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Mormon Stories Podcast

684: Margi Dehlin's Mormon Transition Pt. 1 - Reflecting on Life as a Mormon

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.65.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 December 2016

⏱️ 86 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As the first interview for the new Mormon Transitions project, I am incredibly pleased to interview my dear wife of 23 years, Margaret (Margi) Weber Dehlin. In this three-part interview, I ask Margi a series of 46 questions focusing on thee parts:

  • Part 1: Margi's life as a believing Mormon. This includes questions about how her family joined the LDS church in Washington D.C. during the 1970s, reflections on her own "conversion" to the church, Margi's favorite parts about being a believing, active Mormon, and the most challenging parts as well.
  • Part 2: Margi's faith crisis and transition away from Mormon orthodoxy, including our time trying to remain LDS as semi-believers, and her experiences and reflections on my excommunication. Topics include the impetus for Margi's faith transition, how she/we "came out" to our children parents, extended family, etc. as unorthodox Mormons, and what the most difficult and rewarding parts of the transition were.
  • Part 3: Margi's life and perspective now, as a post-Mormon, including reflections on her current beliefs and non-beliefs, her approach to nurturing a healthy/happy family without religion, how she approaches raising children without the church, and why she feels as though she and our family are happier and healthier than ever before after leaving the church.

The plan for Mormon Transitions podcast is as follows:

  • We plan to conduct somewhere between 20 and 30 of these interviews, and to share them at http://mormontransitions.org. We also plan to "chop" these interviews up by question, so that people can peruse the interview by topic (e.g., raising children after a faith crisis, how to "come out" to family and friends, secular spirituality, dealing with death).
  • We plan to host a weekly call-in show where people can call with their questions/concerns and receive feedback from a mental health professional and/or expert.
  • We plan to compile all the advice and perspective over 2017 into a book entitled something to the effect of, "Navigating a Mormon Transition."
  • We plan to continue hosting Mormon Transition Events across the U.S. See our Mormon Transitions event calendar for events as they are scheduled.

If you support Mormon Stories, Mormon Transitions, Mormon Matters, A Thoughtful Faith, or any of the Open Stories Foundation projects, please consider a donation today. You can donate via any of the "donate" buttons on any of the pages.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hi everyone, this is John DeLin and I have three very quick things to say before this wonderful

0:04.7

interview with my lovely wife Margie DeLin. Okay, first thing, we had about 650 people in 2016

0:12.0

donate to Mormon stories, which were really grateful for. It's what's kept the podcast going.

0:17.7

But we know that we have somewhere between 20 and 60,000 listeners per episode, so tens of

0:22.8

thousands of you listen to Mormon stories and do not support us. We're grateful that you listen.

0:29.2

We just want you to know that every year we rely on your donations to stay alive, to keep the

0:35.2

podcast going, to pay for internet expenses, equipment, to pay for travel expenses, to Salt Lake,

0:41.1

or wherever we do the interviews, to do video editing, audio editing, all the expenses running

0:47.1

the nonprofit, accounting, finance, administrative efforts, legal. There are so many expenses that go

0:54.0

into running a nonprofit and we do all of this on your donations. So if you've been enjoying

1:00.4

Mormon stories.org and you haven't been supporting us, this is just my once a year or so plea to please

1:06.8

go up to Mormon stories.org and donate. If literally only a hundred of you signed up for a $10

1:13.2

a month donation, it could literally transform what we do as a foundation. Right now we run on a

1:18.9

shoestring. It's been me for many, many years alone. We finally added a new employee Amy Grubs,

1:24.2

who's fantastic, but we have to make payroll. We have to pay her. I draw a salary from the

1:29.5

nonprofit as the executive director and of course we pay our podcasters. So please, please consider

1:36.6

a donation to Mormon stories.org to help keep this alive if you benefit from it. The second thing

1:42.8

we want to announce is something we're really excited about. When you listen to this interview with

1:46.8

Margie, what you may notice is that I'm going to ask her about 46 questions in succession.

1:53.9

And this is not just an interview of Margie, although we hope you enjoy it. What this represents

1:58.8

is the first interview for a project we've been planning for well over a year. It's called the Mormon

2:04.7

Transitions Project. On MormonTransitions.org, we plan to do about four or five things. The first thing we

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