The Sean McDowell Show - Life After Polygamy: The Real-Life Testimony of Jared Larson

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Jared Larson was living in a state constant fear from the control of a cult leader. His daily life was consumed with the second coming of Jesus, until he began doubting his beliefs because of a false prophecy. This interview is the first in-depth accounting of the remarkable story of his life, experience in a polygamous Mormon cult, his marriage, his escape, and his current ministry. READ: God Saved Me From a Polygamist Cult, by Jared Larson (https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/ar...) READ: Sharing the Good News with Mormons (https://amzn.to/3pmORPh) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter:   / sean_mcdowell   TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram:   / seanmcdowell   Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

What would it be like to grow up in a polygamist cult? And what would it take for someone to muster the courage to leave? Our guest today, Jared Larson, lived in a polygamist cult in Utah as a teenager, but now is a student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Jared, thanks so much for joining us. It's a thrill to have you here, and super cool haircut, by the way. Thank you. Great minds think alike a thrill to have you here. And super cool haircut, by the way. Thank you. Great minds think alike, right?

There you go. Well, I've been looking forward to this for a while. So let's just jump into, you lived in a polygamous cult as a teenager, but you grew up in what's often called the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Tell us a little bit of what that pre-cult experience was like. Yeah, I was the youngest of 10 kids. Grew up in a small Mormon town in northeastern Arizona, Snowflake, Arizona. And my ancestry on all four sides, both of my families, my mom and dad's sides, branched clear back to the beginning of the church in the days of Joseph Smith.

So we were deeply rooted in the faith. My dad had served as a Mormon bishop for seven years. He had a part of high council leadership there within the community. So it was our life. Everything about that was, you know, our whole life was focused on our Mormon faith. But my parents, particularly my mom, she had always kind of been unsettled about the current position of the Mormon church and how they've changed so much since the days of Joseph Smith. Because they have changed dramatically as the decades pass and as the culture changes, the church has kind of shifted its doctrinal beliefs to go and change with it. And there was a sense of unsettledness growing inside of our hearts. And so they found this group up in Utah that pretty much adhered to all the doctrines that Joseph Smith had, as as a Mormon call restored the true gospel. They lived polygamy. They lived the law of consecration where they would give all their things to the church and then it would be divvied back out. The law of gathering where you would have to go where the church was to build up Zion. And so just a lot of the doctrines, all the

doctrines that the Mormon churches had changed, this cult went back to the way Joseph Smith did it. And so I was about 14 when they decided to leave the Mormon church and move us up to Utah to join this polygamous cult. Okay, now we're going to, in a minute, come to what that experience was like. But of those 10 kids, where did you fit within the mix? The youngest. Oh, wow. You were the youngest of 10, you said. Okay. So would you describe, sorry, keep going. No, go ahead. Go ahead. Those first, I think you said 14 years of your life. Were they happy? Were they stressful? What was that experience like for you? They were happy. I mean, I loved my family. I pretty much worshiped my older brothers. They were all out of the house by the time I was starting to grow up and remember things. They'd

all gone on missions, served two years on mission. And so I really was just in the home with my four older sisters and then one brother above me. And yeah, it's wonderful. I was the youngest, so it was hard in that sense that you would get with any normal dynamic of a family of being the youngest of 10. The brother above me was the golden child. So I was kind of always trying to live up to what he could do. So there was those types of struggles, but no different than what you would typically find in a Mormon family. And it was comparable to any christian family that you would see today there's nothing extreme nothing other than just the mormon belief right the mormon beliefs but it was just a happy normal family we loved each other family was everything as it often is in the

mormon church and then when my parents joined the cult it really broke us all apart my my older brothers stayed they stayed a part of the Mormon church, mainstream Mormon church. My sisters and their husbands joined the cult with my parents, but then a couple of them left almost immediately. One of my sisters became a second wife immediately when they joined the cult.

So all this division then suddenly struck our family when my parents decided to go to Utah. So growing up, happy childhood, were going to go on your mission and just live out as a member of the mainstream church of jesus christ the latter-day saint that was the plan and then when you were 14 years old the apple cart got unsettled or upturned so to speak and everything changed everything changed i Everything changed. I was anticipating going to high school. That's all I'd wanted, and all that was taken from me.

Wow. Okay, so tell me that first moment where your parents broke to you this shift that was coming to move to Manti, I think it is, right? Yeah, yeah, Manti, Utah. They had been going up to Utah. Jim Harmston was the leader of this cult that was beginning to grow and rise into popularity at the time. It's back in 1993, 94.

And my parents had been attending. He put on a two-day seminar, which he called The Models. And he would present all the ways the current Mormon church had changed the doctrines from the days of Joseph Smith. And he'd do this within a two-day seminar which he called the models and he would present all the ways the current mormon church had changed the doctrines from the days of joseph smith and he'd do this within a two-day span people from all over would come and listen and my parents heard about this they started going to it that's really when they became converted to this group and decided to move uproot everything and go and join because that's where zion now being built, where the true gospel was being lived out. And Jesus would return to this place. And so there's all these building

beliefs. And they began to share them with me when I was a kid. And I remember them sitting me on the front porch telling me they're going to leave. And I really wanted to stay because I wanted to play football and basketball. I wanted to go into high school and drive and start dating, you know, all the things you would anticipate as a kid, all the things I'd see my elder siblings do that I was anticipating on doing. But my mom said something to me during that conversation that really struck me and really was what compelled me to sacrifice it all and leave. And she was always kind of the extreme religious type of mindset and she said i i truly believe jared that the it was i'd been growing up in the reagan gorbachev russian-american days right and so all that was in the backdrop and russia was always she believed

they were the greatest syrian that the bible talks about revelation and Antichrist, Gorbachev's Antichrist and all that. But she said, I really believe the Russians will conquer America by your sophomore year and destroy all the wicked in our country. So think about that. If that's going to be fulfilled, then that means if you're found amongst the wicked, you'll be destroyed. And so those seeds of fear had already been planted, but that kind of was pouring the water on it and bloomed the sprout to life.

And that was really what motivated me to follow them to the cult. Wow. Now people watching this who didn't grow up in that era, I'm probably about three or four years older than you, as best I can guess. You grew up in the Reagan era, Gorbachev rocky for like the russians were the bad guys we were afraid they were going to invade you know there's movies that were about this so now it might seem completely outlandish but at that era i could see why especially in that context especially coming from your mom, somebody could be like, okay, I get it. Let's go. So she tells you that puts you over the top and says, all right, we've got to do this. Literally the world is coming to an end. How quickly did you move to Manti? Was it like pack up your stuff and go? What was that process like?

It was a pretty quick, swift process. It was, it was, it took a few months, but, but from the point of that conversation to when we actually moved, I graduated from junior high and we slept a couple of weeks after that. So it was sometime mid May. So it was like somewhere from March to May. So it was just a couple of months, but essentially so. Okay. So this is in Manti, Utahah which i think has about three or four thousand people it's pretty small so were you moving sometimes when people hear polygamous cult they're thinking of like some compound that people lived in or a home and then just met what did you move to we moved into a small the small town of manti and everyone had their

individual homes we didn't have a compound we didn't have a restricted space where only you know where we lived we were amongst the other more the mainstream mormons of the community and it really began to create a sense of uh instability amongst the mormons because now this polygamous cult which the mormon church rejected us because my parents were excommunicated and all that. And so we were kind of rejects of the faith. And now we were moving into their little community, which was mainstream Mormon. They have a big white temple on the hill. And so it did cause a bit of a ruckus when we all came in.

Okay, so the mainstream LDS church would call the name of this was the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days. They would say, you guys are a cult. Would they use this language to describe this church? I think they would. I mean, I don't remember anyone calling us specifically a cult, but we were rejected by them because of polygamy immediately would cause means for excommunication within the Mormon church. Okay.

And we disavowed the authority of their current prophet. And we had our own true prophet that God had ordained to operate in the way Joseph Smith had restored. So you move into this small town in Utah that's mostly mainstream LDS. But when I checked online, tell me if this is correct or not, it said between maybe 300 and 500 members of this cult that you were a part of. Are those numbers correct when you moved in roughly? Not when we moved in. When we moved in, we were one of the first ones there

oh wow but yeah the church really started in may of 1994 there'd been several years leading up to that with jim armston who was the leader doing different things but there's only a small group there before that but when they became official it was like in, we were maybe a couple hundred at that point. The height of our number was maybe 350 to 400. So that was really as big as we got. So it's close to 10% of the town is not insignificant. You can't avoid this issue. It's going to be everywhere. So you move in, is there a public school that was there? Were homeschooled what was that high school experience like for you yeah it was a very uh apocalyptic type of mentality very fear driven jesus was coming and so to be in the world meant wasting your time in the world and all of our energy needed to be exerted and focused on preparing for christ so they didn't they frustrated outside

education at the time they They wouldn't allow it. And so the church had their own little academy, which I attended for about a year until I turned 15 and dropped out of it and just started working. So my last form of any type of public education was eighth grade public school. Oh, my goodness. Wow. Okay. So how did the church practice its faith and its doctrine? What did that look like daily, weekly? What were the rituals and the practices that you did?

Well, that's an interesting question. It's a hard story because it did intensify over the years. Okay. Initially, when we first came you, they had established their own temple, which we call the endowment house. Someone had essentially re refurbished the upstairs of their barn and put up sheet rock, put down carpet and they made it our temple. So that that's where we would go in and get the, get the priesthood keys and all these rituals that we would do that Mormons do in their own temples. And we do it in this barn. And then essentially we had our own priesthood callings

of how we participated. And they called a bishopric, they called 12 apostles. There was the prophet and his presidency. He had two counselors. So I was initially, I think when I was, I received the priesthood at 14, which in the Mormon, the Melchizedek priesthood, because the Mormon church has the Aaronic priesthood, which you get when you're 12 and the Melchizedek priesthood when you typically get around 18, when you go into the temple for the first time. But this cult, because they were adhering back to the days of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, there's records and documents showing that back then young men were actually possibly getting their priesthood of much younger age, particularly Brigham Young. There's records and documents showing that back then young men were actually

possibly getting their priesthood at a much younger age, particularly some of Brigham Young's sons. So we use that as justification to then have some of the worthy younger men get their priesthood blessings. And so at 14 or so, I got the Melchizedek Priesthood and went through my temple endowment and was immediately called as one of the elders quorum in the elders quorum presidency. I was like the second counselor of the elders quorum. So, so like how many days a week were you meeting? How much time was involved with the people in this cult? Yeah. Initially it was every day. I mean, we were moving new people. Yeah. We were moving new people in. We would have weekday meetings, you know, a couple of weekday meetings and then Sunday, obviously. And sometimes

our Sunday meetings would go on for hours and hours. We didn't put a limit on it. And so it would just be open to how the spirit led, the Holy Ghost led. And that would sometimes go on for five, six hours. So the majority of our life was definitely dedicated to it because we had the mentality that we were preparing for Christ's coming. We believed that we were his called and elected, his chosen people, that he would come to us first. And then he would ordain us with a power, a certain priesthood power to then go out and implement his judgment on the world, destroying the wicked, cleansing it for his kingdom to come, for the kingdom of heaven to come, and for his will to be done here on earth

as it is in heaven. All that was going to be done through us as his instruments. And so our whole life was dedicated to preparing so that we could be worthy for Christ to come to us, because he wouldn't come unless we showed and manifested a sense of worthiness and obedience to what the instructions the prophet was giving us. Okay, so if the prophecy was that Russia is going to come and destroy, and I guess this is around 1996 would have been your sophomore year, was the preparation we've got to pray and be spiritually ready, or we've got to be ready like in Red Dawn with weapons to defend against the invasion that's coming from Russia. What exactly did that kind of preparation entail? Yeah. Well, kind of one clarification.

That was my mom's opinion and belief. That wasn't necessarily the cult's opinion. But the cult did believe that an opposing army, which we called the Assyrian, would come and do essentially what my mom was thinking the Russians would do. Got it. So in preparing for that, it was mostly ourselves spiritually. There was a sense of street smarts that we knew that if we tried to stockpile all these guns and take out the U.S. government, if they tried to come after us, that we would lose. That would be evident. So it was more so of this spiritual preparation and being worthy so Christ could come. Because then Christ would give us supernatural powers to take out the U.S. government and do whatever we needed to do. So that was the mentality, spiritually, being absolutely obedient to the prophet and his commands. Because we believed him to be like God's right-hand man on earth. What he said, God said, to go against him would be to go against god so it's

really all about obedience uh to the commands he gave in the minds of people what gave him authority were there stories about him like he did a miracle or he fulfilled prophecy or was he just the classic charismatic compelling person that just sold this story to people? Yes. Mostly the classic charismatic person. He never did any miracles. He gave prophecies that he said would say was fulfilled, but never was. But he was very charismatic. He says he received his priesthood when four angels visited him. It was Noah, Enoch, Abraham, and Moses, the four patriarchs. That's how we understood them to be. And they gave him the authority, much like John the Baptist and Peter, James, and John came and gave the authority to Joseph Smith. He had his own version of this divine authority directly given to him by them stepping through the veil is what they would call it, we would call it, and laid their hands upon his head and blessed him with this authority to essentially re-restore the gospel that Joseph Smith had begun.

So I saw that he passed away, I think it was 2013, in such a small community. Did you know him personally or was he kind of inaccessible and apart from everybody oh i knew him very personally my mom was married my mom after we moved my dad took a second wife and soon after that my mom actually left my father and became his eighth wife and then after that few years after that my sister left her husband and became like his 16th wife so my mom and my sister were both married to him okay so help me understand from the outside looking in i mean it sounds crazy why would anybody want to be an eighth wife i mean i hear my wife sometimes she's like we took a trip trip to Kenya and had a chance to do some basketball ministry with Muslims, and we had a conversation.

I was sitting there with my wife, and the guy goes, hey, so how many wives do you have? And he was serious. He's like, I can't remember what he said. I have three or four or five, something like that. My wife was like, I would never remotely want to be in that context at all. Like, why would a woman be drawn to this? What's the draw from the perspective of your mom and your sister and so many of these women choosing to do that?

Yeah, yeah. Because he had a total of about 18 wives, I think, at the most. It was his spiritual status, his leadership, his ability to be able to be this voice from god um to having that sense of strength and assurance and spiritual character that we within the context that we were operating in right and so that was the biggest draw and him being essentially God's right-hand man. We believed in this doctrine that the early leaders of the Mormon church taught called multiple mortal probations. It's a controversial topic within Mormonism,

but essentially it's like reincarnation. But you can only come back as a man or come back as a woman. If you were a man or a woman in your last life, you can't come back as like a blade of grass or anything like that. You have to come back as a man or come back as a woman. If you were a man or a woman in your last life, you can't come back as like a blade of grass or anything like that. You have to come back as that same sex. So we believed him to be Joseph Smith in his past life. We believed him to be all these different characters, prophets in the Bible, Isaiah.

This was all revealed to us through revelation, not to me personally, but to him and his wives. And so he had this this sense of just divine authority directly from god which was such a huge draw especially to women seeking strong spiritual leadership strong um a strong husband who was right with god and so that was just a huge draw with with the type of women that this cult attracted. And that's really the best. I don't know.

I might be able to give you a better answer, but that's as good of an answer. That's totally fair. So when you move into this community, was there kind of a honeymoon phase where it felt like we're a part of something bigger, we're doing something special. We're one of the select few on the planet who had this revelation. God's going to use us. Like, was there kind of that honeymoon period? And if so,

how long did it last before things started to fall apart? Yeah, definitely honeymoon period. And that for me, anyways, it was different for everybody that went, but for me, it lasted about six years. I was full in, full invested, preparing from 14 to 20. And then about a prophecy was given by Jim, the prophet, that Christ would return on a certain day, March 25th, 2000. And by that time, he was the established voice of God, right? To go against him would be to go against God. And by that time, he was the established voice of God, right? To go against him would be to go against God. But then it ended up that obviously Christ didn't come.

And so that night, we were just like, it was like, if you would have had a camera and zoomed in on the scene of our life, you would have seen people in the church just waiting and anticipating. He had prophesied that there would be plagues that would sweep through the town and the valley, that it would cleanse out the wicked, that we would be the ones left and God would restore us and bring us the glory and power that he had promised us so that we could then go out throughout the world. And the first place we would go and bring down was the corrupt mainstream Mormon church and their leadership because they were the great abominable church. So that night of March 24th, 2000, we were like anticipating it, waiting in our beds, waiting for the clock to strike midnight so that this would all happen.

When it didn't happen, obviously that's when seeds of doubt sprung up in my mind. And I knew something wasn't right, but because it was such a fear driven cult and I had such that deep seated fear I talked about earlier to allow myself to question that he wasn't God's prophet was the scariest thing. Because if I was wrong, then that meant I could not be forgiven my sins. I would be condemned forever. There was no, there was no option for forgiveness with our mentality and where we were at spiritually like we believed that everything was

so reliant on us for christ's coming that for us to rebel against him meant that we were actually preventing him from coming because we had to merit a certain status of righteousness for him to come so that causes you to think oh my gosh gosh, if I'm wrong, then I might be the cause for why Christ didn't come. And this is like ingrained in your psyche. And as a teenager, that was just told to me over and over again. So I began to doubt then, but I wouldn't allow myself to really entertain the doubt, though it stuck and clung. And it just began this whole 10 years of just being caught and trapped in this darkness and this fear and this inability to hurdle all this fear and doubt I had inside of

me. Okay, so hold that thought for a second. I want to enter into that 10-year decade. But when you talk about roughly 14 to 20, you said it was kind of a honeymoon phase, but you also said early in your life, family was everything. And some of your family rejected this belief and stayed in the mainstream Mormon church. Was the mentality just, they don't get it, too bad for them. Hopefully they will come over. How is this a honeymoon phase at the same time some of your family was torn apart yeah it was yeah it was exactly that it was it was essentially if they didn't join then they would be condemned to die when the destructions came um and that was a hard pill for my parents to swallow like they wow in their hearts i don't think they truly believe that, even having behind the scenes discussions with

them. But it was the mentality you had to have to be faithful to the prophet and what the work we were doing and the momentum that we felt like we were creating for Christ to return. And so they wouldn't allow themselves to really have that connection, that inherent internal connection that they had been abiding in their whole life, that had to be cut off because the work of God was more important. And so if they weren't on board, then they would be destroyed when the destructions came. So for me to go to that place for them and say, oh, should I seek advice from my older siblings who never came? Should I seek kind of solace or some type of

sanctuary with them? That really wasn't an option for me because I wasn't prepared to lose my whole salvation by doing so, because that would be the case because I would be showing signs of rebellion and doubt if I were to reach out to outside external people for help. So was it like they were just cut off from the family and didn't even see them or you had Thanksgiving meal and it was like we just kind of pretended everything was normal and ignored it for that those few moments? Yeah, it was hard with with yeah within the church. It was a honeymoon phase. But within the fan our family unit was very much a morning phase things totally changed. We I didn't see some of my siblings for years after that because we were supposed to cut off connections they were mad at my parents for leaving the church you know and so it there was rejection going at both sides it seemed like though that we wanted to be together that pool was always there the the religious mindset was

in the way and so it just like yeah it never it was never the same and it still isn't the same today, really. So is it considered a divorce for your mom to leave your dad and marry the prophet? Or is it okay because he had a higher status? Was your dad fine with that? How did that dynamic play out? It was not considered divorce because the prophet had a higher status. And in that church and in our doctrines and mentality, you could only leave your husband technically if you left him for a higher status and through revelation. My dad struggled with it, obviously, because they'd been married for 35 years plus, I think. So they were, you know, teenage sweethearts and everything. So yeah, he struggled with it. But he did have his second wife. And he kind of went off and lived

with her. And she had a little son, and they became kind of this new family unit. And so that might've helped him in the process, but I know it was still hard. I remember seeing them struggle through it. Yeah. Oh yeah. But for her, my mom had always, yeah, but my mom had always kind of sought strong spiritual leadership in her marriage. And she was always kind of the, the, the proactive religious spiritual person of the family. And so for her, though it hurt, of course, she was also, there was also a lot of excitement and wonder for the new, you know, and so. Okay. That, that makes sense. Now you got,

you got married during this, what we called honeymoon season. I think you were maybe 18 years old. Tell us a little about how that worked out, how you found your wife, just that process. Give us a glimpse of that, if you will. Yeah. Well, after my parents separated, I didn't want to live with my dad because I didn't really like his wife, his second wife as much at the time. I couldn't live with my mom because she went and lived with her sister wives and there was no room for me. So I kind of just began living with a couple of the siblings that were there. I was 16 and I had a job. I started working and I rented,

started renting a house when I was 17. And what sparked me to start renting was because this girl, her and her best friend, I was actually 16 at the time and they were 14. Her and her best friend came to me and said they received revelation that they were to come into my family and be my two wives. The dynamic there was kind of like if you didn't get yourself a young man, then an older guy that was, you know, 40, 50, 60, 70 would pick you up as a third, fourth, fifth, sixth wife. And so the young girls there, the church actually allowed them the freedom to choose a husband initially. But if they took too long, then they would assign them to a man. So, so they didn't want to risk it. So they both asked to come into my family. My wife, who is now currently my wife, Lisa, she was the older of the two. And so I built the relationship with her first.

And we were going to get married in like four days. When she turned 16, the state allowed us to get married at 16 by parents' permission. And so I started renting to prepare for the marriage. And we got married when I was 18. And she was four days after her 16th birthday. Okay, wow. Now your camera's shaking a little bit if there's a little way to pull back. That's okay. I get excited and talk with my hands too. So you get married, you said you were 18 years old. Or no, sorry, 16 years old because you can allow, or she was 16, you were 18. Is that right? Did I mess up the math? Yeah, no, no. I was 16. She was 14 when

she first came to me. We dated for two years until she was old enough to legally marry. Okay. So you, you just married her though, even though you're in this polygamous cult, is that right? Right. The plan was for me to marry with the other girl as well, but it didn't work out. Later. Okay. All right. Got it. So let's fast forward towards this moment when you're 20 years old, you start to have this doubt brought on by this failed prophecy. How many others left the church at this time? Or how many others did this doubt start to build in because jesus didn't return and there weren't the plagues that were described i think you said march 20

something in 2000 maybe it was 2000 yeah okay march 25 2000. yeah okay um the the there was a few more people stayed than left um the ones that did leave were in spiritually, were in leadership. Some of the 12 apostles that was in the cult. So it was maybe, maybe about three or four of them. I think right off the bat, there was a couple that left immediately. And then maybe a half a year passed and a couple more left. I think it was three. I don't, I don't remember, but anyways, they were the kind of the core that left.

There was a few other stragglers but again more stayed and someone actually got another revelation saying that the reason christ didn't come yes we needed to do some more things to be more righteous but also that in order to fulfill the revelation god would then change time turn back time so that we would go back to that day and if he would come on that day fulfilling the revelation so as a whole like sci-fi dynamic going on because god could do anything right if god wants to turn back time and fulfill that revelation on that day so that got people's mentality thinking oh yeah of course god can anything. And now we need to work for the next time around when next year on maybe the same day,

Christ will come and, or something, we just need to do something more righteous so that we will merit his return and then he'll take us back in time. So it just kept getting more strict and more strict and more strict every time we'd have a failed prophecy of his coming. But sorry, I jumped ahead on that.

No, that's great. But you had some of these apostles left. I began doubting, but I stayed. So on the surface, I pretended I was totally into it. They actually called me in to be one of the 12 apostles to replace the one that left wow at that time so and that was at the same time i began doubting so i was feeling like this hypocrite where on the surface i was totally in belief totally on board but inside there was a turmoil

and a war happening so so during that 10 years of this psychological kind of struggle you're working through, you're now an apostle. Did you take on an additional wife during that season? There were a couple opportunities too. And we actually really entertained it, thought about it, because you really were seen less if you didn't. It was kind of a mark of your righteousness if you had a multiple wife, right? And so you were always kind of looking for it. And I had a girl come and ask if they could come into my wife and I's family. And we said yes, initially. But then just like, there was always something that kind of happened, as the other situations there are several of these but this is one i'm just giving an example of that it would get right up to like the last few months and something would happen and be like no i don't think this is going to work out and we'd pull the plug on it and then she'd either go become another man's wife or one of them when became the prophet's wife but looking looking back, I see what a

huge blessing it was that I never entered into a polygamous situation, even though I had several opportunities, because if I would have, I would have established a whole other family, a whole other type of life and existence that really would have rooted me to Utah, rooted me to that faith, because where else are you going to really live polygamy in the States other than Utah and be in that community? So, you know, I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back, obviously you can see how powerful of a blessing that was, that the Lord didn't allow us to walk over that line of polygamy. Now, we won't go there, but I can imagine the questions.

Had you come out of this movement and then become a Christian. Now you have multiple wives and kids of these wives. What do you do as a Christian? I won't press you on that, but those are really tough situations to navigate. Okay. So I can imagine somebody going, Jared, this is a false prophecy. Why did you stay for a decade? Get out. How hard is it? Now, obviously, that doesn't understand the dynamics of what you went through. But help people from the outside looking in thinking, why did you stay for 10 years? Why they had such a stronghold over you in that community and your family?

Yeah, I mean, for me, it was more of a psychological thing than anything. It was fear that really anchored me, that chained me there. I wouldn't say anchored, chained me there. So that was the dynamic that was underlining everything as I tried to process why not leave. Because I asked myself that a hundred times. You know, if it's a false prophecy, then why not? But yet at the same time, because that fear played such a powerful dynamic on how I process things, I would always go to the place of, yeah, but what if this is true? What if God will turn back time?

Or what if I do need to be a little bit more righteous so Christ will come? So it's that what if mentality that's constantly cycling through my brain and trying to get me to be more obedient to the prophet. In fact, at one point, the doubt became so heavy. This was about two years in. I finally confessed it to my wife because it was just becoming such a heavy burden. But to do so, to say it out loud, was such a huge step it might meant God might strike me down with lightning. I remember literally thinking that God might kill me if I profess this and speak it out because that's just the mentality that was fed into me my whole

life. Other people might've processed it differently, but I processed it this way. And so this was my experience in it. And so I find she understood, she agreed with me and she saw how heavy it was on my heart. And I ended up going and telling the prophet about it. And when I sat down and said, I'm doubting, I don't want to doubt, you know, I want to be faithful, but this doubt is in me and I'm not sure what to do. He ends up, his response his response is well are you bipolar

like he didn't even ask a sense of consideration or where my heart was at or why i would think that he essentially told me i was bipolar because i was in this struggle and he essentially told me if you're if you're just obedient to everything i say, this doubt will go away. You know, this weight upon your soul will be lifted through your obedience. So it just made me double down even more and try to become more obedient to everything he said. And sure enough, as more years passed, it still did not leave. It was still just constantly there clinging to my soul as I was trying to work through this and be faithful to the prophet and do all the things I was supposed to do. What he told me would happen wasn't happening. But again, because the fear was there, it just kept me there in this battle.

So this was not like financial fear, I don't know where I'm going to go get a job. This was purely a spiritual fear for your soul that kept you there entirely. Exactly. Yeah. So you shared this with your wife two years in, that means there was eight years during the season where you're married before you leave. What was that dynamic like with your wife? this an ongoing conversation was it just you never mentioned it again what was that season or relationship like it was an ongoing conversation um and it was a hard ongoing conversation because as my doubt continued to increase my anger also increased with it because i saw how much was stolen from me,

how much I wanted to go to high school. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to learn and do all these things because essentially I was just self-educating myself, reading whatever I could get my hands on, but I wanted the college experience. And for her, because of the dynamic of our relationship and the unhealthiness of it, starting out, you know, first as a plural marriage thing. And you get this dynamic often in polygamy. I'm kind of going down the rabbit hole, but I think it's pertinent to what I'm trying to say. You often get in polygamy a man who favors a certain wife. It's typically the second, third, fourth wife.

And she knew that with me and her and this other girl. Initially, I had favored the other girl, but she was that with me and her and this other girl, initially I had favored the other girl, but she was the older of the two. And so as it played out, she would be the one I would marry first. Um, looking back, you know, I see how horrific and horrible of a situation it was. And I had no male model to kind of show me the way my, I was no longer living with my dad, no other man in the, in the group came I was no longer living with my dad. No other man in the in the group came and was a mentor of mine of mine or anything. So I was kind of just

navigating this all on my own. And so there was that built up from it, too. We didn't start out healthy, healthy. She saw I was wanting my life back, and that didn't include her. And so she was agreeing with me. But at the same time, she didn't want to go because she knew that it would probably end up in divorce and break us apart and our family apart. We had two kids by then. Also, another dynamic that played into it is that she was born into another cult. Her mom had had an affair, her mom had her own family and then she had an affair with a cult leader up in Salt Lake City that's where her mom was living with cult leader there Arvin Shreve you might be able to hear here I don't know if you've heard of him but she had an

affair with this guy and my wife was the product of that affair and so she was raised in that cult it was heavily sexually molested their children. And word got out to FBI authorities. They sent in an informant, gathered the evidence, and the FBI raided this group. And my wife was put into the foster care system because her mom was put into jail. And so her whole life had been just turmoil and uprooted and all this stuff. And for the first time now, moving forward, you know, 10 years, we being married in this new cult that her mom had joined was the same cult my parents had joined. And that's where we met.

And so we had finally established a life that was at least stable. And we had a family. And that's what all she had ever wanted was stability and family because her upbringing had been so horrendous. And so she, though she agreed with me and she knew it was wrong, this was life. And this is where it was consistency. And this is where we had our family. And she didn't want to lose that if I left.

And so we went through this battle, these 10 years of me, of this conversation happening, me trying to convince her to go, but her not coming because of those reasons. And we would always end up fighting and just feeling totally defeated. And it was just a dark, dark season. So that's another dynamic I don't often talk about is that as dark as it was in our doubt and our fear, it was also incredibly dark for our marriage because this was the dynamic that was going on back and forth, feeling the pain, feeling the suffering. We were feeling ripped apart, but yet we had so much fear and doubt. We didn't know where to go or what to do with it, so we were just trying to survive where we were at, and it just put us in a really bad place. So I want to come back to when the two of you get in the same page and leave. And this may be outside of your purview,

but do you have any sense of how many cults like the one you grew up in were or are still in Utah or the surrounding areas today? Last time I heard, I think there's hundreds. I mean, because they've been developing since the days of really Wilford Woodruff and the manifesto in 1890 when the Mormon church decided to no longer live polygamy. You've had upright, different break offs ever since then for the last, you know, 100 years. And so they're all over the place in Utah. Some are more distinct than others. Some are way bigger than others, like the FLDS, Warren Jeffs and that group.

But you do have, I think, hundreds of these smaller cult groups. Ours, in that time, in the 90s and early 2000s, we were one of the more popular and probably a little bigger of them. But yeah, so it's a common thing in Utah. It's not like it hardly ever happens. So last question before we shift back to you leaving is it sounds like this cult was not you weren't going out and evangelizing and trying to reach those in the LDS church and non-Christians. It was escapist, get away from the world and prepare.

God is going to come in and save us and usher in this judgment. We did initially. We did try to evangelize initially. We did try to warn Mormons. They sent missionaries to England at one point. Wow. Yeah, we did some of that yeah and we wrote our own pamphlets we handed them out to people it's all warning last days doom and gloom

type scenarios uh mostly condemning the mormon church and saying that we were the true church honor come and join us and then it came to a point where we've done that to exhaust to exhaustion that we said okay we're cutting it off. Jesus is going to come. Now it's time just to prepare. And so there was a shift. And from that point moving forward, who God had already gathered were the ones he had chosen to bring about his work in the last days. Okay, so during this 10 years of just psychological distress, anxiety, your marriage was dark, the way you described it.

Was there a season where you thought, you know what, I'm just going to completely chuck religion and become an agnostic or an atheist? Did you entertain that for any season at all? I did, absolutely. We would sometimes go to Provo, which is about an hour from where we were. And I was perusing the books in Barnes &

Noble one day, and I saw the book in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I opened it up, started reading it, and I had never even conceived the idea that maybe God didn't exist. Maybe this was all just a show, right? I don't know why you would think I would have thought that at that point, but I didn't, because he was just so inherently a part of who I was. And I read Dawkins and I was just like, for the first time I'd felt hope. It was a false hope, obviously, it was a fleeting hope. But I felt this hope like, oh my gosh, if God isn't real, then all this fear I have is irrational. And so I began to try to

rationalize God away. And I read Dawkins, but Dawkins didn't appeal to me after a while because his characteristics was a lot like the prophets, but on the other side of the spectrum of Jim Harvston. He was just very black and white. The way he delivered his stuff, it was this and this. It reminded me of the guy I was having to struggle with. But then I also honed in on Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, these new atheist voices that you can get a lot of on YouTube and writings and stuff. And so that I really, for a couple of years, began soaking in all their stuff and wanted so badly. I tried so hard to be an atheist because it would explain all my fear away. And I had,

I remember having two major hurdles in that time. The first was the, the way that they dealt with love, the idea of love. I mean, not believing in God in and of itself was, was a step of faith just because it's all built on theory, right? So you had to believe in that, that that theory was correct in order to believe that God didn't exist as much as you had to believe that God did exist. It took just as much faith to not believe in God as it did to believe in God. And so with evolution and the process of evolution being touted so heavily, even though I read the theoretical arguments on the existence of love, I struggled with it because the dynamic of love and what it was was so diametrically opposite to what evolution

presented as survival of the fittest. And I couldn't get those two characteristics to kind of just work and be okay with that because they were just so opposite. It didn't seem to go along with it. So I struggled with that, with the idea and concept of love. And then I couldn't shake this, this, this seed deep inside of me that I was loved. So I had that love piece that was just kind of threaded throughout the whole thing. And that I was loved by a creator. And I tried to explain it away. I tried to rationalize away, but I couldn't shake it. I couldn't get myself to believe that I was actually loved by God, which my response to that may be that much more furious at God, because why would he allow me to

go through so much pain and agony and frustration and doubt and fear when all I wanted was him. And yet I felt totally abandoned by him. And so that was something that I just began wrestling with because, okay, I can't rationalize God away. And I feel loved by him. I don't know why, because I'm going through all this. Why isn't he helping me through this? And my anger rose. But in that process, I also found this guy named cs lewis i'd become a big tolkien fan i love lord of the rings i found out that they were friends which fascinated me so i started reading about their lives and the inklings and all that and then i found all i'd known lewis for was lying in which in the wardrobe in the narnia series but then i saw that he had actually

written some apologetic stuff about Christ. And I started reading, I think first I found Screwtape Letters. And then obviously I found Mere Christianity. But what work he did that really just struck me was A Grief Observed that he wrote as a response to his wife Joy dying. And he starts out somewhere in there in the beginning where he says no one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear and when he said that i just like connected with him because i was so full of fear he was so full of grief and then his expression throughout that whole narrative was like he was just plucking my thoughts from out of my mind and put him on the page of the struggle that I've been going through.

And he talks about love in that and your ultimate love being found in Christ and God. And that was connecting back to me feeling loved inside. And so there's this dynamic happening where I was trying to push God away, but God was really having none of it. So I want to come back to this C.S. Lewis dynamic and other books that shaped you. But when you said the two things that kept you from atheism, one, this idea of love, and that makes sense to me. I mean, for love, there has to be free will that you choose to care for somebody. I don't think atheism or evolution can give an account of free will. There has to be an objective moral code for there to be acts that are really loving versus those that are not. That theoretical argument, I think, can be powerful.

But where did this sense that you are loved by God come from? Certainly it wasn't preached in this cult, given all the fear and doom and spiritual abuse. Did that come from your earlier days within the broader Mormon church? Or is this something you think God just placed on your heart? I think both. I think a little both, because obviously my idea of Jesus and Christ, though Mormons believe in to be different, you know, a different person than what Christians do, eternally anyways, that those seeds were planted when I was a kid. I remember my mom telling me the first thing, first time I remember hearing about Jesus, I looked at a picture

and she told me, I asked, who is this? And she said, that's Jesus Christ. He's the only perfect man that ever lived. And he loves you. You know, something like that. And that has always stuck with me through the years. That person of Jesus that loved me, that was perfect. And so I did have that. But even more so than that, I think it was just that spiritual assurance that I didn't know what it was or how to explain it, but I just could not push away or rationalize away this deep-seated love in me, and I didn't know what to do with it. Okay, so it's interesting that you read A Grief Observed because I actually teach a class in our graduate apologetics program on why does God allow evil? And we talk about the intellectual challenge. And of course,

I don't assign it, but we could assign the problem of pain by C.S. Lewis, which he wrote when he was younger. Grief observed, he wrote when he's older. And it's really just a lament of his experience, more so than an apologetic. So that book that connected your grief with fear unlocked certain ideas for you. What other books or ideas started to unlock? So to remind our audience, you had doubts. Okay, let me take a step back. You had doubts around 2000 with a failed prophecy. When was it that you read this Got a Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis and things start to shift positively? Yeah. I can't remember exactly when it was, but where the shift happened was in about 2010. I was going through this. I had just kind of come out of this atheist phase knowing that God loved me, but I didn't know what to do with that. And I remember reading C.S. Lewis before this,

a certain experience I'm about to tell, but I don't remember which C.S. Lewis works I was reading at that point. It wasn't a lie. It was like maybe one or two, but my wife and I got in one of these other, these conversations again, where I was trying to convince her to leave with me, but she was saying no because she know it would mean that it would break up our family.

My reasoning for doing that and constantly kind of getting in these relationships or these conversations was I felt like if I had someone supporting me, it would help me hurdle this fear. And so it was really more so self-centric, by all means self-centric, and me just getting what I had been striving for for so long rather than keeping the family unit together. So it was really a selfish endeavor, though it might've seemed externally not to be. But I was trying to convince her. And she said, why in that conversation,

she ended up saying something like, why should I follow you when I see you have absolutely no relationship with God? And when, wow, yeah, when she said that, it just struck me and I knew what she said was true. I had been reading scripture a lot, but my approach to scripture was always to try to convince myself that the cult was wrong and to prove the cult wrong. So I wasn't reading scripture to know God better or to know the mysteries of God or who he is or his love. I was trying to read it so that I could further convince myself that they were wrong.

I was right. And that would justify me leaving. So though that might seem like a noble pursuit of scripture, it was not a godly pursuit of scripture because it was very self. I approached it in a self-centric way rather than a Christ-centric way. And so she said that knowing it was evident I didn't have a relationship with God. And it just brought me to my knees that night. And I abandoned all types of prayer that the church, the cult had taught us to pray in the temple. There's these secret ways to pray.

They call it the true order of prayer. And for the first time in the last, like, since I'd gotten mine down when at 14, so 15 years or whatever, 20 years, for the first time I prayed just normally. I usually would kneel at an altar. I'd have these robes on. I'd offer up all these secret signs and penalties they teach you. But now I just abandoned all that, got on my knees and said, God, I am done here. I can't take another step. I can't walk.

Keep doing this and trying to be somebody that I'm not. I don't know what to do. I'm done. If you want me somewhere, carry me there. I'm yours. So I just uttered that. I just kind of came into this complete surrender of I believe you exist. I believe you exist i believe your crime or your god and the one truth that had really bridged my whole experience from this

point to where i had was at this point at this time was that doctrine of christ's perfection right that was the one thing i was could rely upon because there were so many things that the cult had taught was teaching me that i wasn't seen in scripture like i was reading scripture like i'd mentioned and seeing it differently than how the cult was teaching me i was seeing it the way cs lewis was talking about it like i said he it was like he plucked my thoughts out of my mind and put him on the page that's how i was reading scripture but i oh sorry for the camera shake that's all right That's how I was reading scripture, but I can never get it to fit with how I'd always been taught it. And so I threw scripture out because I was just done with it.

It just frustrated me. And so I just came to the surrender. I don't know what to do. I'm yours. But I trusted in that perfection of Christ. And when I made that confession, this understanding just swept over me that everything I built my understanding of on who God was had been built on the foundation of family

and the prophet of this cult and my traditions. And that was like building on the sinking sand that was constantly being swept out from under me. And I needed to no longer build on that. That all needed to go away and build on the rock of Christ alone. And when I did that, when I, that realization came over to me, or came over me, I just knew at that point, it's all about Christ. It's not about me. Wow. It's everything that he does, not what I can do. And everything changed for us after that point. So the understanding of who Christ is in the mainstream Mormon church is very different than who Christ is in the historic Orthodox church.

So why not cling to this understanding since this is your family, this is everything you knew? Why cling to what I would argue is a more biblical understanding of who Jesus is? Right. Well, I would jump ahead a little bit with that, but I came into this confession and this surrender more so by the attributes that I understood rather than the person that I understood. Okay. So I was clinging more to that love and more to that perfection and more to that grace than thinking that this was actually God who had come and dwelled fully in Christ. You know, as Paul tells us in Colossians.

I didn't have that understanding at that point. It was all based on these attributes of knowing I was loved and believing he was perfect. And I couldn't rationalize it yet or articulate it at that point, but that I was not going to get to him through my efforts. It was done by what he had already done. And I believed in the salvation work of Jesus as a Mormon. I might not have understood who he was as a Mormon, but I believed in those salvation works. And so as limited as it was, those truths were still there. That kind of just was a thread that I clung to as I worked my way through this deeper theology. But at that point,

I had no idea where I was going with it. I was just totally, God, I'm yours. I know you love me. Take me. And then that's what happened. Things changed. Okay, so I need to know what changed then in your relationship with your wife. Was there a point where you went to her and said, we can't keep living a lie.

I will stay with you. Let's go together. Was there that kind of moment how did the two of you get out together yeah so obviously i was sharing with her when i was reading c.s lewis's works with her and that she we're beginning to like have a bolstered understanding of god and grace we had no really idea about the concept of grace um they teach they talk about grace in mormonism but you don't understand really what that is, right? And what that means, because after all you can do then by grace are you

saved like Nephi talks about in second Nephi. And so we didn't realize that that grace is there with you the whole time from the day you're born, that there's a redemptive plan, you know, ready to bring you back when you believe in Jesus and follow him. So reading Lewis brought that out for us, and it would begin to rekindle both, for both of us, a relationship with God, and in that, also a relationship with one another. She also found a book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas' book that he wrote back in the early 2000s, the popular one. And we read that together. She showed it to me. We read it together.

And we saw how this man, well, one thing that really struck us was that Metaxas puts snippets of Hitler's speeches in there. And the things that Hitler was saying was literally verbatim to what our prophet was saying in some of his Sunday sermons about us being a chosen race and God ordaining us to do specific things. And we're like, wait, what? Hitler said these same type of things? So that really struck us and woke us up. offer was just seeing his life. If this man could stand up against Nazi Germany for truth and for Christ, then we could do the same with this little cult in Manti, Utah. And then I found, I don't

remember how it was just like by accident, I found Martin Luther's commentary on Galatians on my Kindle, a free book on Amazon. I was just looking for anything to learn more about Christ. And that was there because, you know, copyright's gone. It's over a hundred years. Started reading that. And I was just like, so blown away. He was answering specifically all the doctrinal questions I had about the righteousness of Christ.

And that there's, you know, by works we are never saved. It's only, we were found righteous through him. And Luther gets into the nitty gritty of all that and unfolds it for you. And my wife and I were sitting on the edge of our bed just reading that. And it was really in reading Luther and understand him answering all those specific questions we had about salvation and righteousness found in Christ that said, OK, we can't stay here any longer. Luther kicked us off the cliff. We were like, we were ready to jump, but we were still too scared to jump. And when we read Luther, we knew God was calling us out of this cult and that we had to go. And so he really used a couple

years. This was in 2012. So from 2010, when I surrendered my life over to Christ and my wife and I both began going through this process, went clear to 2012 until when we finally left. And I was 32. She was 30. Wow. 32. So I just love the image of a commentary on Galatians from 100 years ago, having somebody on the edge of their seat in anticipation. That's how theology comes alive.

I'm going to remember that one. Okay, so you guys decide how old are your kids in 2012, roughly? 12, 10, 8, something like that. Oh, wow. So your oldest was somewhat close to the age you were when you left and went to the Mormon. That's a really interesting dynamic. What was that like with your kids and with your wife and even announcing to the church or the prophets?

Or was it like grab your stuff and go get out of Dodge? What was that like? Yeah, it was kind of both. I mean, we did grab our stuff and go and get out of dodge but this was our life i mean these were the people we'd known for the last 24 20 years our whole life had been embedded there and so it was hard we i wrote a letter but we knew that as soon as we uh told people we would be emerged people would just come and you know want to know what's going on we didn't want that we didn't want to deal with. I still had siblings in the cult. I didn't even tell them.

And so most of the people that had left had left in anger. Most people that left the school had abandoned, usually they've abandoned God or some had even committed suicide. And the prophet would hold that over your head. Like if you leave, you know, then you're, you're left to the powers of Satan and he will come in and make your life a living hell and so that fear was always there but we didn't want to have to just like battle any of that we didn't want to leave an anger either we'd actually found within that year as before we left we knew we had to go through a sense of healing at the same time there was awareness that we couldn't leave in anger because of all that had happened with people that had left in anger. And the Lord actually brought us the story of Nate Saint and Elliot and what happened to them on their journey. I think

it was down in Ecuador or somewhere down there and how their wives, they were killed by tribesmen and bringing the word of God to those people. And then their wives forgave the tribe who killed their husbands, bringing the, allowing them, which created a bridge for them to bring the gospel into that place, right? Where they've been rejected. And so to see how these women were able to forgive a certain people for the killing their own husbands, we definitely were equipped to be able to God had equipped us to forgive this people before we left so that we can

leave at least in some semblance of healthiness and love. So I did write up a letter though, and I thanked everyone and said, thank you for whatever you've done for us. I went through specifics, but I felt like I still needed to make a stand on something and so i did give some reasoning but then we as soon as i emailed that out five minutes later we were gone um and we began trying to we were in our lower 30s right and for the first time in our life we had choice we didn't know what to do where to go um and so we spent that month kind of figuring that out if i go into all the details it will be a few hour story so i'm not month kind of figuring that out. If I go into all the details, it will be a three-hour story, so I'm not going to do it. Yeah, that's fair. We'll have part two where you can save that for your book that I understand you're working on and want to encourage you as much as I can to write.

So we'll come back to some of that season. Tell us, you're a theology student now. What you want to do? Do you want to go be a missionary back in Salt Lake City? Do you want to get as far or anywhere in Utah or get as far away as you can from this? What's your hopes and kind of dream and passion moving forward now? I'm actually a pastor now. I graduated in May from Gordon-Conwell. So I'm a pastor now. Yeah, I'm done. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm, I've started, I'm an associate pastor and I've been associate pastor for about eight, nine months now, 10 months or so. So that's just going on this journey where God is

leading us. I was initially thinking I'd go the academic route. But my last semester, some things happened and God shifted our desires and brought us to this church, a church up in Maine. So where I'm currently an associate pastor. Oh, congratulations. Good. Yeah. So from there on, I've always felt a call to write and some sense of ministry. I actually began feeling the call to ministry when we were back in the cold a couple months before we left. But I pushed it away. For one, I didn't really understand it, what that meant. And two, I began pushing it away because I was coming out of this religious commitment for the last 20 years. And the last thing I wanted to do was commit myself to some other type of religious endeavor. And so I was really in the

mentality when we left the cult that I would never be involved in organized religion again. I'd believe in Jesus and I'd be a Jesus follower, but I didn't want to ever be a part of the church. But God quickly changed those plans soon after that. But I don't know if you want me to go into that or not. Oh, gosh. I have so many questions for you, Jared. Let me ask you this. What advice, looking back on your experience, what advice would you have for somebody to either reach out to somebody—I know these are differences here—in the Mormon church, the mainstream Mormon church, and or somebody who's in more of a polygamist cult? Do you have any ways to reach either or both of those? Are they similar? Are

they different? What advice would you have for Christians who want to care for their Mormon neighbors and friends? And or if they come across somebody online or in person, if there's hundreds of these in Utah and maybe beyond, what advice for engaging somebody there? Yeah, I mean, they are different as far as mainstream Mormon and the fundamentalist cults that break off of. The fundamentals of them are the same and where they're coming from, where their understanding of Jesus and the God godhead but their approach to those fundamentals are very different and as you would in christianity the fundamental side will be far more black and white far more strict so you have to approach it from a

certain angle angle contextualize things in a certain way for them if you were to go talk to them for mainstream mormonism which is the majority of our circumstances and situations we'd be dealing with there's more kind of openness there and so i think back what would have helped me um and in the conversations i've had with mormons since i've left when i was a kid they in manti there was this big pageant that they would have every year and it would draw in thousands and thousands of mormons to this one spot and it would also draw in a lot of street evangelists and missionaries coming from other places and they would come and yeah exactly and i would go down there and try to debate street evangelists just for the fun of it you know that was like my thing because i was so stumped yeah and i heard the gospel many times in that in that those experiences but one line that they would always uh say to me that always put up my defense mechanisms

was what they were saying was good you know they would be going and going all great but then they would say this the jesus you believe in isn't the real jesus isn't the biblical jesus and when they would say that i would be like what are you talking about the jesus i believe in isn't the real jesus i've had true spiritual experience with this jesus i believe he's leading my life i believe he loves me and so i would be in that mentality would put up my defense mechanisms and everything else they would say thereafter i would not not be listening to. I would just be seeking to like, whatever, or reason it away. So in that sense, I don't think debate is always the healthiest approach for missionary work to Mormons. I would suggest probably a different approach, more of approach where you're starting on a foundation where there's a sense of agreeance.

For me, if I think back, it would be the perfection of Jesus. That's something that we can both relate to. We may have a different understanding of who Jesus is eternally and on earth because who he is on earth makes up who he was in eternity makes up who he is on earth. But the doctrine and the attribute of his perfection is the same. They believe he was the only perfect person to ever walk the earth. They believe Joseph Smith was with sin. They don't believe he was perfect like Jesus. We believe Jesus was the only perfect person. So start on that level playing field, get to know them, be in relationship with them. I don't even really think you should begin discussion with them until tell you're a person they can trust.

Right. And so start with that and then begin to show them the sufficiency of Jesus. Build on that understanding of his perfection, because as you show them the perfect Jesus, the sufficient Jesus, that Jesus will begin to challenge everything about their belief system. Because as they hold up what they believe in with Joseph Smith and the church, all founded on Joseph being, you know, being a prophet, but yet still burdened with sin. As you challenge that, like, why would you do anything different than who Jesus is, the most perfect being that you believe is perfect, I believe is perfect. God, scripture tells, God gave us everything we need through Jesus. So why do we need to add all this stuff to who Jesus is? That's really the process I went through that took me a few years to reason, come into a sense of being in a healthy walk with Christ. Because when I made that confession and said, Christ,

I'm yours, things started happening. I had to look at the Book of Mormon. I had to look at Joseph Smith, all these things that meant everything to me, that my life and my identity had been founded in. And I had to confront them with the person of Christ. And this perfect Jesus that I believed was perfect, both in Mormonism and now as I was coming into Christianity. And when I held those up and confronted them with the perfect Jesus, they all fell to the wayside. Why would I need them when I had Jesus? And so I think kind of beginning to build a conversation on that mentality. You have to know their doctrines.

You have to know the nuances of why they believe what they believe. But when you're using that as your anchor and really challenging everything about who they are by Jesus, which is a dynamic we as Christians also need. Jesus changes everything about who we are in this world. And so we need to bring and lift up the reality of who Jesus is for ourselves on a daily basis, because we have our own idols of the heart, right? The self constantly works its way to our center. We constantly try to make our way, our self, the center of our universe and why we do what we do, rather than remembering that we are founded in Christ, and Christ is our salvation. We were born again in Christ, and that defines and changes everything about who we are in this world. So if you use that same type of approach and dynamic with a Mormon, I think it would be helpful because they do believe in that perfection of who he is. Last question. As much as

you're comfortable, tell us where your family is at. some completely left the cult all have some come back to the mainstream mormon church some become christians some go down that road of atheism where are some of your brothers sisters and larger family at right now spiritually um some are mormon still i have three or four siblings that are still Mormon. I have a few that are agnostic or one that I know is agnostic, maybe a little new ageist. I'm not sure. She'd probably laugh at me if I said that, but a couple I don't really know.

They're not Mormon. I think they believe in God, but there's no like sense of faith there. And then a couple that are still part of the cult. My dad actually left the cult and went back to the Mormon church. My mom actually died in the Mormon church a year before I left. And then we are the only Christians. My wife and I, God brought us out of there. And in his great mercy and love and grace, he brought us through together, my wife and I.

There's no reason that we should still be together based on our past and everything that happened to us. And yet he maintained and has restored and renewed so much of our relationship with us and our three kids. And then we adopted after we left. One of the experiences in the cult was that my wife would get very sick during her pregnancies. Like she would throw up throughout the whole term. And then the prophet actually commanded her to get her tubes tied, the prophet did, because she wasn't able to attend all our meetings. And so that was contributing to our unworthiness because she needed to be all her meetings and she wasn't getting to the meetings because she was sick during the pregnancies.

And so at one point, Harmston, the prophet, said, it's time to get your tubes tied. And so we didn't want to, but we feared if we didn't, then something would happen to the child. And so that's our mentality. So we did. And that was a very damaging, broken, hurtful thing for us. But God renewed that after we left and we were able to adopt soon after, which was a beautiful, beautiful, wonderful experience for us. So we have four kids total now. So our family stayed intact by God's grace. Great. But everyone else, as far as my external family, they're all kind of in different spectrums. And we're first generation Christians, my wife and I. Wow, that is incredible, the amount of power this cult leader, Harmston, I think you said, had to have a woman get her tubes tied.

It makes sense emotionally and psychologically where you're at to make that decision. But that level of control is just stunning and disturbing and pretty high level of spiritual abuse. Lord bless you and your family and your ministry. Really thankful for your story. I first heard about you, I was just following the Gospel Coalition, saw the story. I was like, wow, that is so interesting and really want to have you on. I knew my viewers would want to hear your story as well. I know you work on another article for the Gospel Coalition, but are you on social media? Can people follow you?

Or are you more just kind of wanting to be a pastor and get away from a lot of this stuff and minister to people locally? No, I mean, I'm trying to build a social media just because i was told someone in the publishing agency if i if i'm gonna start writing and and which i which is what i'm working for is really to be a writer then i need some type of platform so uh i am doing that though ruefully and okay but the best way to contact me i guess guess, would be through that. I'm on Instagram or Facebook. Okay. And so, yeah. Or email me, but I don't know if you have an email. You can go to our church website and my email would be on there because I'm a pastor at our church. You might get flooded with emails.

So people who caught this, don't send endless questions to him. Only send one or two pointed questions if you really need his help yeah so you put it out there but just respect the time that it takes as well if you feel the need to reach out but i would imagine jared if somebody's watching this and they're maybe in a polygamous cult or trying to reach out to somebody and somehow came across this you would love to get a contact from them and would come alongside them and help them through the process as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Awesome. Well, when your book is out, regardless of how big your social media platform is, let me know,

and I will spread the word on my platform. Maybe we can have a follow-up conversation. I'll connect you with some other folks who have platforms because this story absolutely, unmistakably needs to get out. Just a story of God's grace and his favor in your life. And I'm super encouraged. Can't wait to show this to my own family and my kids and talk about it with them as well. So thanks for being faithful. Thanks for sharing the story. I didn't ask you this.

You don't have to answer how hard or easy it is to share that story. Um, but your willingness to come and do it. I can tell you from the outside, there will be people interested in your book and, uh, it's a powerful story that needs to be told. So be encouraged, uh, to do so as well. Those of you watching make, oh, sorry, go ahead. No, I was just, and there's just so much more God did in delivering us from the cult. The things that happened afterwards, the miracles and just the miraculous work that's brought us here today since we left in 2012 has just been incredible. Just getting us out because we didn't have work for even the whole year. We were totally reliant on the cult when we left. And yet God opened doors and provided a way.

But that's another story that I won't get into. We will have part two when your book is out to motivate the word. We'll start in 2012 because that's a whole nother season of your life. And we'll cover that. So let me know when it's coming out. I know it's down the road.

We'll have that conversation if it helps. I can't wait to hear about it. Those who watch and make sure you hit subscribe. We've got some other conversations. Mormonism is a topic we sometimes revisit on this channel, as well as other world religions. You mentioned atheism. We talk about that. Make sure you hit subscribe. Got a lot of conversations coming up. If you thought about studying apologetics, we have a fully distanced program, top rated in the world in apologetics. It's online and we talk about

world religions. Sometimes we offer weekend courses on Mormonism. We would love to come by and equip you if you're not quite ready for master's. We have a certificate program and actually Biola has given me a pretty significant discount code below where we will kind of walk you through certain lectures and help train you a little bit more formally, but not the level of a master's. Jared, thanks so much for being generous with your time. I'm already looking forward to our next conversation. Thank you so much, Sean.

Appreciate you having me.