know what you mean.

But I literally felt myself going numb.

I felt my hands on the keyboards going numb.

I was having such a big stress response from reading those words.

And it wasn't just that he was coming home.

It was, I could tell just by reading between the lines, he's going to leave the church.

And guess what? That was not on my map.

know

So what did you discover and what was some of the most interesting things that you share in the book? Maybe some of the stats of like what's going on.

How about I give you kind of a top, you know, a box score as baseball guys.

Yes.

And then we can get into, you know, the sort of the heart of it.

But.

When I got back from my mission, my first counselor when I was a bishop in Midway left with his wife and three kids, and that was another catalyst where I said, okay, I feel like I have this unique perspective.

I was husband, father, bishop, BYU faculty, worked for the church, mission president.

Okay,

it's a good question.

Yeah, and Valerie, I'm going to just share some interesting insights and a little bit of data to give listeners just a sense for the issue.

By the way, I think most people get the issue, right? Because they're, particularly your audience, because you're living on the edge of this tension, right? And if you're a very traditional, devout Orthodox Latter-day Saint, you're kind of going, what tension? This is perfect.

The culture of the church is perfect.

Perfect for me, at least.

And so one of the interesting things We asked people in our survey, who should feel most at home in the culture of the church? And we gave them three answers to pick from.

The first answer was everyone.

The pain itself and then the pain that comes from being given a premise through the church sometimes that life is not what it actually is.

So say more about how you use this concept of culture really for the rest of the book.

Yeah, I'd love to.

In fact, this is another manifestation of a blind spot that I had, Valerie, that I was able to recognize with some help.

But if you asked 100 people what culture means, you might get 100 different answers, right? And so I make the argument, for reasons we can get into if you want, that culture is a central issue in all of this.

And so remember when we were talking about waves hitting the beach? Culture's like the riptide, the undercurrent on the beach that pulls you out to sea, regardless of what the waves are doing.

But culture's also the lifesaver on the beach that drags you out of the surf and resuscitates you on the beach, right? And so while the reasons people cite are critical, And I don't in any way reduce the significance of those.

Culture either amplifies those or relieves those tensions.

Okay, so would you, if you...

Say a little bit about what they said as to their reasons of disaffiliation.

Yeah, happy to do that.

And hey, by the way, just for point of reference, there hasn't been a lot of criticism of the book yet.

There's been a little bit of criticism of some of our research methods, and we can talk that now or later if you want.

Nothing that we weren't aware of and nothing that we actually didn't put very transparently in the book.

But nobody's really pushed back on the 40% number.

And now the reason they haven't is you can't really.

So Valerie,

A

monstrosity that was on my wall.

But, you know, the main premise of the book is that we're losing a significant number of people and it's for the four waves that we've talked about.

But underlying those is sort of this electricity of the kind of culture that's running through the community and that we have an opportunity to address some of our cultural weaknesses.

We have many, many cultural strengths.

But we have some weaknesses and we have an opportunity to address those.

And so the book really talks about what the cultural challenges are and how the gospel of Jesus Christ can help inform our perspective so that we can better deal with them.

And does that take us into the four cultural imbalances then?

Yeah.

So you asked wh- you know, why, why people step away.Um, in our, in our research, people cited four primary reasons.

So the first is lifestyle, about 6%.

It's just not working for them.

They feel it's, it's not about doubt, it's about depletion.

The second is church history, about 42%.

So people would say, "Hey, I just no longer believe the church is what it claims to be." The third area is social issues, and this is, this is one that's very common across all religions, is people sometimes struggle with balancing, uh, our church's position on social...

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

And so I sort of sat there at my keyboard slowly going numb.And, uh, I don't, I don't know why, but I just had a sense this was about much- something much bigger than him coming home from his mission.

And I knew, I knew he was gonna leave the church.

And so that, that was the catalyst.

Now, I was serving at a bishop, as a bishop in Midway at the same time, and, uh, it was in the River Road Ward, and we had just formed the new ward.

So I was meeting lots of people in the ward for the first time, and there were a number of Latter-day Saint families or members of that ward who were leaving the church.

And so I'm looking at my son, I'm looking at these good people in the River Road Ward that, that were leaving, and none of them fit the profile that I had in my head at the time, right? The, the profile back then was, you know, yeah, people have always left the church.

Yeah