617: Thirteen Years of Silence - Matt Elggren and Clay Christensen's Story of Family, Faith, Doubt, and Hope Pt. 2

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 5.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2016

⏱️ 121 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 of family, faith, doubt, and hope.

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.
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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 Conglue Light, a myth in circling glue.
0:36.0	Leigh Thou me on the night is dark and I am far from home.
0:43.0	Hello and welcome back to part 2 of my interview with Matt Elgren and Clay Christensen.
0:51.0	The overall theme of this podcast as it's sort of unfolding, it's about belief, it's about doubt.
0:57.0	But mostly it's about families, about mixed faith families and how difficult mixed faith families can be, particularly in this case for the non-believers.
1:08.0	We'll have some believers on some time as well as we've had in the past to talk about their perspective.
1:13.0	Because it's not always a picnic for them either.
1:15.0	But in this case, Matt and I were good friends at Microsoft.
1:18.0	We both sort of went through our early faith crises together.
1:22.0	Matt's been, as we listen in the first segment, it's been about 15 years now where Matt's been sort of a big fan of the past.
1:29.0	We both went through our early faith crises together.
1:32.0	Matt's been, as we listen in the first segment, it's been about 15 years now where Matt's been sort of from my perspective, the good soldier.
1:40.0	Supporting his believing wife, Laurie, as she remains faithful, Matt sort of keeping his doubts and questions to himself, raising children in the church.
1:53.0	And just doing all he can to put the family first and in his case to have his doubts and his own concerns be secondary.
2:01.0	And how, as we ended so beautifully last segment, Matt talking about how he's glad.
2:07.0	And he feels like it was a sacrifice worth making to have a happy and a healthy family, not a perfect family, but one that he feels proud to have been a part of.
2:16.0	So that's been part one and it's been beautiful.
	...

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