Mormon Stories Podcast takes a ton of work and depends solely upon the listener's support.

To keep this program alive, please consider a donation today at MormonStories.org.

Well, cool Dan, so we've spent a little bit of time just kind of talking about your formative years.

Kind of your early, prodigal years, your decision-gore omission.

The wonderful spiritual experiences you had going on omission and your time after as an MTC instructor, etc.

and your decisions to kind of pursue graduate work in religious studies that I was on a state.

I'm kind of assuming that this is where kind of maybe things start unraveling a bit.

So why don't you talk a little bit about the unraveling?

Alright, that's a fun way to think of it.

I was sure that I was at Arizona State to learn about religion and for whatever naive reasons I thought that it would only enhance the truth of Mormonism.

To learn more about the early church fathers and the formation of the Christian tradition, I thought that would just fortify

that our view is Latter-day Saints of Jesus had 12 apostles and organized a church and let's make sure the priesthood is...

I just thought that it would just give me this fuller background for fitting the Mormon story and the complete opposite.

Yeah, it happens.

There was this moment in my first semester and it was pretty late into it.

I remember recognizing quite early that the things that I was studying, one of the best classes I ever had was methods.

They call it methods and so the different methodological ways that you can approach religion.

So there's a psychological approach to religion, sociology, anthropology, all the different kind of schools of thought that try to explain why religion works as a phenomenon.

So that was a wonderful thing but I never wanted to let any of those so affect me that I think religion really is just the opium of the masses.

I never wanted to really consider accepting those theories wholeheartedly.

And so I remember kind of somewhere getting along the line of, you know, I've got to start letting some of this in.

I've got to start really considering some of this stuff and so I just made that choice of being less resistant to the danger that this spelled for my current worldview.

...