1441: Questions I Would Ask Richard Bushman

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 5.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2021

⏱️ 111 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week we celebrate the birthday of faithful Mormon historian and scholar Richard Bushman – author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, and former Mormon church stake president and patriarch.

Some of you will remember that I had the privilege of interviewing Richard back in 2007. Most of you probably don’t know that Richard agreed to discuss 10 topics on the series, but quit the interview after only addressing 3 of the 10 topics, which was very disappointing to me at the time. But of course that was his prerogative.

Since our original interview, Richard has declined to appear on Mormon Stories Podcast again – especially after my excommunication from the Mormon Church in 2015. Still, there are many questions that I would like to ask Richard (or any believing Mormon scholar), if he (they) would allow it. Unfortunately most faithful Mormon scholars avoid any forums where they are asked candid, difficult questions. This is not their fault, of course. It’s the price of doing business with a church that silences and punishes its truth-tellers.

Consequently, I am recording a personal episode where I go ahead and ask the questions I’ve been wanting to ask Richard, along with expressing a few concerns with some of Richard’s public statements over the years.

I hope you enjoy! If you enjoy this episode, I may do something similar a few other faithful scholars/historians/apologists.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host,
0:05.3	John DeLin. It is June 23rd, 2021 and I am very grateful to have you here with me today
0:13.4	for kind of a special Mormon Stories Podcast episode by special. I mean kind of different.
0:20.9	I'm doing something today that I have never done before and I don't know if I'll ever
0:25.3	do it again and I'll just give you a little bit of background. So, you know, early on in the history
0:32.8	of Mormon Stories Podcast, I prided myself on trying to be as balanced as possible, on trying to
0:40.8	interview people who are faithful, people who aren't faithful, interview regular members of the church,
0:46.1	ex-Mormons, apologists, faithful people, people all across the spectrum, including scholars and historians.
0:54.8	And I was able to do that for several years and that included interviewing members of
1:00.6	Fair Mormon like Scott Lynch or John Lynch, Daniel Peterson. It included faithful, interviewing
1:06.5	faithful scholars like Richard Bushman and Terrell Infiona Gibbons and others, even Patrick Mason,
1:12.1	Thomas McConkey, etc. And of course I would also interview people like Grant Palmer and people
1:18.0	who left the church and Brett Metcalf and Michael Quinn and others. So, for many many years, I worked
1:25.5	really hard to make Mormon Stories Podcast really balanced, have people from all over the spectrum.
1:31.2	Once I started feeling the obligation to be really open and honest about my problems with the
1:38.4	church and once, frankly, I started seeing the real damage that the church was causing to
1:43.8	marriages, to people's individual mental health, to marriages, to families, LGBT people, racism,
1:49.5	sexism, all that stuff. Once I saw that they continued to silence historians and truth tellers,
1:56.6	once I started really as a mental health professional getting in, immersing myself in the collateral
2:03.3	damage that was caused by the church, I felt an obligation to speak out against those problems.
2:09.8	And also, once I started to really believe that informed consent was a really important thing and
2:15.3	that the church was not observing even the most basic rules or guidelines regarding informed
	...

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