Engaging with Mormons (Corey Miller) Part 4

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. You can be with us for this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism.

I'm your host, Bill McCaver, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry. And with me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM. But we've also had the pleasure of having our good friend, Dr. Corey Miller, be with us this week. And Corey, I want to welcome you back to the show. It's been a pleasure and I'm glad we're getting a little bit off course to talk about your background and what you're facing as you work in our secular university. So welcome back to the show. Thank you.

Good to be back. I think what we've been discussing is very important, but I wanted you to explain with your Mormon background how it kind of, I guess you could say, steered you into this direction. Some people may wonder, well, how did that happen? So let me let you explain that as a former Mormon.

Sure. Because of the trauma that I faced coming out of Mormonism and now needing to know that something was true, it sent me into a period of skepticism where I had to explore deeply philosophy, comparative religions and science and so forth. And that sent me into this trajectory of insatiable passion for knowledge and going after the universities as a strategic place. So I credit my background coming out of Mormonism with putting me on the platform where I'm at today by God's grace and sovereignty. And that's fascinating because so many times we hear of those who leave Mormonism end up going off into nothingness, either agnosticism or even atheism. Yeah, throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yeah, we see that happen far too many times.

Very quickly, why do you think that is? Well, you're already taught from being a child that the Bible is corrupt, but it doesn't matter. You have a living prophet. But once that living prophet is pulled out from under you in terms of confidence, well, you no longer have that confidence in the Bible.

And emotionally, you feel betrayed by religion. It's very difficult to trust after that period of time because Mormonism had captured you and taken your whole life. Well, let's talk about your book. This book is titled Engaging with Mormons, Understanding Their World, Sharing Good News. And as I mentioned at the beginning of the week, I was given the honor of writing a little blurb for this book. And one of the things that I like about it, it is concise.

It's not meant to be in-depth though, right? This is a series that thegoodbook.com has put out, and yours just happens to deal with the subject of Mormonism, but it's not meant to be exhaustive. But you give enough information about the doctrines of the LDS church, but in a way, as I mentioned, that doesn't cause you to look down on the LDS people.

And for that, I think you are to be commended because that is so, so important. But in the preface of your book, you talk about the bash or dash methods as ways not to engage Latter-day Saints. Could you tell us what you mean by bash or dash and explain why you don't recommend these methods? The bash, what I mean by that is sometimes Christians try to take the biggest Bible they have and bang the Mormon over the head, not just, you know, with theological ping pong back and forth, but with the goal to kind of destroy the enemy. But the Mormon is not our enemy.

And then the dash is kind of the opposite. Rather than engaging in conflict, you seek to disengage. You close, you know, your door, you shut your blinds, you hide from the enemy rather than seeing them as someone to be loved and present the truth to. Both views don't care for the Mormon and both views are ineffective to the Mormon. So they're nonsensical ways to get to go about conversations with Mormons.

I would totally agree with you. I think having a Mormon delivered to my door is far better than a pizza any day. I would open up the door to a Latter-day Saint anytime.

And it's an opportunity, as you have illustrated, that is wasted far too many times by Christians. And we've been trying to emphasize here on this show and in our ministry, and we've said it many, many times, the time to prepare your game plan is not when they knock on the door, but to be ready. Would you agree that people that are prepared to engage usually come off much better than those who are not prepared?

I mean, it's obvious, isn't it? Yes, and it puts you in a better emotional state as well. You can actually have a spirited conversation and not get emotionally defensive. Especially when much of our conversation can be nothing more than questions.

I love asking questions. In fact, most of the dialogues that I have with Latter-day Saints, it's just asking them one question after another, trying to bring them to a conclusion that we can discuss, perhaps at the end of our conversation, kind of put everything together and say, okay, let me see if I understand you correctly. And then just go through those points and then asking some more questions regarding why you might have a problem with some of their conclusions. Corey, you said something interesting about doctrine. You said that you could find five different Mormons, and you might get six different opinions.

And you say that even includes the leaders. If that's the case, then how can a Christian ever engage a Latter-day Saint on important theological issues? That's a great question. What I meant by that statement on logic isn't that we shouldn't use logic, but only that, as I learned in the study of rhetoric or the art of persuasion, persuasion comes in a triplet, the logos, our English word logic, the ethos or ethic or competency, and pathos, passion. For some, coming to them with iron class deductive syllogisms in an argument isn't going to do it.

For some, it might. And so with this, we have two ears and one mouth for a reason so that we listen more and we follow the spirit and we try to get to know the person and personalize our encounter. Because truly, not every Mormon that you talk to is going to be believing the things you think they might believe. Boy, that is so true. We should never assume what a Mormon believes.

And people look at me kind of cross-eyed when I say that. I find in my experience when dealing with Latter-day Saints, it's not like when I'm dealing with, let's say, a member of the Watchtower Society or Jehovah's Witness. I find dealing with them, I almost expect them to all say the same things, but that's not really true when it comes to Latter-day Saints, is it? No, we need to be good cultural and psychological diagnosticians. Not just diagnosing the culture, that's what we do in missiology, the study of missions, but for the individual. What makes them tick? Why are they a Mormon?

What objections might they have to becoming a Christian? We've got to hone in. Is it emotional? Is it volitional? Is it intellectual?

What is it? In the book, you talk about Mormon culture and values. Give us a summary of what you mean by Mormon culture and the values that many Latter-day Saints have. Eric, years ago there was a movement I recall in Utah to move away from the attribution of Mormonism as a cult and toward understanding it as a culture. And I think that movement swung the pendulum too far, but the insight gained is completely appropriate when thinking missiologically. Mormonism isn't just about doctrine and theology, but about people together with their sociology and psychology. Many Mormons don't seem keen on theology and doctrine, but almost every Mormon is keen on the cultural values and beliefs supporting them.

Families are forever. Solidarity and identity. It's very pragmatic.

It's feeling oriented. We need to be able to speak Mormonese. People who know Utah can appreciate fry sauce.

Napoleon Dynamite jokes about Jell-O. But people who know Utah can also recognize the curious facts that there are a disproportionate number of blondes, tans, skin, number one breast augmentation state, top 10 bankruptcy state, number one consumer of porn. And begin thinking about the external shell of appearances and secret sins, perhaps connected to an extreme performance mentality that really is probably joined to the Mormon view of salvation. So we need to understand Mormonism as a culture, not just as a cult. Well, Corey, wouldn't you say that that argument that Mormonism is not a cult, it's a culture, isn't that kind of the either or fallacy? And that's why I would say it's both ends. Exactly.

And that's an argument that I've been trying to raise here in the state of Utah. Look, why can't it be both? I mean, it seems to have characteristics that fall into both categories.

Why do we have to say it's one and not the other? Why can't we just argue that it seems to show that it's both a culture and a cult as well? I'm talking about theological cults here, that it claims to represent true Christianity, while at the same time denying or distorting the basic teachings of the Christian faith. That would certainly put Mormonism into that category. But I'm not denying that it's a culture as well.

Certainly it is. Corey, you wrote a chapter for our book that we put together in 2018 called Sharing the Good News with Mormons. And you described a tactic in that book and you did it here too. It's called the police lineup.

I think it's an excellent tactic. Can you tell us a little bit about the police lineup tactic, how it works, and how can a Christian use this to share the Christian faith? I think the helpfulness of the illustration is that it brings the Mormon back to their founding story, to the grove where Joseph Smith allegedly had this revelation, the appearance of Heavenly Father and Jesus. And at that time, the way they tell the story is that there were so many different Christian sects, sectarian religions, he wasn't sure which one to join. And so Heavenly Father said, you know, don't join any of them. Well, we're taking a Mormon back to the grove experience and we're saying, okay, I'm an investigator here of Mormonism. This isn't a prospect, but I've been told that there are multiple Mormon sects.

There have been 400 since Joseph Smith died and at least 80 that are, you know, ward size or more. And if I just considered even three of them, you know, the Fundamentalist, the Salt Lake Church, the Community of Christ, and I line them up almost like a police lineup. And I asked which church is true of the one true churches, which church is the one true, one true church. It gives them a real existential sense that they are all too familiar with. And they realize that there's got to be something wrong here with the testimony. And my point is, I'm trying to tear down the overconfidence they have in the notion of testimony, because that is not, while it's not an essential doctrine, it's an essential of dialogue. And so I want them to see that each of those other sects, other than the Salt Lake one, the Mormon you're probably talking to, are false. They believe they're false. Is it because that Mormon is lying? No.

Who would want to judge in this day and age when, you know, you don't want to be a judger? And so you say, so are they deceived? Yes, they're deceived. So they're deceived perhaps by a lying spirit. That's right.

Okay. How do you know you're not the one that's deceived? And the point to this is they will forever hopefully carry that illustrative experience with them.

No matter how many more encounters they have where they're constantly bearing testimony, they will not be able to fall back on that psychological defense or offense in the same way ever again. We're talking with Dr. Corey Miller. He's the author of the book Engaging with Mormons. Now, Corey, this book can be purchased through a website called TheGoodBook.com and they can also get it on Amazon, but it's got a lot of information within its pages. And we want to continue this conversation with Corey in tomorrow's show as we continue looking at his book, Engaging with Mormons, Understanding Their World, Sharing Good News. 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 CrashCourseMormonism.com