Mark Oppenheimer: Is it significant that the King James Bible is so beautiful and the Book of Mormon is so clunky and badly written, or do you not accept the premise?

Zachary Davis: I don’t think you’re wrong that there is less overall grace in the writing of the Book of Mormon. One thing that I think about a lot is how does the human and the divine interact in the world? God isn’t going to completely take over the writing of a text. He’s working through human beings. And so you’ve got this 19th-century farm boy, Joseph, who did not train to be a great writer, was not a highly educated person. And so when he’s interacting with the divine to produce this text, I would expect it to be rather clunky. There are passages of great beauty and overall there’s an enormous complexity and beauty in it. But Mark Twain famously called it chloroform in print, and there are some areas where it’s hard to disagree.

MO: I’m Mark Oppenheimer and you were listening to ARC, the podcast. It is the audio companion to the online magazine ARC: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, which is online at arcmag.org. Both of these — the podcast and the web zine — are productions of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, all of which is a very long way of saying that I’m so delighted to be back with you. We’ve had a couple of weeks off and now I have a lot of podcasts rolling your way in the summer months. Coming up soon: a podcast interview with Paul Elie of Georgetown University. He did a book on religion and art in the 1980s. I have a joint session with the poet Christian Wiman and the theologian Miroslav Volf, who have co-written an epistolary book — a book of their letters back and forth to each other dealing with matters of God, faith, death, family, and more.
Tomorrow, as it happens, I am interviewing Amy Laura Hall, the Duke University theologian and ethicist, about her new book about muscular Christianity in American history. So lots of good stuff to come. But for today I’m talking with Zachary Davis. He is the co-founder and editor of the magazine Wayfare, which is online at wayfaremagazine.org. Wayfare is about Latter-day Saint — or what used to be called Mormon — culture, and I mean that in the broadest possible sense. It’s about Latter-day Saint history and Latter-day Saint culture and Latter-day Saint politics. It also runs fiction and poetry and what the Latter-day Saints call oratory, which is like testimony or sermonizing. It’s kind of one-stop shopping for the most cutting-edge and latest in creative Latter-day Saint thinking. And in my interview with him, I talk about all of those questions, as well as the question of Mormon rebranding.
The title “Mormon” has been dropped from everything. There’s not even a Mormon Tabernacle Choir anymore — it’s just the Tabernacle Choir. So that, of course, was at the forefront of my mind. But we talked about all sorts of stuff, and it’s a really fun interview. And I invite you to kick back, drink a cold beverage — but not one with caffeine, for that would not be appropriate to the moment — and have a listen to my conversation with Zachary Davis//

Zachary Davis, welcome to ARC, the podcast.

ZD: Thank you, Mark. So good to be with you.

MO: So I have a lot of questions to ask you, my Latter-day Saint friend, but let me start off by asking about your Latter-day Saint upbringing. You’ve written about it recently. I read you had a great Substack post, actually pretty recently, in January, about your whole history growing up as a Mormon, how you were raised as a Mormon. And by the way, is it offensive for me to say “Mormon” now that the church has asked everyone to say “Latter-day Saint”? Why don’t you give us a position on that before we go any further?

ZD: Yeah, a few years ago, the president of the church, whose name was Russell M. Nelson, asked members of the church and the media to start referring to the church not as the Mormon church, or its members as Mormons, but as the full name of the church: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And so its members would be Latter-day Saints. That is a mouthful. And for 200 years, people have been using the term Mormon. It was originally a derogatory nickname — like most derogatory nicknames, the people eventually embraced it. I think it’s still acceptable to call people Mormons, and I often still use the term, but there are some people who feel like it’s more respectful to use the full name.

MO: Here’s a question. When it was a slur, what did Mormons want to be called, say in 1850 or 1860? Latter-day Saints?

ZD: Probably Latter-day Saints.

MO: I mean, good luck to that. That was a mouthful then as well.

ZD: Exactly.

MO: But okay. But I have your hechsher, as we Jews would say — your permission, your kosher certification — to say Mormon.

ZD: You have a dispensation. Absolutely. You can refer to —

MO: — it. Got it. Now, you’re a journalist and an editor. Do you ever feel bullied by these style book things that some newspapers and magazines give into — like the way the National Association of Realtors wants us to capitalize “Realtor,” because not every real estate agent is a capital-R Realtor? Have you dealt with that?

ZD: Well, I think it’s appropriate for everyone to rebel against tyranny in their own way. And so refusing to use certain linguistic constraints is one way to do that.

MO: I feel like I’ve been a lowercase realtor and I’m going to keep calling you Mormons. And if the Latter-day Saint Defamation League wants to come for me, so be it. So you wrote a very moving post about how you grew up, and maybe you could just summarize that for us a little bit. And I’m particularly curious how typical your rearing was. One of the things that people outside any religion tend to think when they look inside it is that everyone inside it is the most traditional or fundamentalist form of it. And I know enough to know that there are all kinds of Mormon upbringings. And I’m curious if yours was — if your household and your parents were giving you the kind of down-the-middle-of-the-road, not too far to the left, not too far to the right, not too lax, not too hardcore one. Were you more hardcore? Tell me a little bit about your Latter-day Saint rearing.

ZD: Yeah. So I wanted to meet the writer Paul Kingsnorth, and he was —

MO: Me too. The motherfucker cancelled on me like seven times and then wrote a blog post saying, “I’m not doing any more media until the Millennium comes or something.” So anyway, carry on, carry on.

ZD: Yeah. So I read his conversion story in First Things a few years ago and read some of his earlier writing. I was like, “This guy is amazing.” And I was so captivated by his journey. And I saw that he was coming to speak at an event in Wyoming called the Doomer Optimism Campout, up at this kind of dissident right headquarters called the Wagon Box, in rural Wyoming. I was going to be in Utah for the summer and I was like, “I think I can swing that event.”

MO: This is an event for an audience of a hundred, and you and I are two of the hundred who are — bring it on. Doomer Optimism, Wyoming, bring it.

ZD: Exactly, exactly. Just tickled all my right-brain zones. And so I registered, I decided to come up, and they invited me to give a 10-minute address. And the whole gathering was about imagining alternative futures for the country, kind of rethinking what utopia looks like. And so I took that opportunity to think about what did I really learn and experience as a Latter-day Saint growing up, and what lessons does my experience have for all these people who are trying to rethink the future of American life — and especially formation. And that concept, formation, became really salient and interesting to me because I had taken it for granted just how many rites of passage I had actually undergone as a Latter-day Saint. And I would say my family was pretty normal, pretty typical, not extremely hardcore, but definitely committed. Grew up in a southern Utah town called St. George — beautiful red bluffs surrounding the town — and right smack dab in the middle of the city is the LDS temple, this big white massive building. And so the entire city was oriented around this sacred purpose, this sacred House of the Lord. And so in my little talk, in this little essay that you read, I just went through my entire upbringing. I was blessed as a baby in front of the congregation. When I turned 8, I was baptized and given the Holy Ghost. When I was 12, I was given the priesthood and ordained every two years to a different office to kind of help me grow into a young man. I then, like many Latter-day Saints, went on a mission to Spain, served for two years, lived like a monk, praying and sacrificing and serving and teaching. And then I came home and got married. And our marriage ritual is in these temples — sacred structural commitments that ask you to try to live up to sacred values. And I just thought about there were so many ways in which my soul was being trained by my community. And I look at secular life and secular culture and all of those are missing. There are very few rites of passage, except —

MO: — for kind of college. You get your iPad at 4, you get your first video game console at 10, you get your smartphone at 12.

ZD: That’s right. That’s right. And so that’s all baked into the church. Are there families that kind of drop the ball on some of those? Or if you’re growing up Latter-day Saint, especially in Utah where the culture is so thick on the ground, is everyone doing all of those?

ZD: Yeah. I was just looking at this Ryan Burge graph and he looked at religious engagement across the entire Western world, and Utah is number one, and then Poland, and then some of these other ones. So there are very high rates of activity in Utah. And I bring that up because basically you either go to church most weeks, in which case you are an active Mormon, or you might be kind of just very lax and you might self-identify but not really go to church. So it’s either church attenders or not. If you are going to church regularly, you are going through all those rites of passage, and your children are brought up and given all these experiences.

MO: So this is one of the things that I’ve always thought was interesting about Mormonism — and by the way, I would say the same thing about Islam — is that you don’t ever seem to have had, and this might be in the case of Mormonism because the church is so young — you’ve never had a reformation where some group has said, “Okay, this is fine, but that’s Orthodox or fundamentalist or literalist Mormonism.” And I love the culture, but I don’t want to go every week, and maybe I’m living in Des Moines or New York City so the cultural pressure isn’t there. So I want to join this slightly more chill church — or stake, you would say — where people go once a month or they go on the big holy days or whatever, and otherwise I’ll join the softball league and I’ll bring my kids for the rituals, for the bar mitzvah so to speak, and the confirmation, first communion, to put it in Catholic or Jewish terms. But this every-week thing? How am I going to make partner at McKinsey? I’m not Mitt Romney, I’m not a superhero. How am I going to make partner at Bain if I’m literally going to church every single week? I’ve got to be working. It’s so interesting to me, if I’m correct, that the church has never had that. There’s no sort of — and what’s more, it would be considered so completely illegitimate, right? If the ethos of a given church in the diaspora somewhere was like, “You don’t have to really do all this all the time” — what Reformed Judaism is — that wouldn’t work in Mormonism. Am I right?

ZD: Yeah, that is right. Like Catholics, we have a central hierarchy, which means schism is tough because if you’re not in communion with Salt Lake City, you’re not really a member of the church. There have been many breakoff communities, however. And in fact, there is a group that you could call reform Mormonism, and that is formerly what was called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they are the people who stayed in Illinois —

MO: Missouri. Oh, Illinois. Okay.

ZD: — and didn’t move west with Brigham Young. And you’re right, they moved to Missouri. And so they are now called the Community of Christ, and they don’t take the Book of Mormon as literally true in the same way. So that’s a kind of liberal version —
MO: — of Mormonism. But there’s like 117 of them. There are not many. And they’re basically liberal Protestants at this point. That’s right. In other words, they’re not continuing to do Mormonism, but just less turbocharged.

ZD: That’s right.

MO: The schisms, as far as I know, are all to the right. It’s all people who want to keep polygamy or keep an older, more traditional form of what they see as pure Mormonism. They’re functionally — again, except this Community of Christ — there’s no schism to the left. Which the Catholic Church and Judaism — I mean, the Catholic Church had it, I would call it the Reformation, “left” is sort of the wrong term — but they took some stuff out and kept calling themselves Christians, and were like, “Well, the Pope won’t agree, but who cares?” We’re not in the Vatican. And Jews, of course, do that all the time. I find that remarkable, that there’s no group. I’ve always thought this would happen in New York, where I’ve known many Mormons who are kind of — they still culturally identify as Mormon, they still say they’re Mormon, but they’ve stopped going. But they still want to have dinner and play softball with other Mormons because they recognize each other culturally. They get each other and that feels comfortable. Totally understandable. But then I’ve said to them, “Well, why don’t you guys — you seem to miss church ritual — why don’t you get a thing going?” And sure, and you guys don’t care that several of you are living with your partners without marriage and you’re smoking, you’re vaping and doing your weed, and some of your friends are gay and have tattoos. But that’s okay. No one’s stopping you in America from coming together on Sundays and saying, “Well, we’re doing church.” And they look at me like it’s literally a logical impossibility. They’re like, “Well, that just wouldn’t be Mormonism.” And I say, “Well, it would be if you called it that.” Lutherans kept calling what they did Christianity. Reformed Jews keep calling it Judaism. And you get to name it — it’s a fact on the ground because it’s a free country. Nobody’s going to kill you. And your friends — I won’t know the difference. Your schmucky friends on the Upper West Side will believe you, just do it. And they can’t. Why is that? Why is the deference to normative Mormonism so unquestionable? I’m not saying it would be a good thing. I don’t care which way Mormons go. I’m not advocating for it. I’m interested in, culturally, why the deference to normative Mormonism seems so unbreakable.

ZD: Yeah. A lot of these things have a great deal of respect for authority and deference to the leadership. Primary kids sing a song called “Follow the Prophet.” And I remember singing this song and marching around the Primary room. And you look at it now and you’re like, “That’s unusual.” That’s very unusual. So there’s all these dynamics of maybe reform or conservative, they tend to play out within the congregations. Uniquely among many churches, you can’t church-shop in LDS congregations. You have to go to the congregation that you are geographically bounded by. And so that means you don’t get to choose your favorite pastor and you don’t really get to choose the teachings. Everything is standard, standard doctrine across the community. So what you then get is just, if you live in coastal cities, you have a more liberal expression of Mormonism. And if you live in a suburb of Salt Lake, it’s more conservative. And so there hasn’t been a schism because nobody would have the gumption to start their own branch of the church except for a truly deranged wannabe cult leader.

MO: First of all, I want to say that’s interesting because Catholicism, I think, used to be that parishes were geographical and sometimes ethnic. After Vatican II, when the mass went into the vernacular, the Poles said, “Well, we want a Polish mass,” and the Ukrainians said, “We want a Ukrainian mass.” So in Chicago, you could ethnically or linguistically church-shop. But basically they used to have geographical parishes, and that probably gave a kind of unity like what you’re talking about. And then the expressions played out within the parish, but not among them. But then these days they let people parish-shop. And I’ve never heard a Catholic talk about some of the downstream effects of that, but probably there are a lot of downstream effects. I mean, in New Haven, of the Catholics I know who go to church, a lot of them don’t go to the local neighborhood — they go downtown to the Yale Catholic Center, which is more, quote, intellectual or liberal or whatever. Or the traditionalists, the trads, go over to St. Mary’s, which I think is run by the Dominicans and is more traditional. But nobody’s going to St. Aidan’s in the neighborhood, which is just like mainstream. And so all that shopping allows them each to have a character. It’s interesting to me — it didn’t occur to me that the resistance to church-shopping probably does a lot to promote conformity. I still guess I would ask one more time — maybe there’s no sense in pressing on this — but when you say anyone who set up their own church would be some sort of cult leader, maybe that is how it all starts. The people who kind of started doing Reformed Judaism weren’t cult leaders. I think what they were — I’m thinking standing on one foot now — they were recognizing the reality that a lot of Jews in urban Europe were not doing traditional Orthodox Judaism. They’d stopped doing it altogether, they’d become highly assimilated. There were certainly a community of Mormons like that who moved to the big city and just stopped doing it. And so certain rabbis gathered them in and met them where they were and said, “Okay, so you’re not keeping the Sabbath and you’re not eating kosher. We’re going to start creating a liberal Judaism.” They wouldn’t have described what they were doing as being this instrumentalist, but in effect what they were doing was creating a Judaism that appealed to these lapsed Jews because it put fewer demands on them. What would happen if some fairly devout Mormon thought, “Well, we’ve got a few thousand Mormons on the island of Manhattan who just aren’t coming at all. I’m going to give them a parish — a stake, you would say — where the preaching is where they’re at.” I mean, I guess they’d get smacked down, but someone in Salt Lake would say, “We’re going to excommunicate you if you do this.”

ZD: That’s right. They’d be excommunicated. And then the question is, how many people would really want to be part of a schismatic small Mormon offshoot? And this is something that sociologists have looked at — is Mormonism an ethnicity like Judaism? Is that bond enduring enough to go beyond this communion with Salt Lake, this part of being part of the institution? And there are aspects of our community that feel ethnic. When I go to Utah, I’m like, “Oh, I’m with my people” — in a very different —

MO: — I’m in the homeland. Yeah.

ZD: Exactly. The way you look, the way you smile at me — everything about you is like, there’s blood going on here. And yet it’s not truly an ethnicity where, you know, like Christian communities, it’s very multicultural, there’s all kinds of people. It’s not actually a tribe. And so it doesn’t endure past institutional affiliation — at least so far. Here’s what I’ll say. You’re actually seeing all these dynamics play out in media. Media platforms are where these energies are being directed. In the ’60s and ’70s, there were some new groups that emerged to give expression to a more liberal Mormonism. One was a magazine started in Palo Alto by one of our greatest intellectuals, Eugene England, called Dialogue. And then a decade later in Salt Lake, a group called Sunstone began and started having symposia to talk about issues, face the tough things. Both of those institutions still exist. But there were excommunications for anyone who became too outspoken in their criticisms of the church. And in fact, there was a famous address that specifically warned members, “Don’t go to symposia. They’re dangerous.” So there’s been a lot of anxiety about this. In the last 10 years, though, the rise of the internet, the rise of podcasts, the rise of these new platforms have given voice to a lot of different charisms of Latter-day Saint life. And Faith Matters, the group that I work with, very much feels like it’s a place for people with a different spiritual sensibility to find a home. And we have these big gatherings. We had a conference — we have one every September — and the last one we had 5,000 people. And what you hear again and again is people saying, “Oh, I found my people.” So there is a desire to find a tighter unity and a spiritual orientation. But a great strength of the community is that we’re part of one big whole. And I think that that’s important — to learn how to love people that you don’t like.

MO: It just occurred to me that the reason there are so many Catholic parishes where they preach against the Pope, to be perfectly blunt, or very much downplay certain aspects of the Catechism, is because the Catholic Church is pretty reluctant to excommunicate anyone. They don’t wield that. And my sense, both from my own reporting over the years and from hearing you talk, is that the Latter-day Saint hierarchy is pretty free about excommunicating. They will lower that boom — you go to the wrong symposium, you might get excommunicated. Whereas in Catholicism, you really at this point have to be actively undermining the church. It can’t just be an in-gathering of people where you share your disagreements week after week. Even as a priest, you have a lot of latitude to dissent before you’d be excommunicated. It’s almost unheard of. And Catholics don’t want to be excommunicated. So that freedom gives them a lot of space to be all kinds of parishes, including ones that seem to radically dissent on sexuality, on all sorts of political questions, et cetera. But who is it who excommunicates? Is it the president? Is it the quorum of the twelve? Is it —

ZD: — who makes that call? That’s right. So there’s a president, and then there’s a quorum of twelve apostles. And yet for a prominent critic who is openly antagonistic towards leadership and towards doctrine, they would be excommunicated. There’s lots of room to dissent, especially privately. If you go to a gathering, you’re not going to be excommunicated. But anybody who sets themselves up —

MO: It’s not the East German Stasi. No one’s turning you in. They’re not bugging your hotel room. Got it. Okay.

ZD: But you’re right that the boundaries are maintained more firmly than in other faith communities. There are constantly more liberal podcasters who either do get excommunicated or they get threatened with excommunication if they don’t stop. This happens frequently, so people know that.

MO: Is there a principal enforcer? Is there a guy in an office in Utah who’s monitoring social media podcasts — the stuff that the 97-year-olds who are the top, top people don’t do — but there’s an office of ideological conformity, the OIC, that listens to podcasts on Spotify, figuring out whom to threaten with excommunication. There must be, right? Who is it?

ZD: Mark, are you asking if there’s a Grand Mormon Inquisitor?

MO: Kind of. Kind of. Is there a GMI? There must be. But in all seriousness, there has to be, right? How does it filter up if there’s not someone whose job it is to listen to this stuff?

ZD: Yeah, there surely are. It’s not clear to me who exactly has that role, but the church does manage and look at what’s happening in the media sphere. There is a communications department.

MO: So let’s talk about culture a little bit. Again, I’m always thinking in terms of my own people, the Jews. If you try to threaten Jews with excommunication for going to the wrong synagogue or the wrong havurah — prayer group, fellowship, whatever — like, most Jews I know would be like, “Dude, fuck you. Excommunicate me? What is this? Is this 17th-century Holland? Am I one of your Spinozas? I’m going to keep going. I’m going to eat challah with whom I want. I’m going to watch the Super Bowl with whom I want. I’m going to eat what I want. You’re going to tell me I’m not a Jew? Fuck you.” Why does this work among Mormons? I mean, there’s a cultural aspect — it’s not just the marching around singing the ode to the prophet, which by the way, I totally want to get a YouTube video of and see if we can import that somehow to Judaism. I’m going to show it to my rabbi. I realize your devotion is — is it to Joseph Smith? Is it to the head of the quorum of the twelve? Whom are you singing to when you’re 8 years old honoring the Prophet?

ZD: Yeah. Well, “Follow the Prophet” would be: follow the living prophet, the current president of the church. But there is a great hymn to Joseph Smith called “Praise to the Man,” which is a great rousing hymn.

MO: So again, in Judaism, if you tried that, people would just roll their eyes and be like, “Dude, come on.” There is a cultural aspect that must precede and undergird the actual threat of excommunication. And I’m curious, how did that get built like that? And it’s not just the deference to authority — you guys joke about this, the Mormon smile, the optimism. There’s a whole cultural vibe, and it’s the thing you feel when you go home to Utah: “Oh, these are my people.” Did it come from the first Mormons and then get transmitted? Does it have to do with the kind of converts you attract, who therefore come in and re-infuse that vibe? How do you explain the persistence of the vibe?

ZD: Persecution creates bonds and loyalty and in-group trust. And so the story of Mormonism was being persecuted and attacked and fleeing from state to state until Joseph Smith was murdered in Illinois, and Brigham Young took most of the Saints across the West and settled in Utah — called Deseret — for a while. And for many, many decades, this was a very isolated community, hated and mocked by the rest of the country. And so a great deal of in-group bonds were created, which persist. It’s a community of very high trust, high social trust. Why are we polite? Well, I think it’s because we want to be liked, and we know we’re not. We’re the least liked religion in the country, below atheists and Muslims. It’s kind of astonishing for a group that tries so hard to be nice and liked to still be so hated. And it’s a conundrum and a question that nobody really knows what to do with.

MO: I don’t think you have an answer for this, but I’ll put out there an interesting question, which is: everything you’ve said could be said of Jews. The historical persecution, the eagerness to be liked. And somehow, although Jews — when they do these surveys — Jews actually come out pretty near the top in terms of people’s opinions of them as a group. And it’s also true that there are more antisemitic attacks every year, not just in absolute terms, but you’re more likely to be attacked for being Jewish, according to the FBI, the Anti-Defamation League, others, than you are if you’re a member of any other group. So it’s weird. There’s sort of high reverence, but also the people who hate us are very vocal and very active, and I think there are more people looking to go punch a Jew than there are looking to go punch a Mormon.

ZD: Right, right. No, I think that’s right.

MO: The real crazies go for Jews. So everything you’re saying is true-ish. And the result has been a high-irony, low-deference culture — as if the way you survive is by always being able to wisecrack about it. That’s a very rough statement that applies less and less to the younger generations, but I’m talking about the Jewish humor that we would talk about. There’s a reason that Jews were good at literature and building Hollywood and joke writing and all those things, which are things that Latter-day Saints have been historically bad at. I mean, it’s the opposite thing, which is: you’re much too polite to write really good shows. And so it’s interesting that the oppression, the in-group solidarity, the skepticism from the Gentiles — which would be the people we’d call Gentiles, and you would call Gentiles, the out-groups — has led to different, if not characters, at least character stereotypes. That’s interesting.

ZD: Yeah, it’s interesting. Maybe there are doctrinal differences. What would account for this difference? I mean, 200 years versus what, 4,000 years? Maybe we’ve just had less time.

MO: That is part of it. I once wrote a piece that Latter-day Saints loved — that other people thought was bigoted against the Latter-day Saints, but Latter-day Saints thought was dead on — which was basically a column asking Mormons: why are there no great Mormon novelists? Why is Mormon art a hundred years behind the times? And as you know, there are good Mormon genre writers — science fiction, fantasy, et cetera — but sort of high literary fiction, the kind of film that wins Oscars, that sort of thing is not — even though Mormons are successful in so many other areas, it’s not an area. Singing, yes, but not writing Oscar-winning scripts or novels or things like that. And Mormons loved the piece and sent me all sorts of emails saying, “I think about this all the time. I’m getting an MFA and I’m wondering, how do I do it as a Mormon?” And the general consensus from a lot of people who wrote to me was: we don’t do psychological complexity. We brush past it and are just supposed to smile and forge ahead. And of course, a lot of this art relies on plumbing the dark depths and the psychological complexity and embracing it and seeing it as the interesting stuff of life. Does that sound right?

ZD: Yeah, I think that’s part of it. So Latter-day Saints aspire to theosis. We believe that we are ontologically on the same spectrum as God, and we are gods in embryo, and we are trying to become like our heavenly parents. What that means is we have a pretty strong emphasis on becoming perfect and taking that literally. And the way that becoming perfect is interpreted is to do everything right, to always be kind, always be compassionate. And that can lead to sometimes very boring personalities.

MO: I didn’t say that.

ZD: You can’t integrate tragedy as well. Latter-day Saint funerals can sometimes be very unusual because you’re not really supposed to be too sad, because you’re supposed to have such great faith that you will see your loved one again. I always felt uncomfortable with that — there’s a little bit too much of a “put on a smile.” So I think integrating darkness, integrating tragedy, that’s something that we need to work on as a people. And until we do that, our art is going to be flatter than I wish it were. That’s something I’m working on. My magazine, Wayfare, is very much emphasizing art. We’re working on creating a new theater company, starting a press with fiction. But yeah, as we approach 200 years, it’s time that we try to live up to our potential as a people when it comes to art.

MO: That was the first of two parts of my interview with Zachary Davis, editor of Wayfare magazine. I want to reiterate that his magazine is online at wayfaremagazine.org. And as I said, a lot of good stuff coming up in the pod — not just guests that I have, but guests of two other podcasts — because we are expanding into a podcast studio. We will be adopting two lonely orphan podcasts that currently are independently produced and debuting them in a matter of weeks. I’m not going to tell you what they are right now because this whole delicate process is still underway, but we’re growing. ARC is going to become more than just ARC the podcast. It’s going to become ARC the podcast and its two baby brother or baby sister podcasts. So more news on that in the coming weeks. All the more reason that you should be listening. If you’re listening, you should be subscribing on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your fine premium audio earbud products. You should be rating us, giving us five stars, helping other people find us in the algorithm. And if you have any questions, concerns, comments, briefs, complaints, write to me. I’m at mark.o@wustl.edu. That’s wustl.edu. It stands for Washington University St. Louis, but around campus we just say Wustl. mark.o@wustl.edu. Tell me what your beefs are, but also give me suggestions for podcast guests. I would love to interview more people in this space around religion, spirituality, politics, and culture that we have claimed as our own. And now back to the second and final part of my interview with Zachary Davis, editor of Wayfare magazine.

MO: You wrote: “In my early 20s, I began to ask harder questions about the claims my church made about itself. Questions about the origins of the Book of Mormon, the character of the founder of the church, Joseph Smith, the practice of polygamy, and the likelihood that of all the religions in the world, mine happened to be God’s favorite, chosen one. I had been taught to think about religion in dualistic, true/false ways, and once I applied Enlightenment ways of thinking to my faith, belief as I had known it became unsustainable. That same tendency for fundamentalist black-and-white thinking meant that our tradition does not, by and large, produce complex or beautiful art, nor substantial intellectuals, nor patterns of culture that are deeply attractive to outsiders.” I’ll say I think you’re being a little unfair to your own faith that way, but you said it, not me. So there are two things you’re saying there, as I take it. One is that there’s a theological problem, and I’m curious if you’ve resolved that. I mean, you said your belief, as you’ve known it, became unsustainable. Did you find a way to have sustainable belief? And then the other thing you’re saying is it’s a problem for art — that it makes it hard to — you say our culture is less good at beauty, mystery, complexity. And so I guess both of those. Number one: where did your belief land? How did you reintegrate your new thinking into a belief? You stayed in the church, you have not been excommunicated. And then the second one would be, what’s the way forward in terms of art? And the answer might just be doing it, with all that in mind.

ZD: Yeah. So I lost my faith in a simple literal Mormonism in my early 20s at college, a lot of it because you could ask all kinds of questions on the internet and get complex answers. And I struggled for years and it led to a great deal of depression and anxiety and confusion. But I was able to stay walking the path and engaged in the question of religion, I think because I had great parents and I grew up in a loving, happy home. As I wrote about in that essay, I had experienced the fruits of genuine spiritual life in community. I knew that the fruits were good, even though I had questions about how this could be literally true. I didn’t know how to make sense of it. So I just kept asking those questions. And a lot of the help that I received was because I had also encountered great spiritual beauty in other traditions. I encountered Chartres Cathedral, like many American tourists to France, and I was like, “Something so powerful is happening here.” That allowed me to think bigger about what God could be, what God means, and what particular expressions of spiritual community could mean as well. And so I began to rethink what it means to walk a true path. And I retained an enormous admiration for Joseph Smith’s theology and his teachings — they’re just an extraordinary set of doctrines that did not really feel completely invented, that Joseph was tapped into something truly divine, truly sacred. And the particulars you could examine with a microscope and find a different kind of answer. But the overall feeling that I began to have, and that I continue to have, is that Mormonism is a genuine expression of the sacred, and our community is a path to God. And since I was given it, it feels like it’s my home and I want to help develop it.

MO: So do you dissent from the traditional teachings of the church on aspects of literalism in the Book of Mormon?

ZD: I would say that for me, the Book of Mormon’s historicity is not as important as the totality of Latter-day Saint theology. And so early on, the Book of Mormon was hardly emphasized by Joseph Smith or the early followers. They didn’t really read it, they didn’t really teach from it. Really, more than anything, it was a sign that Joseph was a true prophet because it was miraculous in origin. And then in the 20th century, the Book of Mormon began to be emphasized and taught a lot more. I still really like the idea that the Book of Mormon is a sign of a true prophet and that there’s so much goodness in it. But whether there were historical Nephites or Lamanites — that just became less of a pressing question for me.

MO: Is it significant that the King James Bible is so beautiful and the Book of Mormon is so clunky and badly written, or do you not accept the premise?

ZD: I don’t think you’re wrong that there is less overall grace in the writing of the Book of Mormon. One thing that I think about a lot is how does the human and the divine interact in the world? God isn’t going to completely take over the writing of a text. He’s working through human beings. And so you’ve got this 19th-century farm boy, Joseph, who did not train to be a great writer, was not a highly educated person. And so when he’s interacting with the divine to produce this text, I would expect it to be rather clunky. There are passages of great beauty, and overall there’s an enormous complexity and beauty in it. But Mark Twain famously called it chloroform in print, and there are some areas where it’s hard to disagree.

MO: My daughter is taking a Mormonism class in college right now and she called me and she said, “Dad, this book is not good.” And I said — that might be unfair to her. She was gentler than that. I think she was hemming and hawing. And I said, “It’s not good.” Yeah. When you have an idea of what a religious text reads like from the King James Bible, or from very beautiful contemporary translations of the Quran — and I don’t know what the Quran reads like in Arabic, or the Torah, and I have some familiarity with the original, and the translations are quite — there’s a very good one that people use now. It feels like the farm boy’s attempt at sounding profound. But I take your point that that’s not the only measure of its divinity, right? So tell me about your organization. You don’t just run a magazine, you run a movement, you run a way of life. What are you doing?

ZD: Yeah, it’s called Faith Matters. It started seven or eight years ago. And actually the very first thing that Faith Matters did was put on a conference about translation — what does translation mean in Mormonism? And it has become a place to ask the biggest questions of life and faith. We have eight podcasts, ranging from the experience of being single to the experience at the temple, and we have a flagship show that has LDS thinkers, secular thinkers, all kinds. We put on conferences, publish books, and we create space for what we imagined to be an expansive Mormonism. And there is a tension between those who think that to be LDS is to just receive what was given and transmit it as received. And there’s another line that imagines we are part of the restoration — we are co-creating this tradition with God, with our inheritance — and we’re more this latter. We want to help develop it. There was a germ seed of Mormonism and it’s still flowering and we want to be part of that.

MO: Well, let me put it this way. Where are you in tension then with other Mormons? What would they be mad at you for? Your greatest critics — what would their criticism of what you’re doing be?

ZD: Typically, the fault line is whether you are quote “ahead of the brethren” — the brethren being the leadership of the church. There are some people, more conservative-minded, who say you shouldn’t propose your own ideas about where the community should go or how they should live. You should wait for instruction from the leadership. The other group would say, “No, we are the church. All the members of the church are the church.” And so we are engaged with the Spirit as well and we need to —

MO: So what’s an idea where you might be accused of being ahead of the brethren?

ZD: Faith Matters doesn’t necessarily say anything ahead of the brethren, but we are willing to ask hard questions and explore where those questions take us. So for example, the origins of polygamy — was polygamy given by God, or did Joseph Smith make a big mistake? We’re willing to ask that question, whether it was all a big mistake. Trying to understand what to do in the cases of LGBT members. We platform a variety of voices. Some of those voices have different views than what the church currently teaches. So more than anything, instead of having an institutional Faith Matters advocacy — which we don’t really do — we at least create the space for the conversation to take place.

MO: And there are people who prefer you not platform those conversations.

ZD: That’s right. So we have a very annoying, bad-faith YouTube critic who looks at everything we do and then cherry-picks the most progressive-sounding things and makes it look like we’re apostate. So that kind of thing happens.

MO: Who’s that? I’ll go check out his YouTube.

ZD: Don’t want to give him any more attention.

MO: No more attention than necessary. Okay. Last question before the lightning round of final questions. There have been some articles — I think McKay Coppins, your co-religionist, might have written some of them. Love McKay. But maybe not, maybe not. But there have been some articles that have talked about the ways in which, going back say to the first Trump presidency, there was a lot of criticism among conservative Republicans in the LDS Church of Trump, or a lot of resistance to his crassness, his rudeness, his lack of politeness, which I take very seriously and I know traditional Mormonism takes very seriously. And that over time, a lot of Mormons just kind of gave up and said, “Well, he’s our leader,” and they kind of moved into his camp. And that the sort of Jon Huntsman-type resistance to him kind of withered away. And Mitt Romney was — that in fact, Romney was encountering more and more people who said, “He’s the leader, he’s good.” And that there was concern that the distinctive Latter-day Saint response to Trump’s outward unchristianity — in terms of how he treats people, how he talks about people, et cetera, leaving his policies aside — was kind of withering, and that Mormons were just looking more and more like other Republicans in how they responded to him. Where do you think that stands now? Do you think that’s true?

ZD: Yeah, Utah is a little more moderate than other states. Latter-day Saints are definitely more accepting of immigration because of all the missionaries who have served abroad. There are certainly policy differences. I think Latter-day Saints have made the same kind of compromise many conservative Christians have, which is: we wish he were a nicer guy, but the times are tough and he’s doing the job that we wanted done. I think it’s very helpful to look at Spencer Cox. So Governor Spencer Cox of Utah — I’ve watched his choices and his speeches very closely. He very controversially endorsed Trump after being an open critic, after Trump’s assassination attempt. And he’s justified that endorsement in the face of a lot of pushback by saying, “If you don’t have a seat at the table, you can’t make any positive difference.” So he looked at what Mitt Romney did — who was completely, eventually sidelined, with very little influence and very little power — and decided he’s at least going to be part of the conversation. And my understanding is it’s actually worked. Spencer Cox has been able to have a dialogue with Trump. He’s pushed on certain areas, he’s had some influence. So I think that’s been the compromise position that a lot of Latter-day Saints have made as well. They’re probably looking forward to a less raunchy president one day.

MO: What do you think of Trump?

ZD: I think he’s a bad person — foolish and embarrassing — and I look forward to a better leader one day.

MO: All right. You have time for some quick final questions. If you could have had any other career — within reason, not gold medalist in a sport you’re bad at, or something that involves superpowers — but if you’d made different choices, what would that career maybe have been?

ZD: I think I’d like being in politics. I like connecting with people, I like giving talks. So politics is one path. The more unusual one is: I love branding. I love coming up with names for organizations and companies. I love logo development. So I could have definitely been a New York brand strategist, agency type.

MO: Interesting. What’s a song that makes you nostalgic for a particular moment in time?

ZD: Okay, this is funny. There is a West African musician named Toumani Diabaté. He plays this instrument called the kora — it’s like this guitar-harp-lute thing, and it’s just transcendently beautiful. And he has this album called Elane Road. And I fell in love with my now-wife, Maria, who was from Ukraine, in DC. And she moved back to Ukraine and I followed her in order to get married. And so we ended up living in Ukraine for a year and a half while we were waiting for the green card to go through. And we actually lived separately while I was there because we weren’t married yet. We actually kept the — good Latter-day Saint. I know. So obedient. And I lived in her family’s very tiny Soviet apartment in a poor part of town, and I would listen to that album walking around the pond and trying to imagine what my future would be — again and again, it’s one of the few albums I had. And so every time I hear Toumani Diabaté, I think about my life in Ukraine.

MO: Interesting. How do you support yourself financially?

ZD: So I’m a full-time employee of Faith Matters, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. I fundraise and we have some revenue from the work that we do, and that pays my salary.

MO: What’s a big regret that you have?

ZD: I can’t really say I have big regrets, but here’s a small one. If I’d known I was going to end up doing humanities and theology work as a career, I probably would have studied that more intensely as an undergrad and gotten a leg up — because I did international relations as an undergrad and I thought I was going to go into kind of the political world. So I sometimes wish I’d had all this free time to just read all the classics that now I don’t have time for.

MO: Hey, join the club, man. And finally, can you give our listeners a recommendation — a book, a TV show, a movie, a record — something that you love that you push on people

ZD: My family makes fun of me because I have one book that I tend to give everybody for any kind of gift.

MO: Oh good. Oh good. What is it?

ZD: I’ve probably bought 30 copies of this. It’s a book called The Master and Margarita by a Russian writer —

MO: — a Russian writer.

ZD: — Mikhail Bulgakov. And I love giving this book because it’s not that famous, but it’s a great work of literature, and it also has a personal connection. My father-in-law was the first Mormon convert in Ukraine after the Soviet Union fell, and he had been an atheist scientist. And then he read The Master and Margarita — it has all of these very moving passages of a kind of historical fiction of Jesus — and that converted him to be a believer. And then when the Mormon missionaries came, he was ready to go deeper. And so this book is very beautiful. It’s an exploration of truth-telling in a time of censorship and the power of love. And it’s just so damn funny.

MO: Zachary Davis, thank you so much for your time. This has been great.

ZD: Thank you, Mark.

MO: Thank you so much for listening to my interview with Zachary Davis. Rather than list the upcoming religion holidays, I’m just going to mention that within a matter of days, the World Cup begins, and we are running a piece over at the magazine at arcmag.org by excellent and impressive and expert footballer Dan Friedman of Leeds, England. Friedman’s piece is about the way in which the World Cup — in soccer, or as some say football — is in fact a religion of its own. It’s a religion with pilgrimage sites, with clergy, with theology. He breaks it all down. So if you’re interested in soccer and football and still waiting for America to get the memo that this is the world sport, go over to arcmag.org and read the work that’s coming up within a matter of a few days by Dan Friedman.

ARC is a production of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University. This podcast is produced by me and also by a deputy editor, David Sugarman, who is our editor and producer. I’m sadly no longer working with interns Caroline Coffee and Ben Esther, but we were for over a year and they have graduated, so we wish them well and we will say Kaddish for their absence. So no interns at the moment — just me and David, and our terrific adult, grown-up, fully credentialed colleagues at the Danforth Center. They include Debra Kennard, Abram Van Engen, Mark Valeri, and Sheri Peña. Thanks to all, and good night. Till next time, I’m Mark Oppenheimer and this has been ARC, the podcast.