616: Thirteen Years of Silence - Matt Elggren and Clay Christensen's Story of Family, Faith, Doubt, and Hope Pt. 1

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 5.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2016

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2003, Matt Elggren and I met while working at Microsoft. Together, along with others, we discovered troubling things about LDS Church history.

For most of the past thirteen years, Matt has not attended church and has more or less quietly supported his believing wife and children. For fear of losing his family, Matt chose silence....as did his extended family. It was basically thirteen years of "don't ask don't tell" with no hope of resolution for Matt.

This changed in October of 2015 when Matt's brother-in-law, Clay Christensen, began a 6-week slide into total disbelief after 51 years of devout membership, which included 7 years as a high-level LDS Church employee. After losing his faith, Clay didn't choose silence.

This is Matt and Clay's story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories Foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners.
0:07.0	To help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community, please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org
0:15.0	and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under Support.
0:19.0	All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you.
0:29.0	Thanks for your support.
0:32.0	The kindly light of myth in circling glue, lead thou me on the night is dark and I am far from home.
0:54.0	Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host John DeLin.
0:58.0	It is December 23rd, 22nd, 2015 and we're broadcasting or recording from the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City today.
1:13.0	I'm here with two very exciting guests for me. I'm here with a very old friend. He's not very old but our friendship is quite old.
1:23.0	Oh I'm old.
1:24.0	Are you old?
1:27.0	Matt Elgren. Matt and I, hey Matt, welcome to Mormon Stories.
1:32.0	Thanks.
1:33.0	Is this bizarre for you?
1:34.0	Very bizarre.
1:36.0	So Matt and I go way back if you think about when I first started going through my faith crisis while I worked at Microsoft, Matt and my good friend Paul Mayfield, we used to sort of sneak out at lunchtime sometimes while we worked at Microsoft.
1:51.0	We would go to the Wendy's or the Red Robin.
1:54.0	We would have lunch and we would talk about all this mind blowing stuff that we were first learning sort of before podcasts and Mormonism, before CES letter,
2:04.0	before Mormon think, before blogs, before all that stuff.
2:08.0	And you know, Matt and I were good friends while we lived in Washington.
2:14.0	But then in 2004 when I moved to Logan and to start Mormon Stories and all that, you know, our lives just continued kind of in parallel.
2:23.0	We'll talk about my relationship with Matt and his faith journey.
	...

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