423: John Hamer on Returning to Mormonism Through the Community of Christ Pt. 2 - Returning to Mormonism, Belief, and Joining the Community of Christ
Mormon Stories Podcast
Dr. John Dehlin
4.5 • 5.7K Ratings
🗓️ 14 June 2013
⏱️ 81 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In today’s episode we interview John Hamer, who left Mormonism (and religion/belief altogether) after graduating from BYU with no intent to return. We explore how John’s relationship with his partner, Mike, helped him to discover his love for Mormon history, the Mormon historians community, and the John Whitmer Historical Association. This path ultimately led John to become baptized in the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) on April 6, 2010 - the 150th anniversary of the Reorganization and the 180th anniversary of the organization of the church. How does an ex-Mormon who had left faith altogether rediscover the value of religion within a Joseph Smith tradition church? This is John Hamer’s story.
You can talk to John directly at his facebook group "Latter-day Seekers" or follow the Saints Herald blog.
Transcript
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| 0:29.2 | So how did you go from, you know, from disability with the LDS Church and identifying |
| 0:39.2 | as an atheist, agnostic, you know, to sort of not wanting anything to do with Mormonism, per se, |
| 0:46.0 | to then rediscovering a love for Mormon history, I can get all that. Now what I want to understand |
| 0:53.2 | is how you go from that to wanting to actually be baptized a member of the community of Christ |
| 1:00.0 | and to be an active participant in it. Because I know a lot of people who follow those steps out |
| 1:05.0 | of the church, but you know, I think it's more rare for people, for ex-mormons, to find their way |
| 1:11.8 | back into a church and even more significantly into a restoration branch church. That's affiliated |
| 1:19.2 | with Joseph Smith in any way. How did that happen? Yeah. Well, I'll say that for one of the things |
| 1:26.6 | that I think that one of the reasons why atheism or agnosticism ends up being such a common |
| 1:35.9 | end state for people who leave the LDS Church are that people have the idea of the idea of God, |
| 1:47.2 | the idea of kind of a God as a literal heavenly father as a being with a body, a finite being, |
| 1:57.7 | with a body who is all powerful, but who performs different miracles, this kind of thing, |
| 2:03.6 | these kinds of, this kind of very physical and direct connected to a luminous being, |
| 2:16.3 | kind of concept of God in Mormonism. And then they, and kind of a very fundamentalistic, |
| 2:23.3 | not fundamentalist Mormonism, but fundamentalist in religious sense in general, |
| 2:27.6 | and literalistic view of scripture ideas that the Bible is more or less a history book |
| 2:35.9 | and that things that are told in the narrative stories, the sacred stories there are in scripture |
| 2:43.0 | are actually historical and not simply symbolic. And so I think that by, when you have that |
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