Joe and Isaac Hess discuss Joe’s last appearance on Pints With Aquinas, that created some controversy among the LDS community.

Transcript:

Joe: Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and I’m here to have a cup of Joe with my friend Isaac Hess. Isaac, thanks for coming on.
Isaac:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Joe:
Isaac, we’re going to talk a little bit about Mormonism, which I thought I might … Church of Jews Christ for Latter Day Saints thought you might be a good person to talk to to sort of translate between these two worlds. You want to introduce yourself a little bit and maybe give a bit of a clue as to why I might think that’s the case?
Isaac:
Sure. So my name’s Isaac and I want to apologize right up front. I’m recovering from a cough. So I’ll try to mute myself whenever I cough, but if you hear me cough or clear my throat, that’s why. Yeah. So I was raised a Latter Day Saint. I just grew up through the ’80s and the ’90s and the early 2000s. I went on a mission. I attended BYU. So I was a Latter-day Saint for about 35 years. And then about five years ago, I converted to Catholicism and was baptized into the Catholic Church. And I’ve shared my story on some other platforms before. I’ve been on Matt Frad’s channel and Lila Rose. And so if people want a deep dive on my conversion story, they can kind of go there. But yeah, I still have a lot of connections to the Latter-day Saint community as well.
I have close family and friends who are still LDS.
Joe:
Yeah, I was going to say, it seems like you still have a lot of … I mean, sometimes you have the bitter X member and that doesn’t seem to be your case. You seem to have a great deal of love for the LDS community, maybe certain members in particular that you’re related to and friends and all that with. But yeah, so you’re XMO, I think is the term, but you’re not like a bitter XMO.
Isaac:
In internet parlance, I am XMO.
Joe:
Okay. Just showing, I’m cool. I’m a 40-year-old man being hip to the slang. Super. So for those who are just tuning in, this is called Cup of Joe, both because my name is Joe, but also because we drink coffee together. And I thought it was only fitting to use my Pints of the Quinas mug today. And I’ve got some Trader Joe’s roast and so I’m going to pour myself a cup of coffee. Isaac, you have a little bit of a background with coffee. Now I want to, for those of you who may be tuning in for the first time from an LDS background and saying, Hey, this seems like a slap in the face because of word of wisdom. This is what we do every week. This is not some sort of joke at your expense. So Isaac, that said, you have a story about the siren song of coffee as I’m playing.
Isaac:
Well, so I want to just point out that I am drinking from a new local coffee shop in my area that opened recently. So I’m from the town of Gilbert, Arizona. So if you’re here, look this place up. It’s 90s themed, which is hilarious to me. But I’ve had to remind myself that when I was a kid, things were 70s themed and that’s just- Well, that was a
Joe:
Different arrow. That was like 20 years before.
Isaac:
I know,
Joe:
Right?
Isaac:
So if you want to go and watch Saved by the Bell on a TV they have playing, they have a working payphone and wonderful people who run the shop and excellent coffee. So it’s the nook. I’m promoting them today because they’re in my new favorite
Joe:
Coffee shop. There’s a place like that in the suburbs of Kansas City that actually had … You can play old video games like Mortal Kombat, which is just crazy.
Isaac:
Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. People are cashing in on my childhood. So anyway, yeah, so you were joking about coffee. So I’ve always loved the smell of coffee. Growing up as a Latter Day Saint kid, I used to, when I would walk through my local Smith’s grocery store in Orem, Utah, they would have an aisle with fresh coffee beans, the bulk aisle. And I would linger in the aisle smelling the coffee. I thought it smelled quite delicious. So becoming Catholic, the true reward is the fullness of our savior, Jesus Christ, but the secondary reward is the enjoyment of delicious coffee.
Joe:
That’s excellent. I was threatening Isaac beforehand that I was going to tell everyone. Isaac was faithful, but then he sacrificed his recommend in order to get good coffee because he just couldn’t resist the siren song. Okay. Well, anyway, a little bit of background as to what we’re talking about today. As some of you already know, last month I was on Matt Frad’s show, Pints with Aquinas. That episode just dropped on Monday. In it, we talked a lot about Mormonism and explored some of the problems with the system from a Catholic perspective. And in particular, we talked about just how big our differences in our conception of God are and whether what they mean by God even counts as God in kind of a classical theistic conception. I’m positive we’re going to talk a lot more about that pretty shortly. But as you might imagine, both that section and the interview more broadly generated a lot of response.
I think it’s fair to say a lot of backlash from Mormons. I thought it’d be good to get into the weeds, to be responsive to the critiques, to cover some of the good, the bad, and the ugly. And some of the responses are really thoughtful. Some of the questions are well worth answering and some of the memes are just glorious. Mike, could you put up the one meme I was really tickled by?
So for those of you who are listening and can’t see it, it’s the famous office meme where it says corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures and then the responses they’re the same picture. But in this case, it’s me as Pam and the … I think it’s Pam, isn’t that? I’m actually blanking on that.
Mike:
That’s Pam.
Joe:
Okay. But then it’s like, I think it’s Atheist United or whatever, some atheist group and then Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And it’s just like, oh yeah, Joe doesn’t know the difference between these two. As a representation of my position, it’s like comically wrong. As a meme, I thought it was hilarious and I thought they did a really disturbingly good job of plugging me into the meme in a pretty realistic … They got my suit and everything. I was really impressed.
Mike:
Not all of the memes were quite so terrible.
Joe:
No, there were some memes. So I was critical in the same episode of both Mormons and Gropers, and both groups can be a little defensive about any criticism. And so I was simultaneously accused of being a Nazi and a Jew for the same episode. And I’m a third secret thing that is neither of those two. So I thought it’d be good though not to just feed the trolls, but to actually cover some of the thoughtful, meaningful replies. And I want to see at the outset, we are absolutely not going to get to everything and I haven’t even seen everything produced. I’ve tried to watch a lot of it, but there’s hours of stuff. So just to give you a sense of some of the stuff we’re going to try to cover, Ward Radio did a two hour stream with Jasmine Rapley, Luke Hansen, Jacob Hanson, who I realized spelled their name differently and are not, as I assumed, related.
And of course, Carden Ellis, Caden Baylor, all those in favor had a fascinating 80-minute rebuttal with Joseph Lowell and Tara LaCore, who I believe is an LDS convert to Catholicism, looking at more of a philosophical perspective. So we’re definitely going to want to cover that. At the other end of the spectrum, a guy named Shad Brooks said he was going to do an autistic level deep dive, but then ended up producing what appeared to be a kind of crazy three hour long rant where there’s … I mean, it mostly was him kind of crashing out, but there were a few things that he said that I thought would be worth replying to. And I know we’re just scratching the surface. There’s another episode from a Mormon response perspective coming out, I think this Saturday. I know Emerson Green had an 80-minute long response, not to me, but to one of the guys from Ispiring Philosophy when he made the same point that Mormonism from a theological perspective is actually atheistic and we’ll explain what that means.
I haven’t even tried to watch that one. The other ones I’ve at least tried to watch and pull, I haven’t watched every moment, but tried to find the major points to respond to. Can
Mike:
I add a quick thing about Shad really fast? Yeah. So I was watching Shad’s content before he started doing all this crazy commentary stuff years ago, and he really started and found his bones as being a medieval night kind of YouTuber where it’s all about swords and armor and how people lived way back in medieval times. And it was really good stuff, really fun. And it seems like when he started this commentary channel, which I’m sure started out as event, but then once you start going down rage commentary, it becomes a drug, just so you get addicted to it.
Joe:
Yeah. I don’t want that to be this kind of in the other direction. I don’t want to just crash out or rage or do whatever because I don’t think that’s helpful. I don’t think that brings people closer to the truth. I mean, it can be really cathartic. This is very big in politics, just like yell at the other side, and I don’t think that’s good or helpful, which actually I think is maybe a good segue to the first topic I think we should cover, Isaac. You can take the meme down there if you want. One of the critiques people had wasn’t so much of anything that I said, but just the fact that I was the one saying it, that there’s this question of whether a non LDS person should have been on the show to critique or discuss LDS theology in the first place.
And I tried to be very clear upfront. I did not grow up Mormon. And anytime I’m talking about any system I didn’t grow up in, I’m well aware that things often look different from the inside than from the outside, which can sometimes be an important reason to have an outsider’s perspective, but also means that we can just completely talk past each other, that maybe you have a completely skewed vision. And I’m sure every person on here knows what I’m talking about. You’ve heard people who aren’t of your political affiliation talk about your party and your values and why you believe what you believe. If you’re Catholic, you’ve probably seen a gazillion episodes. I literally had one come out Tuesday of people claiming what the Catholic church believes and getting stuff wildly wrong. And it’s tempting to just say like, non-X people shouldn’t talk about X political group, religious group, whatever.
I think that’s a mistake and I’m happy to talk to you about why I think that. I’m curious your take, Isaac. But yeah, so anyway, I tried to be very clear. I’m going to do my best to charitably, accurately present the Mormon view before critiquing it, but I’m obviously not coming from an insider’s perspective. So some people seem to appreciate that Luke Hansen, Jasmine were very kind about that. On the other hand, if you want to pull up clip one, Chad thought that me trying to fairly and charitably present the Mormon position should be marked as a malicious lie. Do my best to fairly and charitably present the Mormon position.
CLIP:
Again, he’s not, right? If his intention was to fairly and charitably present our position, he would have a Latter Day Saint there to help him or to actually present what it is. All right. This is all coming through a biosource with the intent to belittle and present it as literally the title, incoherent. And so this is, again, he repeats the lie of intent here. And so this is another lie and it is a malicious lie.
Joe:
Okay. So that’s one take. As somebody said, the guy seems very passionate. I think that’s very passionate. So is it the standard, should it be the standard that you can only talk about Mormonism if there’s a Mormon present with you, Isaac? What would your take be on people making this kind of claim? Because I’m sure there are people who are upset that I’m talking to a Catholic who used to be Mormon.
Isaac:
Yeah. I was about to say, you just did it again, Joe.
Joe:
I know.
Isaac:
You clearly don’t learn from your mistakes. I think it just depends. I think there’s room for all sorts of different kinds of conversations. It’s, I think, absurd on its face if someone, and I’m not trying to attribute this to any particular person, but if you were to say basically every conversation about Mormonism on YouTube, say, has to have a practicing believing Latter Day Saint present, that just seems kind of silly. It’s okay for there to be people discussing their understanding of what the LDS church teaches and believes, just as it is vice versa. If a group of Protestants or Latter-day Saints are having a conversation about Catholicism, I don’t think that there’s anything that requires that you have a practicing, believing Catholic present.
Joe:
Right. If you’re preaching in an LDS temple about the great apostasy, I don’t think you need to invite a Catholic in to give the counter to that.
Isaac:
See, you’re just showing your ignorance there, Joe, because they don’t preach in their temples.
Joe:
Oh,
Isaac:
Okay. Yeah. No, I’m just teasing you. But also what I said was accurate. Yeah, fair. So if that’s all you did though, if you never spoke to a practicing Latter Day Saint, if you never spoke to practicing Catholics, if there wasn’t engagement and interaction between the two, if you just sort of shut yourself off from the other side, that’s also really bad. That’s just not intellectually, it’s not a good way of pursuing. So people will say things like, “If you really want to know the truth about what Latter Day Saints believe and think and what our doctrine is and what our history is, you should talk to a believing Latter-day Saint.” And there’s truth to that. That is going to be a crucial part of the process. It’s not the exclusive part of the process though. For any position, if you want to know the fullness of the position, it’s actually very helpful to encounter both the defenders and the critics of the position because they’ll offer different perspectives.
Joe:
Right. I mean, I’ve just used a political example. If you want to know how to think about a conservative policy, you should talk to conservatives, you should also talk to liberals or people who are critical libertarians or you should talk to insiders and outsiders and people who were one and then became the other. I think the echo chamber’s not good. And I’d say that in both directions. I think it’s bad if it’s just Catholics talking to other Catholics about other groups and I’ve been critical of that in the past. And I actually, I hope one thing people take from this, if you’re a Catholic and your knee-jerk response to seeing someone criticize the Catholic church is like, “We are being persecuted, you guys are being so unfair and you can’t substantively say what they’re getting wrong, it looks like whining and it looks like you just are really thin skinned.” And so you should learn from that.
As a Catholic, don’t do that because I think there were people who had legitimate grievances. They said, “It sounds like you’re saying X and that’s wrong or you got this detail wrong and all of that. ” I want to talk about all of that stuff, but then there were a lot of people who were just upset literally. I mean, the comments on Twitter seemed to be mostly people who literally wouldn’t even watch it because it was like, how dare a non-Mormon talk about Mormonism? And to make it more absurd, Jacob Hansen’s been on Pints. I did a dialogue with Jacob Hansen and a Protestant pastor. We had a debate. We’ve been on capturing Christianity together. So it isn’t as if I’m not willing to talk to LDS apologists or people who represent that perspective. I’m happy to.
Mike:
We have a comment from a viewer that I think is actually relevant to this. The great wa asks, why not just read the documents and articles of faith speaking to general followers of a faith is hit or miss on actually getting good information. That’s been my experience at least. And you addressed some of this in your interview on Pines.
Joe:
Yeah. I think, because one of the things I was particularly trying to do is to say this historic belief, there’s been a reversal on it. And so looking just at the present documents without saying, “Here’s this earlier bit of preaching or here’s this earlier lecture at the veil or here’s this earlier removed part of doctrines and covenants.” Even the name doctrines and covenants no longer makes sense because that whole section got removed. Comparing those two things isn’t possible if you’re just going from the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints website where all of that stuff is kind of downplayed or scrubbed completely. And also for all the reasons solo scriptura doesn’t work, just expecting people to read the articles of confession or the documents of your faith and come away accurately understanding everything about it, like to just say like, “Here’s a book of Mormon.
Now you understand if everything Mormonism teaches or here are the standard works, now you’ve got everything.” That’s not as workable as I think people imagine it to be. It’s great to say, “I heard somebody claim that you guys believe this and I’m going to cross reference that with official sources.” But I do think if you want a sense of the lived reality of the thing, you sort of have to talk to the people living that reality.
Isaac:
Yep. I agree. And maybe the last comment I’ll make on this, and maybe we should go on to just some of the other critiques that people have made, but there’s different types of conversations as well. So the conversation you were having with Matt, it would’ve been a very different conversation if a practicing Latter Day Saint had been there. It would’ve been inevitably sort of turned into some kind of debate or something like that.
Joe:
Yeah, absolutely. And
Isaac:
I’m happy to do that, but you’re right that it’s a different conversation. But it’s also good and fine also to have conversations between people who maybe agree and they’re discussing a different topic and I don’t know. So I agree that no one should silo themselves from criticism or from trying to really … But I think that it’s hard to make that charge against you. It’s true that Catholics and Latter Day Saints have their own lingo. And so certainly there are times when you and Matt would say something I think that I understood what you meant, but I think wouldn’t necessarily translate well. I can’t think of a specific example right now.
Joe:
Well- I can think of one where I got confused by something in a Latter Day Saint source that I referenced and was corrected on. I’ll get to that in a little bit. But when we talk about the protection from error in the temple, when it talks about the elders of Israel being protected from falling into error in the temple, Brigham Young
Isaac:
Teaches- You’re talking the Tabernacle.
Joe:
Sory, Tabernacle. There it is. This is exactly what I’m talking about. Yes, I did mean to say Tabernacle that I read that and it’s like, yeah, okay. So he’s going to preach something in the tabernacle and it’s basically ex- catheter and the word radio guys just laughed at that. You’re importing a Catholic idea of infallibility, that it’s rather a protection of the people rather than a protection of the individual leader. You know what I’m talking about there?
Isaac:
Yes. I can …
Joe:
I do know
Isaac:
What you’re talking about.
Joe:
And I’m sure we can talk more about that as we go, because that’s relevant for Adam God and it’s relevant for some of the stuff about the curse of Cain that Brigham Young said, where he would preach these things that actually were errors in the tabernacle and they weren’t corrected. But how that kind of works out in terms of what it means for his authority and status as a prophet is something that obviously people are going to disagree. All
Mike:
Right. So let’s get into a few of these clips here.
Joe:
One good joke that I wanted to make sure people saw that Isaac, you’re a latte desaint.
Isaac:
Yeah, I saw that.
Joe:
Yeah, I thought that was pretty good. Okay. So yeah, actually there was one other question I wanted to ask you real quick, Isaac. How can non-Mormons navigate this? Because I think the danger on the Mormon side is that it honestly looks a little culty. Now, I don’t think Church Jesus Christ Latter Day saints is a cult, but I do think when you say don’t talk to outsiders, don’t listen to them when they talk about your religion, don’t receive criticism from them, or when that’s the impression you give to the outside world, that gives, I think, a false impression of being cult-like, where I think it’s just kind of a bubble. I think all of us can really fall into that. But on the non-Mormon side, knowing that any critique, any question might run into that sort of response, do you have any tips for how to navigate that?
Isaac:
That’s a good question. And again, I think the way to navigate it would depend again on the style of conversation that you’re having, right? So if you’re in dialogue with a Latter-day Saint, then ask them what they think about what you’re saying. Don’t tell people this is … One thing that is always frustrating to someone, especially if you’re talking to them, is if you say, “You believe X, you believe Y.”
Joe:
Don’t even do that in your marriage.
Isaac:
Yes, that’s a great … Very true. Instead, what you can say from a Catholic point of view, what you can say is the Catholic church teaches X, the Catholic church teaches Y. That can even be difficult within Mormonism as well, because there’s not a unified doctrine in Mormonism about what constitutes doctrine. And so this can be very frustrating sometimes. You and Matt spoke about this a little bit about how you’re trying to critique and understand LDS teaching and theology, but it seems like anytime you get a grasp on it, someone comes along and says, “Hey, that’s not what we believe, or that’s not what we think, or I don’t believe that, whatever.” So if you really want to get in the weeds, I think the best thing to do is to look up the specific critique that you want. And you could say something like, “Latter Day Saint Prophets taught X.”That
Can be a true statement that’s easy to defend. And if you want to engage with a Latter Day Saint, like suppose you’re talking about Adam God theory, I think you can very defensively and clearly say Brigham Young taught the Adam God doctrine. So what does that mean? What are the implications? Was it a church doctrine? That’s a different question. Was it something that was to be believed on pain of sin or something?That’s a very Catholic terminology. By the way, Latter Day Saints wouldn’t speak that way. I’m translating this into... Read more on Catholic.com