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All right, well, we're in part two of our interview with Brad Kramer. He's talked to us a bit about his history. He's talked to us about growing up LDS in Utah, studying various, pursuing various channels academically.

And some of his biggest concerns that he's faced regarding the church. And it was a great hour. And now Brad's going to talk to us about, let's just say a framework that he's developed for people to consider as it relates to intellectual Mormon discourse. Is that sound right, Brad?

Yeah, that sounds about right. And so there are a couple of triggers for me to kind of thinking about church membership or church affiliation in this in this front framework. One of them was, I ended up doing in my in my dissertation. I know we didn't I know we didn't talk about the dissertation, but I ended up in my dissertation doing a lot of oblique descriptions of what.

What temple work is like for Mormons and how the temple figures into Mormon life. I mean, obviously I was respectful in my treatment, not just out of spiritual, but out of anthropological sort of professional obligations. I didn't divulge anything.

But trying to work through what how the experience of the temple sort of shapes the lives of people that engage in it and of Mormons generally. So that's part of it. And then part of it was, there's this great little this great little chapter in Adam Miller's new book, Letters to Young Mormon.

Where I'm going to end up paraphrasing this obviously, but he talks about faithfulness, which has certain overtones in Mormonism, right, in overtone in Mormonism, faithfulness doesn't just describe commitment. It describes a scent, right, it describes agreement.

It describes acceptance of ideological propositions, acceptance of truth claims, right, it requires it implies that you believe or know certain things about Mormonism and that you're faithful because you are orthodox because you believe the right things, you don't believe the wrong things.

In other words, faithfulness is highly, highly ideological in the church and ideological and commitment to the church is framed in terms of ideological commitment that you agree, you accept certain things as true.

And Adam tries to reframe that by saying faithfulness is more like faithfulness to espouse.

It's faithfulness to a family, it's faithfulness to a loved one. In other words, it's a faithfulness that fully acknowledges and recognizes the flaws in the other person and is grounded in a choice and a commitment and even a covenant of faithfulness irrespective of those flaws, right.

And so, and I thought that was an interesting reframing, obviously it's simplistic, but I think it's at least a very useful kind of way of an alternative or a kind of supplement to the more common Mormon mode of thinking about faithfulness.

And Brad, I'm just going to say that immediately there's some questions that are jumping out of my mind about that and I'm just going to I'll tell you and I'll tell my listeners what I'm going to do is reserve my questions and concerns until the end after you laid out your framework because I don't want to want to get us bogged down but I also don't want you or the listeners to think that I'm that I don't have questions about what you're saying.

Absolutely, and this is design, I mean, this is one of the problems when you try to present a framework like this, you run into the problem of it coming across as being sort of totalizing and perfect and really thinking about this framework that I'm introducing is more than anything else designed to sort of provoke conversation dialogue and to enable that dialogue sort of across different, you know, spaces are across different positions.

To be more fruitful, more productive, more more generous, so I absolutely expect that this will generate questions, but so there's there's atoms thing there.

And it reminded me of something that happened a couple of years ago for me, so I wrote a blog post four or five years ago, it's been a while now, in which I sort of posed the question, what would

it take for you to leave? In other words, you're, you know, I figure a good portion of my common consensus readers, by the way, I blog it by common consensus.

I forgot to mention that in the intro, a good portion of my common consensus readers are intellectual Mormons who are, you know, more likely than not, I think to, you know, to still be inside the church.

So I started to sort of thinking about this question abstractly, what would it, what would church leaders have to do to provoke me into leaving?

Since, you know, I'm fairly committed to staying and one of the obvious answers I had in my head was like, oh, well, if they tried to say reverse the 1978 revelation, I would leave.

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