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Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host John DeLin and I'm very excited to be with you today and to share with you an interview a few hours with a man who is known as Rock Waterman or Alan Rock Waterman.

He is the author and founder of the blog Pure Mormonism. You can find that at puremormonism.blogspot.com.

And Rock, for those of you who are on the blog or not, you probably know who he is, but many won't, probably most won't. And so I'll describe Rock a little bit. He's a bit of an enigma to me.

And what I love about Rock is he speaks his mind. He's very bold. Where he has a very interesting angle. He sort of falls in a group that lately I kind of thought of this term kind of a neo-fundamentalist and Rock will get into that term and what it means.

But what I mean when I say that is, you know, a fundamentalist Mormon in 2014, you know, you kind of think we're in Jeff's. And that's not who I would describe Rock as being.

But there is a class of Latter-day Saint who has a testimony of the restoration of the founding of the restored gospel. I'll say I won't say church because I know that's a term that Rock has strong feelings about.

We'll talk about that. But they sort of believe in the underpinnings of the restoration. But they sort of believe that maybe the modern day church has kind of maybe at best isn't doing quite what it should be. And at worst has either gone astray or apostatized.

I would sort of loosely classify someone like Damon Smith or Denver Snuffer in the same sort of category. But when I do that sometimes I get in trouble.

So part of this podcast is going to be to have Rock share his story to share his perspective. We're going to talk a lot about some of his major blog posts, things about the word of wisdom and tithing and book of Mormon and polygamy and Denver Snuffer.

We're going to talk about Rock's recent interactions with his bishop and I believe stake president where he is potentially being threatened with disciplinary action.

And and then Rock's going to set me straight on on what Neil fundamentalism is or isn't or or what he likes or doesn't like about that classification. Now he would classify his work plus Damon Smith plus Denver Snuffer. So how's that for introduction Rock?

Sounds great to listen. It's just an honor to be speaking with you, John Dylan. You're one of my heroes on the on the internet. So glad to be here. Oh, well, you're too.

All right, but it's fun. I've been wanting to do this for a while. So rock. Let's start just, you know, we don't have to delve too deeply because I want to spend a lot of time talking about the issues.

But why do you just give us a few minute flavor of your upbringing in the church? So we kind of know the context from which you come.

Okay, I was born in the church raised in the Anaheim First Ward and I watched that ward split while I was a teenager, we split about well, we split six times and then the stake split.

The church was really growing and this is what it what time period about this would be the 60s. Okay. Okay. Yeah, well, I think I graduated school in 1970s. So you can see I was a teenager in those days.

And the church was at its height. Yeah, in growth. And we were hearing a lot about by their fruits. You shall know them, which we took to mean, you know, the fruits of our conversion rates on our growth and everything.

I take a different view of what the fruits mean today. Right.

But anyway, you were devout. Yeah, well, actually, I wasn't even I wasn't I wasn't even typical Mormon. I was what I'd call sub typical. I was into it. You know, I like to go to the stake dances and I participate in the road shows and it was a cultural social thing for me, but I really

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