1354: Informed Consent and "Ableism" in the LDS Church - Katie Harmon

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 5.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2020

⏱️ 349 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Katie Harmon was raised Catholic in Laramie, Wyoming. After falling in love with a Mormon boy at age 15, Katie became socially/emotionally converted to the LDS Church in spite of...

High ambitions for herself (Katie was a 4.0 student, got a 33 on her ACT, was in AP classes, got a full ride scholarship to the University of Wyoming, and wanted to become a doctor) and
Strongly valuing social justice (e.g., anti-homophobia, anti-sexism, anti-racism).

As Katie became fully committed to the Mormon church, she saw her original aspirations slowly slip away, as she began to follow "the Mormon way for women." Katie ended up:

Experiencing severe Scrupulosity as a Mormon woman.
Enduring an invasive and inappropriate "sexual repentance" process.
Marrying 3 months after graduating high school to a man she had only known 7 months.
Getting sealed to her husband while her non-LDS family sat outside the Mormon temple.
Having three children within a short period of time before she felt ready to do so, based on LDS teachings.
Feeling frustrated when, after her 2nd child was diagnosed with major health issues at 20 weeks, priesthood blessings failed to heal her ailing child. She basically discovered after conversion that the "Priesthood power" was not real, and did not work.
Confronting the stifling "ableism" of Mormon doctrine, theology, and culture.

As Katie's hopes and dreams began to fall apart, she began studying Mormonism more closely, and discovered that she was not taught as an investigator important truths about Mormon history and the LDS church that would likely have prevented her from joining.

Katie's motivation for doing this interview is to call on the LDS Church to be fully honest in its missionary efforts, and in its education of children and youth, so that people like her can not be misled into joining and/or committing their lives to the Mormon church without being fully informed about its history, doctrine, and theology.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host John
0:04.0	Delin. It's October 16th, 2020. And I think we have a very useful and important Mormon stories
0:11.2	interview for you today. Today we are interviewing Katie Harmon and a lot of lately on Mormon stories
0:19.0	we've been refocusing on history and truth claims. But part of our bread and butter over the years
0:25.2	is to just do stories of people's Mormon journeys, regular people and just how they've
0:33.3	navigated Mormonism for better for worse throughout their lives. And oftentimes there's a heavy
0:38.4	emphasis on what happens when you learn the truth about Mormonism and you start to have a faith
0:44.3	crisis and then how do you work through that and reconcile it. And today I think we have an excellent
0:50.6	story planned for you. Today we're interviewing Katie Harmon. Katie was raised Catholic in Laramie,
0:58.7	Wyoming. She fell in love with the Mormon boy around age 15. She became what I would call socially
1:05.9	and emotionally converted to the LDS church without having been taught the full truth about the
1:13.2	Mormon churches, theology, history, truth claims and sort of social justice record. And so what she
1:22.0	became commited to the church, she was all in and she ended up following the Mormon plan which was
1:28.7	even though she was a 4-0 student, 33 on her ACT, full ride to University of Wyoming, scholarship
1:36.6	wanted to become a doctor. She gets married just a few months after graduating from high school,
1:43.2	probably too young by her estimation now. Probably didn't get to know her future husband
1:49.9	like she would have otherwise wanted to, started having a lot of kids and started experiencing
1:56.8	difficulties within Mormonism like everybody else but specifically when she had a child with
2:02.4	serious medical conditions was taught about the power of the priesthood to heal. Things didn't work
2:08.6	out like she thought. And then as things started becoming even rougher including bouts of
2:13.6	script velocity and other sorts of things, Katie started to investigate the Mormon church truth
2:19.2	claims and realized that she was not taught a lot of very important basic and central things
	...

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