1373: Zelph on the Shelf - 5 Years of Laughter, Wisdom, Healing, and Growth

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 5.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2020

⏱️ 207 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Zelph on the Shelf is one of the most successful YouTube channels in history dedicated to exploring Mormonism in thoughtful and entertaining ways.

Five years ago I sat down with Samantha Shelley and Tanner Gilliland to discuss their loss of faith as "Mormon Millennials." That episode was extremely well-received at the time, and was highly influential in the journey of tens of thousands of Mormons, including Tyler Glenn (lead singer of Neon Trees).

Today's episode with Tanner and Samantha will be in two parts:

Part 1: Samantha and Tanner discuss the evolution and impact of Zelph on the Shelf over the past 5 years.

Part 2 (My favorite part): Samantha and Tanner discuss how they have healed and grown over the past 5 years in many of the domains most salient to transitioning Mormons, including: creativity, community, identity, mental health, spirituality, sexuality, finding meaning/purpose in their lives, and in thoughts about death and the afterlife.

Part 3: We end this interview by discussing Tanner and Samantha's perspective on the recent Mormon apologetic content released by FAIRMormon, featuring controversial apologist Kwaku El.

I found Samantha and Tanner to be incredibly thoughtful and wise, and am confident that you will thoroughly enjoy this episode.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host John Delin. It's December 15th, 2020
0:06.0	and I am over the moon excited about our
0:11.0	guests. I've been thinking recently about kind of a 12 days of Christmas where I spotlight
0:18.0	12 of my favorite kind of participants in the Mormon kind of post-Mormon dialogue
0:24.0	and just people that are cool, that are making things happen, that are doing good things
0:29.0	and of course one of the first people or perhaps the first people that I decided to reach out to
0:35.0	were, self on the shelf. Hey guys! We love to have your 12 Disciple and Case of Christmas.
0:41.0	Welcome back to Forms Stories. Thank you. You've had a glow up. What's that? You've had a glow up. We've
0:49.0	had a glow up. We've got a nice hat now. It's MLM hat. They're like, get rid of the hat, John. It's an MLM. Thrive is not an MLM or at least
1:01.0	not in my world. In my world, Thrive means you can heal and grow and thrive after Mormonism if you so
1:09.0	choose and I can't think of two better people to talk about that. Yeah, you got us to do it. Now we're going to
1:15.0	do three of our friends to tell their friends. We love Thrive.
1:23.0	Yeah, but seriously, for those who have been under a rock about five years ago, if I'm right, I met
1:31.0	Samantha and Tanner, Samantha Shelley, Tanner Gilliland. I met them at Utah State University when I was getting my
1:39.0	PhD in clinical and counseling psychology and I thought they were so talented that in addition to
1:47.0	whatever ambitions they had, I wanted them to enter into the progressive post Mormon discourse.
1:55.0	And so they decided to start an amazing YouTube channel called Self on the Shelf. It was a blog too. Probably
2:03.0	still is. And we interviewed them five years ago. It was called, what was it called, losing Mormon
2:09.0	millennials or something like that? Yeah. And it's definitely one of the top 100 Mormon stories episodes
2:15.0	of all time, which is saying something because there's like 1400 hours of content. But it's perhaps best known
2:23.0	for being the tipping point or the trigger for Tyler Glenn, lead singer of Neon Trees to begin his
2:31.0	discussions about Mormonism. And it's been viewed by literally tens of thousands, if not over 100,000
	...

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