Engaging with Mormons (Corey Miller) Part 1

Answering Mormons Questions by Bill McKeever and Eric Johnson deals with 36 commonly asked questions by your LDS friends and neighbors. It's a great resource for Christians who want to share their faith with friends and loved ones.

Be sure to pick up your copy today at your favorite Christian bookstore. Viewpoint on Mormonism, the program that examines the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a biblical perspective. Viewpoint on Mormonism is sponsored by Mormonism Research Ministry. Since 1979, Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now, your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry. And with me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM. But we also have with us a friend who has been on this show a number of times in the past, and that's Corey Miller. Corey Miller grew up in Utah as a seventh-generation Mormon and before coming to Christ as a teenager.

He is CEO of Rocio Christi, which if you want to find out about that organization, it's rociochristi.org, which is a campus apologetics ministry. Corey, welcome back to Viewpoint on Mormonism. We're glad to have you. Thanks, Bill and Eric. It's great to be here.

Thanks for the opportunity. Well Corey, you've written a new book entitled Engaging with Mormons, Understanding Their World, Sharing Good News. And I'm always excited when new books come out about Mormonism, and I want to tell you that even though this book is short and concise, it really nails a lot of the important issues.

And you had asked me to read the manuscript, which I did, and to give you a little bit of a blurb. And so I was pleased to say this about Corey's book. I said, Not only does Corey Miller offer practical tips on speaking with members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he gives pertinent information regarding their theology in such a way that the Christian reader can't help but gain a better understanding and compassion for those immersed in this system.

And I really mean that. I think what you did in your book was to give a pretty concise view of the problems with Mormon theology, but at the same time you do it in a way where the reader will not walk away thinking less of the Latter-day Saint people, and that's always so important. What we're going to do, Corey, today is to go to the back of the book first. Now, as I mentioned in the opening of the show, we've had you on before, and we have talked about your background, but of course we've got a lot of new listeners since the last time you were here, so we wanted to talk a little bit about your background.

Now, I'm going to throw you a curve here because I want to ask you this. Now, you come from an LDS background, but some people think the only ones who can speak to the subject of Mormonism are those who have an LDS background. What would you say to a person who thinks that? I would say that's a genetic fallacy. It confuses the rationality with the argument and the source of the argument.

It's the same thing that's used in the abortion debate. If you're a male, you have nothing to offer. Or in the critical race theory debate, if you're white or non-black or non-colored, you have nothing to offer. Let's talk about your background. At the end of your book, you give a summary of your story, and as you grew up as a Latter-day Saint, you were a seventh-generation Mormon.

Explain for our listeners why that is important. Sometimes in certain quarters of Mormonism, there is a pecking order. You've got good street cred if you come from certain families and backgrounds. I have uncommon descent. Some of my family say that I come from healthy stock.

What they mean by that is that my ancestors go all the way back to the founding stories. In my previous book, Leaving Mormonism, Why Four Scholars Changed Their Minds, I accidentally said I was a sixth-generation Mormon. This one corrected at seventh, and it's because I had gotten so captured with John Scott. I forgot about his father, Jacob Scott, who was great friends with William Law, the second counselor of the first presidency in Mormonism. The most credible and highest ranking Mormon to ever depart from Mormonism. And that was because Joseph Smith, along with many of his other wives that he was getting assigned to him, wanted to marry William Law's wife, Jane. And it made it into the Doctrine and Covenants 132 in terms of his revelation trying to calm his first wife, Emma, down about this.

Well, the Law's would have nothing of it. They departed, and my family at the very top, Jacob Scott, was going to depart with them. They were going to put this out in the Nauvoo Expositor.

They had one publication. And boom, Joseph Smith sent his minions, destroyed the place, vandalized it, and the municipalities came and took Joseph Smith to jail in Carthage. And you know the rest of the history from there. Well, he got killed.

John Scott was one of his bodyguards, Jacob's son, and took his body back to Nauvoo after death. He used to report to Joseph Smith, began reporting to Brigham Young, and to show his loyalty to Prophet Smith, having been a colonel in the Mormon Battalion and the Nauvoo Legion, he took five wives and had 36 to 39 children, of which I'm a descendant. Now, you grew up in a broken home, but at the same time you were active in the LDS Church. Was this a stabilizing influence in your life as you grew up in the single-parent home?

Yes, it was kind of rough. Both of my mother and father were both black sheep in their respective families. And both of their parents helped care for me. My grandparents on both sides helped raise me in various ways.

On my dad's side, you know, my grandma talked about how she saw Jesus two times in the temple, talked about temple work, her visions, taught me about tithes. My other grandparent on the other side, you know, the Pinewood Derby, the Cub Scouts, I involved in my baptism. I did have extended family and community through my Mormon heritage. The community that provided stability, I think, was, you know, it was present. You had church basketball, the dances, cupcake days, Sunday school, you got your CTR ring.

Cub Scouts was part of Mormonism at the time. And I was, though I had black sheep parents in that respect, my sincerity was there. When I was eight years old and supposed to be baptized, I wouldn't do it because I knew that I wanted to spend eternity with Heavenly Father in celestial glory.

And that required a lot. I didn't want to get baptized and have my sins washed away and have a blank slate until I was ready to die. So I figured I'd wait till I was 88 years old and beat the system. Unfortunately, I lived in fear for the next year and finally capitulated and got baptized at nine. Corey, at 16, you went to a Christian camp. How did that change your perspective about having a relationship with God? I didn't go to the camp to find God.

I thought that I already had God. I had rebelled by that time against my Mormon sociology or culture because I felt ostracized growing up in a family with one parent, poor, mom smoked and things like that. And so I ended up rebelling against the culture, but I still believed in Heavenly Father. I still believed in the plan of salvation. I still believed in the church.

I just wasn't living at the time like I should have, apparently. And I went to this camp because a friend said, hey, you can come the whole summer, spend the summer at the beaches with me. And at the time I'd only seen a great Salt Lake, so I thought, great.

I went there. The preacher spoke on hell. I tell people it literally scared the hell out of me and heaven into me. I saw the gospel for the first time.

I saw it demonstrated in people. Fell in love with Jesus in the community and moved to California my junior year of high school where I was discipled. As a young person making a decision like that, no doubt you probably had, I assume, peers that maybe wanted to pressure you to go back into the church because we find that happens quite often here in Utah where a person can be convinced that Mormonism is not true, but it's difficult to leave because of the peer pressure that they receive.

Right, right. I came back my senior year of high school to graduate at Cottonwood High School in Utah, and that's when the pressure was on with the fear that I'm now an apostate. Maybe I'm a son of perdition.

Maybe I stand at an eternity worse off than Hitler in the eternal scheme of things. So I was challenged to reread the Book of Mormon for the sake of truth rather than tradition, which I did. It was only during that time when I started finding, okay, this has got some severe problems with it, but in my mind, if I leave Mormonism and I'm wrong, I'm doomed. If biblical Christianity is true and I return to Mormonism, I'm doomed. And so I had to figure this out, and I started studying philosophy and comparative religions and things like that, and it put me into a mode of skepticism for a while, frankly, where I really had to question whether God existed and whether the Bible was true.

How did you overcome that? Well, as I was looking into the Book of Mormon and reading it and praying over it, I also came across material from the Tanners. I got engaged with someone who is named Timothy Oliver, former returned Mormon missionary, who with me and 10 of my friends senior year of high school, we used to do Bible studies at his house every Tuesday after school. And I began seeing that the Book of Mormon was fraudulent and problematic. And as I was studying world religions, comparative religions and philosophy, I came into the field of apologetics as well. And that helped me to see the veracity or the truthfulness of Christianity. Can I ask you, as you're looking at the Book of Mormon in that way, what was it from the Book of Mormon that stood out and caught your attention and caused you to delve a little bit deeper? What subjects, any particular chapters, any particular books in the Book of Mormon, any particular verses that stood out?

I'm just curious. Yeah, I mean, just the reading of it as I was going through seemed very boorish, repetitive, and it just seemed like something wasn't right. Now that I was thinking more of a critical thinker as well. And, you know, as I was meeting with Timothy Oliver, he helped me to see the notion of salvation through the Book of Mormon. And that became, for me and for everyone, Mission Impossible. And that highlighted the gospel and contrasted and illuminated the gospel of Christ.

So it was some of those things. And then as I, you know, was reading some of the other literature, finding some of the historical and archaeological problems with the Book of Mormon as well. But theological, archaeological, scientific, and just literary. I would think that the difficulty for an average Latter-day Saint when it comes to seeing the theological problems is what do they have to compare what they're reading in the Book of Mormon?

If they don't really know what the Bible has to say, how would they ever notice the red flags of bad LDS theology in the Book of Mormon? So it's good that you had someone like Timothy, and Timothy is a very good mentor, no doubt, to kind of lead you along the way. I think it becomes important if Christians are listening to this to understand to be there by the side of a Latter-day Saint who's struggling in order to help them along as they're coming out and give them guidance and direction.

I think that's so important. Corey, you have a friend who's a mutual friend of ours, Dave Roberts. Could you tell us a little bit about Dave and how he also helped disciple you during this important time?

Yeah, so that was a little bit after Timothy. After high school, I went to boot camp, served at the Army National Guard in Utah for a little while. Got plugged in with a group of about 17 to 22-year-olds, about 25 of them, radical Christians, doing some street preaching, temple evangelism, University of Utah tracking, and so forth. And it's through that process, through those young people, that Reverend Dave Roberts, who's a great friend of ours, took me under his wings, and I started meeting with him quite frequently, and he's since become the pastor throughout my life.

We've been talking to Corey Miller. He is with an organization called Rocio Christi, a former Latter-day Saint who wrote a book, Engaging with Mormons. And tomorrow we're going to continue talking to Corey and asking about his background and the experience that he had, not only as a Latter-day Saint, but his transition from Mormonism into Christianity. When sharing your faith with a Latter-day Saint, it helps to know what their church has taught on several basic topics. For this reason, Mormonism Research Ministry has provided its Crash Course Mormonism. Crash Course Mormonism includes concise articles highlighting what LDS leaders and church manuals have taught on issues that will probably come up in a typical conversation. You can find these informative articles at CrashCourseMormonism.com. That's Crash Course Mormonism.com.