Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am your host for today John DeLin. It is July 15th, 2022.

And I am joined today in studio as co-host my dear beloved sweet partner, amazing brilliant beautiful partner, Margie DeLin. Hey Margie. Hey, babe, how are you?

You're co-hosting today. How cool is that? I know. I'm happy to be here. Yeah, Jen's out of town and Margie, as as many of you know, Margie's been leading kind of this thrive series where she's exploring healing and growth after high demand religion.

Many of you love that thrive series, but we also want Margie to be able to co-host from time to time and just a regular old, amazing epic Mormon stories faith journey interview.

And that's what today is going to be you. Anything you want to add to that Margie? Oh, just that I'm really, really happy to be here for today's story.

Yeah. All right. Well, as just kind of like an introduction preview today, we are interviewing Ali, Kristiansen. Is that right? Yeah. Hey, Ali. Hey, welcome. Thank you.

And just to give a tiny bit of background, as we were nearing kind of the March, April timeframe of this year in 2022, there were a lot of people emailing or messaging me about kind of the issue of being a BYU student and losing your faith while being a BYU student, but not being able to talk about it publicly.

Out of fear of some sort of repercussion, particularly BYU has been known in the past to kind of like hold up someone's graduation even expel them from the university if they talk about their loss of faith in a way that really can negatively impact their ability to graduate and graduate on time.

I'm setting them back two years worth of like study and financially. So it's a real serious problem that at BYU, if you lose your faith in Catholicism and join Mormonism as a BYU student, you're fine.

But if you're believing Mormon while a BYU student and then you lose your faith, you can literally be expelled and kicked out. It's a real problem.

But we also really believe in covering all topics that are really germane and important in the Mormon experience and the BYU experience is a really important Mormon experience.

And in fact, it's one of the reasons I'm super glad Margie's here because Margie and I met at BYU, right sweetie?

We sure did.

Yeah. So we're both BYU alums and we had faith challenges while at BYU. So we know a little bit about this issue.

Yeah, absolutely. So Ali's Ali's story is going to be epic for a lot of reasons, but we're definitely going to be covering the issue of losing your faith while at BYU.

Ali, you graduated from BYU just just a couple months ago. Is that right?

Well, I was that was my plan was to graduate a couple months ago. So it would have been you know like spring of 2022.

But I ended up not happening and I ended up actually I graduated a year ago. So I kind of had to guess we'll get into that later.

Okay.

Cut things short and so I sort of am a recent graduate, but not actually.

Okay.

What was the last time you attended BYU?

...