1695: Leaving the Mormon Church in Australia - Tani Berlo
Mormon Stories Podcast
Dr. John Dehlin
4.6 • 5.2K Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2022
⏱️ 202 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Content warning: Suicidal ideation, Drug addiction
Tani Berlo was raised in Australia as a biracial Mormon of Maori descent. Showing an early love for history, Tani asked many questions of her LDS seminary teacher regarding science and history that caused concern. This included questioning the validity of the "Lamanite" identity (from the Book of Mormon) handed to her as a descendent of the Maori people.
Later in Tani's teenage years she was shamed by her LDS church leaders for normative sexual exploration, and was ultimately summoned to a disciplinary council where she was asked sexually explicit questions by multiple men, and was disfellowshipped by the church. This led to significant sexual shame as a temple married Latter-day saint. After having children, Tani experienced significant post-partum depression and an opiate addiction, which when combined with her questioning of Mormon truth claims, led to a full-on faith crisis.
Today Tani hosts a TikTok channel on history with over 1.1 million followers.
This is Tani's Mormon story.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host for today John DeLin |
| 0:05.4 | It is November 8th |
| 0:07.5 | 2022 and today I am super excited to be sharing with you a human who if you're on tiktok you may know about |
| 0:17.3 | Her account is known as tawny burlow. I believe that's how you pronounce it |
| 0:22.7 | She is a tiktokker with almost a million followers |
| 0:26.5 | Who does tiktok videos about human history? |
| 0:30.5 | But it also turns out that |
| 0:32.7 | Tawny burlow was raised in the LDS church and not only was she raised in the LDS church |
| 0:38.2 | she is of Maori descent and |
| 0:41.5 | She lives in Australia and just recently we did an episode about Australia |
| 0:47.1 | But more importantly we are always looking to capture kind of the Mormon the post Mormon experience of people all over the world and |
| 0:54.7 | And tawny reached out to me a couple years ago year two ago and it's taking me while to get back with her |
| 1:00.5 | But as her tiktok channel and YouTube channel had been skyrocketing in prominence |
| 1:05.7 | I've had more and more people reaching out to me |
| 1:07.9 | Saying that I should interview tawny and it was only recently that tawny came out herself on our tiktok channel as |
| 1:13.9 | Having been raised in the Mormon church in addition to being brilliant |
| 1:17.7 | You know tawny's got what I believe is gonna be a really epic Mormon story |
| 1:22.0 | Not only about being raised as a as a woman of color in the LDS church in Australia |
| 1:27.7 | But she will also have much to say about growing up with the churches kind of purity culture with the youth program and |
| 1:35.1 | Of course matters of faith and even of mixed faith so without any further ado |
| 1:41.8 | Tawny burlow welcome to Mormon stories podcast |
| 1:45.3 | Hello, I'm excited so excited to be here. Yeah |
... |
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