
Brian: It's one of the Church leaders that said the truth can't be harmed by inquiry. And if something can be harmed by inquiry, it ought to be.
Cody: You won't find many members with that attitude now.
Brian: No.
John: And the point is that they don't even realize that they're not that way. They think they're that way.
Brian: I know I did.
Cody: Sucks.
John: Well, North Korea. Let's all move. I hear they have nice grass.
Brian: Bring your scissors.
John: As always, the discussion continues on the website at mormonexpression.com. You can also join in the ruckus daily fray that is the Mormon Expression VIP Lounge on Facebook. Ever growing stronger, so you can find like friends. It's a secret group, so your family has no idea that you're in it, and you can join and come on in. Alright, well Cody, Brian...
Brian: Thanks again. It's always fun.
Cody: Thank you. Sorry for blubbering like a baby. I hope you edit most of that out, if not all of it.
Brian: That was authentic and genuine!