Mediated Mormons (feat. Rosemary Avance)

Our 21st century digital age provides countless and unprecedented opportunities for identity development and cultural engagement. But how might these new means of social interaction impact religious institutions and their public image?

On today's episode of Scholars & Saints, host Nicholas Shrum seeks out these answers with the help of Oklahoma State University's Professor of Media and Strategic Communications Rosemary Avance. In her recent book, Mediated Mormons: Shifting Religious Identities in the Digital Age, Avance explores how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints created and negotiated its public image during the "Mormon Moment" of the 2010's. Avance and Shrum discuss the different media focuses during this period, including Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, online discussions around caffeine, the Gospel Topics Essays, and more.

You can learn more about Rosemary Avance, her research, and her academic interests by visiting her faculty page.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 4:12 Background
• 15:13 Orientations to Contemporary Mormonism
• 22:40 Constructing Mormon Identity
• 35:35 Caffeine
• 46:35 2012 U.S. Presidential Campaign and Mitt Romney
• 57:55 Gospel Topics Essays and the Digital Age
• 1:09:05 Concluding Questions
• 1:20:32 Outro

Transcript

(00:00) Introduction:

You're listening to Scholars and Saints. The UVA Mormon Studies podcast. I'm your host, Nicholas Shrum, a PhD candidate in American Religions at the University of Virginia. On this podcast, we dive into the academic study of Mormonism. We engage recent and classic scholarship, interview prominent and up-and-coming thinkers in the field, and reflect on Mormonism’s relevance to the broader study of religion. Scholars and Saints is brought to you by support from the Richard Lyman Bushman Endowed Professorship of Mormon Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. The podcast’s goal is to discuss some of the most pressing issues and cutting-edge methods in Mormon studies and put them in conversation with scholarship from the discipline of religious studies. While the podcast content explores Mormonism, the views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any organizations they represent or study, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the University of Virginia. 

Today on the podcast, I speak with Rosemary Avance, a professor of media and strategic communications at Oklahoma State University, about her recent book, Mediated Mormons: Shifting Religious Identities in the Digital Age, published with the University of Utah Press in 2025. According to the publisher, “In this first lengthy treatment of Mormon identities as they intersect with their religious institution, the internet, and modernity during the so-called “Mormon Moment,” Rosemary Avance explores how LDS stakeholders challenged traditional notions of what it means to be Mormon, vying for control of their own public narratives.” Avance’s book is an important investigation into Mormon identity in the twenty-first century. It examines case studies such as the role of caffeine, Mitt Romney’s 2012 U.S. presidential campaign, feminism, Mormon apologetics and dissent, and recent efforts at historical transparency. These case studies, influenced by technology, politics, and other broader cultural contexts, demonstrate that what it means to be a Mormon is quite a complicated question. However, in analyzing these discourses during this pivotal moment, Avance’s study sheds important light on how Mormons specifically, but other religious groups generally, build, challenge, and live out their religious identities in the digital age.  I hope you enjoy today's conversation with Rosemary Avance.

Nicholas Shrum:

Welcome, listeners, to another episode of Scholars & Saints, the UVa Mormon studies podcast. I’m very excited to have Dr. Rosemary Avance, who is an assistant professor of media and strategic communications at Oklahoma State University. Today, we’re going to be talking about Professor Avance’s most recent book, Mediated Mormons: Shifting Religious Identities in the Digital Age, which was recently published with the University of Utah Press at the beginning of 2025. Welcome, Dr. Avance! 

Rosemary Avance:

Thank you so much for having me, Nicholas. Please call me Rosemary. I’m really excited to talk about the book and just Mormon identity in general. 

NS:

Excellent, well, very excited. This was a really interesting read. I want to get into some of your background before we launch into the content of the book. I just have to say, as an anecdote, this was such an interesting read for me, given how I interpreted or experienced the events in your book. So for listeners, Mediated Mormons focuses on the “Mormon Moment” of just over a decade ago, from 2010ish to 2014. And for me, it was fascinating reading this book because I was actually on my Latter-day Saint mission in California, and so to read some of the history and the interpretations of these things, such an eye-opener into how oh I was definitely enmeshed in a lot of these discursive projects that you talk about, so maybe there are others that can relate. But maybe you can give us a brief introduction to you, your education, projects, and what you’re currently doing. 

(04:12) Background

RA:

Yeah, so I was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which we call the “Buckle of the Bible Belt,” which I have since come to learn that lots of people call their hometowns the Buckle of the Bible Belt, which is really weird, but we’re in the middle of evangelical Chrisniatiy, very conservative part of the country. Tulsa itself is a little more diverse. I was raised with a very, kind of insular view and I’d say within that, my family was extremely fundamentalist Christian. I wouldn’t even classify as evangelical. We moved churches so much as a child because my mom couldn’t find one that she felt was biblical enough, so that’s saying something in a place where there's like churches on every street corner. So, I was homeschooled until I was in third grade. And my siblings were homeschooled longer. I'm the youngest of four, so I tell people I learned to read and write out of the King James Bible and I really did. It would be open and I would be copying. So, I grew up in a very conservative Christian environment, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. And when I went to college at the University of Tulsa, I still didn't move out. So I'm still in Tulsa there. I should have probably moved away, but I didn't. But I went to college, you know, to kind of broaden my world view a little bit, but not too much, but a little bit. And I learned I was really great at school. In my family, women don't go to college. Really, no one goes to college. But, you know, I was raised to to be a housewife. And that was what I was supposed to aspire to be. So I wasn't really encouraged to go to college, but then I went to college. I really liked it, and then I kept going to college. I went to do more college. I moved to the University of Pennsylvania for a graduate school after my undergraduate, and that was a huge shock for me to go from living in Oklahoma to living in a urban campus in a majorurban center in the United States. A lot of diversity, diverse viewpoints, and the East Coast, which is more liberal leaning, not a fundamentalist Christian environment. I was no longer the, you know, majority viewpoint. And, that was like being dropped into ice water and, you know, complete shock to the system. So it's been a few years being shocked. And then after that, I knew from when I started graduate school that I wanted to study religion from a media perspective. My undergraduate was in communication, for no particular reason other than I enjoyed it. And, as I took courses, I was really interested in the kind of psychology of communication and why we make the choices that we make and how we're persuaded to do the things that we do. And I went through some things in my undergraduate, you know, some sort of questioning of my own faith and sort of distancing from some of the more fundamentalist things that I was raised with. But that really had me questioning why I had believed them in the first place. Beyond the fact that that's how I was raised. You know, there were a lot of things that I really bought into and really kind of lived my life around, and I wanted to understand that more. One of my mentors in grad school told me that everybody goes to graduate school when they probably should just go to therapy, and that's probably true. But, all of that to say, people ask me all the time, like, “so, were you raised Mormon? Why do you study Mormonism?” And no, I wasn't and I was actually raised to think that Mormons were a cult. And I grew up with little books about all the things wrong with Mormonism in my house. But, I was raised so similarly to so many people that I know who are Mormon, and there's so many things that are the same. But it's a just a different framework for a lot of the same types of things. So I recognize a lot of similarity in Mormonism when I start to study it from a scholarly perspective. Which, I guess I should say also, my husband was raised Mormon. We met when I was close to the end of undergraduate and he hadn’t been a part of or hadn’t been practicing Mormon for a long time at that point. But his family was still practicing. And his I would, I would guess I don't know for a fact, but I would guess that our address kept getting updated with whatever local ward we moved to every time we moved. So by the time we got to Philadelphia for graduate school we were still getting missionaries who knew his name when they knocked on the door and they were looking for him. So I took a class at Penn called the world of the Latter Day Saints, which was an anthropology course. And during that course, I was, you know, trying to choose a project to focus on for the course. And had a pair of retired missionaries that came to my house and I told them about the class I was taking. They thought it was really fascinating. And I told them I was studying religion and media. They thought that was cool. And they came back and did the full missionary lessons with me as my project. So I told them I was doing a project and they told me that they would come back and, you know, kind of give me that experience. So it was a little different than I think most people have that experience because it wasn't young missionaries. It was a retired couple, and it was different because they knew I was doing a project on it. But it was really, really eye opening and really great. And every time they came, they basically had different kind of media to give me. I have like VHS tapes that they gave me and they gave me pamphlets and books and fliers and all kinds of different things. And they told me one of the reasons they wanted to do that is because knowing that I was doing a project on Mormonism, they wanted to be sure that I wasn't getting misinformation about the church. And they're like, “we'll bring you everything you need. We'll answer all your questions. But don't Google Joseph Smith. Like, don't go online and read that stuff because that will not be accurate. That'll be biased. It might be anti-Mormon. But it won't be, you know, accurate or true information. So if you want true information, you have to make sure it's from the church.” So, of course, I did Google. I mean everyone does like, if you tell a child not to do it, I'm going to go do it and I'm always going to be a child. So I had already done that. Obviously I'd been reading online, I'd been reading all this kind of content, reading books. At this point, I'd already read Rough Stone Rolling, all kinds of different things. And I was really kind of digging in deep and, but I thought that that phrase that they said, I think it's even in the book, in the introduction, I say that phrase: “don't Google Joseph Smith.” We are so far past that point now. You cannot teach someone about a new faith and convert them and get them acculturated to a new religion in the United States in this moment in time, without them going online and checking it out and not just reading about it, but like talking to people and finding people. So that's a new media environment that the church finds itself in that, my real interest in the book is exploring what happens to a church where 20 years ago, someone could say, “you know, don't don't read what you see on the internet and don't read the books. And we'll tell you what you need to know.” And maybe that might have been more successful. But that's not a possibility anymore. So, a faith has to encounter this world in which they no longer can write the story about who they are and what they are. As an organization, as a community, the story has more complexity and more nuance and certainly more contestation than ever before. So that's what's interesting to me is just who is prioritized and privileged in the conversation, who gets to share, and what did they get to say, and how is that evaluated? And, in the kind of grand marketplace of ideas, if you can call the internet that, that we kind of have to deal with now.

NS:

That's really helpful and also really interesting. So timeline wise, you were meeting with Latter-day Saint missionaries just prior to your graduate work.

RA:

That would be during coursework in grad school at Penn. So I was, I think it was my second year there or maybe my third semester at Penn when I was taking the course.

NS:

And did that coincide with the so-called Mormon moment?

RA:

Everything did. The timing of the book is not coincidental. It focuses on the time I was in graduate school. And 2012, which is, I think, the height of the Mormon moment, I was living in Salt Lake City, on a fellowship from the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. They have a Mormon studies fellowship that's specific to that topic. And I think I was the third person to get that fellowship. Maybe the second. It was still a little new. So I lived there for one year, and that was 2012. So this class was right before that, but it was still, you know, like conversations were stirring up. People were interested, but it wasn't quite what it became during Mitt Romney's candidacy when people were writing op eds and, think pieces about whether whether Mitt Romney is going to serve the American people or the First Presidency with his policy decisions that he becomes president. I do believe the Book of Mormon musical was already out at that time, too, when I was taking this class. So there was some kind of pop culture conversations happening. Like how much of this musical is a joke, an exaggeration, and how much of it is pretty accurate. And people are trying to kind of piece through some of that.

(15:13) Orientations to Contemporary Mormonism

NS

Excellent. Thank you for all of the background on that. And, I think we'll continue to bring listeners into the conversation about why the focus on media is so important for this kind of study of Mormonism. I'm wondering first, and you kind of introduce it with your own personal background, but I'm wondering if for listeners, especially because this is so ethnographic, you do a lot of interviews, you do a lot of contemporary research during that time period. You're able to, I think, very helpfully categorize and in some ways label various degrees of Mormon-ness. Right. And so I'm thinking of terms that listeners may be unfamiliar with, like heterodox, orthodox, orthopraxy, these kinds of terms. I wonder if you can give a brief introduction to those kinds of terms before we launch into the some of the content.

RA:

There's a tension that I experience as a researcher as well as a tension, I think that you might have noticed in the book, with all of these captions and titles and trying to categorize, and at the same time that I'm trying to create a taxonomy just to be able to talk about this stuff, like, you can't talk about how something is outside of the norm if you don't identify a norm. But at the same time, the thesis of the book is that there's so much variety that it's not easily identified in a simple taxonomy. So I tried to adopt some of the terms that are used more traditionally in religious studies to think about ways of being religious. So, Orthodox, has to do with ortho, like the correct way of thinking like these are the correct beliefs to have. So you have to have orthodox beliefs, like certain beliefs. If you don't believe that Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God, for example, then you're not an orthodox Mormon, like you’re just not because you don't have that belief. And that's a belief that the church says you have to have to be a correct kind of Mormon.But there's also the kind of orthoprax religions. So, some religions focus more on having the right beliefs about things like, you have to believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God to be a Christian, for example. But then others focus more on the right actions. So that's this orthopraxis idea, some religions care more about, do you do the right rituals?Do you embody the religion in the correct way? You know, do you avoid pork? Do you pray facing Mecca? Like, do you do these embodied things? And the beliefs can be important, but sometimes they're not as important as embodied things that you do to show your religion. And so I've tried to tease out some of the ways that Mormonism is both of those things. That the kind of bureaucratic official form of Mormonism emphasizes both believing the right things, but also doing things a certain way. And in a lot of ways it comes out to be more of an emphasis on orthopraxy than on orthodoxy in Mormonism. Because, as one of the apologists told me during my interviews with people affiliated with FAIR and FARMS, you can believe anything you want to believe as long as you don't say it or, like, publish it online. You can believe that the Book of Mormon is literature and creative imagination or even that it was like plagiarizeed, as long as you still pay your tithe and obey the law of chastity, and you don't go online and write a blog about it, then it's okay, like, it's fine. So, there's rthodoxy, there's orthopraxy and then the kind of just for discussion sake in the book, I use the terms heterodox and heteroprax to talk about people who their beliefs set or their practice set is distinct from what the church's official guidelines would suggest is appropriate. So, you know, Mormons who, drink coffee, I guess, would be a good example of a hetero practice Mormon or, you know, someone who doesn't attend, or who doesn't wear the garments or whatever it might be. So there's such a spectrum that those simple terms, like you're either heterodox or orthodox, that's not really what I intend to suggest in the book, but by using those terms, I think that sometimes we fall into those binaries. It’s either one or the other, but really it's more of a spectrum. I think every person is somewhere on a spectrum from day to day, and it can change even by person. So, the terms are just there to help identify in what instances a person is aligning with official guidelines and expectations. Sometimes the guidelines and expectations are official and you can find them in a handbook. And other times they're cultural. And that makes it even more difficult to discuss. Which I kind of get into in the chapter on caffeine, where we're discussing sort of like in some parts of the country in 2012, drinking a Coke could be taboo if it had caffeine. But that's not a official teaching anywhere, that's not written down somewhere. So there's lines that are clear that are written down and, I don't even want to say their official because there's a whole other thing about things being official or not official, but they're accepted in the community as being Mormon ways of doing things and Mormon ways of belief. And then there are all of the other ways of being Mormon that actually happen. So those things, sometimes they coalesce and other times they diverge.

NS:

That's really helpful. And, for listeners, I can just say how much I appreciate the way that Rosemary in this book is able to bring out all the various nuances of these different kinds of taxonomies of orthodoxy and practice. And, other thing I think I would add to this that I think becomes such an important element of your argument and the perspective that you're bringing to this is that you can have a spectrum of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. But then there's also kind of this other plane of, is this the viewpoint of the institution, is this from the viewpoint of the media, outsider viewership. And then you also have it from the point of view of the individual. And this is a really complicated matrix that I think you do such a good job of parsing out all these various details of, and that you get into in each of these case studies. So I just want to say I appreciate how well you navigate so many of those things. And I think that listeners that are members of the church will find that it's eye opening, but also it just speaks to a very present reality for people of how they navigate their own religious identities in ways that they may not recognize right off the bat. So thank you so much for the way that you navigate that.

RA:

Appreciate that.

(22:40) Constructing Mormon Identity

NS:

So just really quickly, before we jump into the case studies, your book is oriented around different case studies. One question I have for you is about the role of the internet and specifically before the internet. So you already alluded to this, but can you describe how Mormon identity was constructed and lived before the advent of the internet? For instance, one of the things you talk about is this effort by the church in the beginning of the 20th century that really comes to the fore in the mid-20th century, called correlation. I wonder if you can kind of talk about what tools did Latter-day Saints have at their disposal to construct their identity?

RA:

I think we, often and probably even in my book, oversimplify prior identities. The ways that people sort of navigated without the tools that they have to do that today. It's easy to think of, like, the past time as being this kind of uncomplicated past where everything was more black and white and that you see that in national discourse about, like, going back to simpler times or better times. And you see that within communities where things are starting to change and things might feel under threat. So people imagine this past in which things were different. And I will say that Mormon identity, just like all identities that I know of, and I'm going to assume all identities in general, are complicated and always have been, and people have always had really interesting and unique ways to kind of push back against institutionalized or bureaucratic requirements or expectations. They've formed very unique communities of practice. They've also kind of within their own selves been able to negotiate meaning and practice and to come with something that's meaningful to them as an individual and something that's workable for their families and for their lifestyles. And sometimes that involved faking, like having to hide aspects of yourself that are really important to you in some environment and not in others. But I think that's just part of the sort of the way that we play various roles in various parts of our lives. So prior to the internet, there were also complicated Mormons. There were gay Mormons, there were feminist Mormons. There were less believing Mormons who are still practicing, but not necessarily believing literally. And we know that because there are magazines and there were communities like there were wards in places like Boston where people were having really progressive conversations that didn't align with a lot of the things that were going on. And, as far back as we can go back, you can find people who were were writing things that might be slightly different. For example, writing about Heavenly Mother and writing things that were not necessarily part of the mainstream view but were not also unpopular opinions. So, today we have everything that people think in front of our eyes. And, that's the real difference. I would say there is more nuance and diversity just as a product of more visibility and availability. Like knowing that representation matters because you know what you can be, it gives you ideas. It helps you find things that match with how you feel and that kind of resonate with you. So, I don't want to suggest that it's always been possible and easy for people to live a nuanced relationship to their faith. It's not always been easy, and it's still not always easy, but it's not a totally new time either. The internet didn't make it where people could be gay and Mormon, and they never did that before. I mean, that's not a thing. That's not true. But it has brought more visibility and more awareness and more conversation around all of those ways of practicing that are outside the mainstream. So, yeah, absolutely prior to the internet the institutional church would have the picture that they have painted, would be one of correlated hegemonic church in which there was unity and similarity of belief and practice to the extent that everybody around the world is doing the same things every Sunday and this is very unified. And the diversity in the church has been more and more recognized by the church itself, mostly through recognition of cultural diversity around the world in various missions in order to expand the missions and be able to relate to various people around the world. But there's still a lot of similarity in the narrative that the church puts forward about what the church is. And it's still a very kind of Western white, masculine model that's put forward about what the global church looks like. But yeah, I'm not sure if I've just veered away, I think, veered very far from whatever the question was. I know it had to do with prior to the internet. That's what I remember.

NS:

No, no, I think that's a really helpful kind of introduction to this. Because, for example, I mean, there's a recent event that has happened in the realm of Mormonism that I think is also a good example of this, where Latter-day Saint exposure to the history of polygamy and the discourse of polygamy has been such that either this was something that wasn't talked about or it was understood as having certain characteristics. Right? Things like, oh, it had this reason and justification. It went to this extent. It was practiced by these people at this time. Right. All these various things that you were saying would have been correlated if it was going to be discussed at all. But then we have with the internet, right. The release of, even by the church today, which I think you would argue is the product of this you say unprecedented media attention and the role of the internet, that we have a revelation purported to have been given by the third president of the church, John Taylor, that talks about how plural marriage is something that will never be taken away in the 1880s. And now you have Mormons all over the world on the internet, going through the same process that you talk about in your book of what are the boundaries? What does this mean? How do we make sense of polygamy?

RA:

Yeah. It's, and I mean, there's always going to be really interesting ways to interpret it, that kind of a thing. And it's not just some Mormon tendency. It's every community that encounters this. Communication studies, one of our kind of canonical texts that we refer back to a lot. It is the kind of foundational text on cognitive dissonance that, it's called When Prophecies Fail. And it was written, I believe, in the 50s and its a group of psychiatrists, psychology students or psychiatrist students. I can't remember, I want to say psychology students, for a research project kind of went underground or undercover and joined a cult that believed the world was about to end on a certain date, which I don't think this would get IRB approved today. I'm not suggesting we should do this, but they joined this group to see what would happen when the world did not end. Which was very presumptuous of them, by the way. But it didn't end. So they were right that time. And, when when the cult’s members, the people who had sold everything they owned and like, told everyone they knew that the world was going to end, like they'd really put themselves out there telling people this is what they believed. And then it didn't end. The focus of that book is on the ways that people try to understand what it means that it didn't end. And then what we do in general as humans if we have put ourselves on the line. It's called ego involvement. But the more of it that you have, the more that you've dedicated your life to the thing that you stood up for in this case, you know, the world ending and this cult being correct. And, you sell all your possessions and you tell all your friends you have more ego involvement than if you didn't sell everything because you thought maybe you were going to hedge your bets a little and so you didn't sell things, but maybe played along. So the more you involve yourself, the more you give up. Your life would say, I don't know. You serve a mission. You marry in the temple, you attend BYU. That's not the correct order. But you did all these things and you've developed a very high level of ego involvement, and therefore it's very important for your psychological well-being. And it's not even necessarily a conscious choice. It is very important to be able to interpret anything that ever happens that could contradict or challenge those things, in a way that provides the most simple explanation for what's happening in a way that can provide psychological calming. And that's what you see for anything. It's not a Mormon thing. Again, it's every faith, every, I mean, worldview, political. You'll see this all the time in politics whenever some new policy is passed. But in the case of this, what does “never give it up” mean? I mean, does that meanthat we're always going to think it was true when it was happening? Maybe we don't give up the fact that it was just inspired once, or maybe it's an eternal practice that will happen in heaven. And, we haven't given it up, we just are not currently practicing it. Or, there's always a different way to explain and understand. And it just depends on the individual which one they need to be able to continue being active in the church and happy with the way that they've dedicated their lives. So, yeah, this being released recently and has received a lot of attention is really interesting. But I mean, we also had Brigham Young saying it was an eternal law. And we already knew that. We already knew that it had been called an eternal law. So it's not really news. It just makes people talk about some of those other questions. And I kind of get into those two questions about when is a prophet or an apostle speaking as a prophet versus speaking their own opinion. And if the thing he said wasn't  sustained by a majority of the members during General Conference or whatever, maybe it was never really a thing, it's not canonized if it's not sustained and the nothing is sustained anymore. Not like that. So, new doctrine is supposed to be added all the time. That's the point of the open canon. But yet, when's the last time that you can remember some new doctrine being added? I mean, seriously? So the open canon is open, but that means it's also open to interpretation. This can be canon or this cannot be canon depending on if it  serves. And, polygamy is illegal and frowned upon socially. And Mormons, for the most part, reticent to talk about it. It's a little embarrassing. It's not the best piece of history. So it's one of those things that it's pretty easy to figure out how Taylor was speaking as Taylor when he said that and not as the mouthpiece of God.

(35:35) Caffeine

NS:

Okay. So maybe let's let's move away-we'll come back to polygamy, I'm sure. But, we can talk about something I think is a really interesting case study that you brought up earlier, which is caffeine. And, I think everywhere I've ever traveled, there's an assumption or an understanding that members of the of the church don't consume caffeine. I personally consume copious amounts of caffeine, and always have. But, there is this idea of that this came from somewhere, and it's been understood at different times. Can you talk to us about why this case study is so fascinating and important kind of to your exploration here?

RA:

Things have changed. So when I wrote the case study or when I was gathering the data. So Mitt Romney is running for president, and there is a special on TV about the sort of just giving a day in the life of a Mormon family, I guess, because people are so interested in what Mormons are really all about. And there's this Mormon lady, it's just an everyday Mormon family. And this Mormon lady says, something like, they don't drink caffeine. She just mentions it briefly. And it's not even a focus of the show. But people sort of latched on to that. Is it caffeine or is it coffee and tea, or is it, you know, something else? What does the word of wisdom mean? What does it really focus on? What does it encapsulate and what does it not? Every religion has some kind of  code, might be a health code. It usually is related to health, or what you can imbibe into your body, what you can put in your body. And in Mormonism, it's so vague and it's written in language that doesn't necessarily translate to today. So it's been interpreted in various ways. And, “hot drinks are not for the body” doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't drink a Coca Cola, but it can be interpreted in various ways. So I was actually really surprised because I come from Tulsa, like I said. And then I was living in Philly and I attended the ward in the Philadelphia, I can't remember the number, but  the ward nearest my row home, which was a very diverse urban ward. And, then when I got to Salt Lake City for my fellowship and I think first, actually, I went to a conference. I was invited to speak at a conference in Utah, and at the conference, the beverages that were available were diet caffeine free Coke, and I had never even seen that. I didn't know that was an option. Like I didn't know they sold cans of diet caffeine free. I don't know what that even what's left, we've taken it all out. But that there was no caffeinated option at the conference I was at. And I was just confused. And then when I was at BYU for a conference, it was something to do with Mormons and media. Media, something I can't remember. Would have been around 2011, probably. Again, there was the the vending machines did not sell anything with caffeine in them. So you could get regular Coke. That wasn't diet, but it didn't have caffeine. So it was just caffeine free Coke. And I'm not Mormon. And, the stereotype about us being us Gentiles being addicted to coffee and and caffeine and needed to survive is probably mostly true. So I was wandering campus trying to figure out how to not get a migraine that day. You know, there's no caffeine anywhere I looked. And I knew there wouldn't be coffee, but I thought for sure I could. It just didn't even cross my mind that there would be no caffeine. So that fascinated me because in other places in Tulsa and in Salt Lake City, or sorry, Philadelphia, you can have a Coke and be a Mormon, and nobody's going to think anything of it. But if you think about the context in Utah, everybody is Mormon. If you're in Philly, it's so unusual to be Mormon that having a health guideline that prohibits coffee, tea, alcohol, cigarettes, that's enough to differentiate you. If you go out with your friends and you're not drinking alcohol or coffee, that's enough to say this is a social boundary that differentiates me from others. It's a sacrifice in the sense that you miss out on certain kinds of socializing, you're having to let people know that you don't do certain things so that you can maintain your beliefs and activitiesin those social environments. And then that kind of gives you that ego involvement we were talking about. But if you're in Salt Lake City, if you're at BYU, everybody else is also Mormon. And we still have this sort of, it's more of a psychological it's not a Mormon thing. It's more of a psychological group-based behavior need for hierarchy and differentiation. And so if you are a Mormon who not only follows the rules but goes beyond the rules and does more, you not only don't imbibe coffee and tea, but you also don't drink anything with caffeine in it. Although I never did see this extent to like hot chocolate, but I'm just saying that's still a favorite. Or chocolate ice cream. But, having that extra line of differentiation, it's a way of saying I'm all in,  it's not just a social commitment for me. it goes beyond that. I've also seen this in things like the length of the skirt that you might wear to church or the degree of, well shavenness of your face. How well you prioritize the different things that are already important to other Mormons, but how frequently you go above and beyond the expectation. And I recognize that from my own upbringing, too, in the churches that I attended when I was younger. Modesty in the way that women dress was a huge area of emphasis. And, there were degrees of that. It was expected for women to cover their knees. But the more that you covered, then the more religious you were and the more faithful you were. And really, at the end of the day, like the more spiritual and holy and good you were. And so it was kind of a measure of like dedication and commitment, but also the state of your soul. And so even though I wouldn't take caffeine quite to the level of the state of your soul, I do think it has that social function of a more serious Mormon, someone who's more dedicated and more willing to sacrifice, might take things to another level. It also can just be cultural. If you're raised a family in which you don't do a certain thing, it's pretty normal to continue not doing that thing. Whether or not you've put thought into it or effort into it. But over time, it can become that way of differentiating people who are more dedicated from those who are less dedicated.

NS:

Yeah, I think that discussion of differentiation is spot on. This is a really fun chapter. I started reading it and I was initially really, resistant to it because I was “no, like, this isn't a thing” like I've always heard. It's a thing. I grew up going to BYU campus and being confused that there was caffeine free Coke and Diet Coke, because I never was raised with that in downtown Salt Lake City that this was a thing. Right. But apparently it is and it still is. And I think that the way that you discuss this need to differentiate and how going above and beyond. You say that the debate was never “just about caffeine. It was about the porosity or density of boundaries for being Mormon, about the role of rules in religious life, and about the nature of authority and revelation in the context of Mormon praxis.” And so Mormons listening to this will be like, “well, you know, it's not against the commandments or it's not in the church handbook” or something like that, but at the same time, what it means to be Mormon and to identify and to construct that identity often does come down to these things. And people will go and above and beyond. And modesty is a huge one and has been in Mormonism for a long time, as well. So it is just a really fascinating chapter.

AV:

Oh, yeah. And it's been really interesting lately for me to to read and think about the new garments and the new lines for showing  shoulders and that creates a lot of feelings of resentment amongst some people who they've been told all their lives that things are the way they are for a reason. And then when things change, that makes you wonder what else might not be for a reason. But with caffeine, there are instances, not I wouldn't put it to the level of the the statement from John Taylor about polygamy, but there are a lot of instances of church leaders historically saying certain things like interpreting the word of wisdom to mean certain things, or, saying Mormons don't drink caffeine or saying, caffeine is not part of what we teach about, or we have no stance on caffeine. And there’s just never a final word on things like that. And that's for a good reason. I mean, it would cause problems and it would cause people to be less likely to join or or more likely to leave if there were more strict rules on lots of those little things that seem less important. But, without that kind of official, I don't want to even call it doctrine, but just an official guideline on where to put the hemline, what beverages are or are not acceptable or whatever it might be, it leaves that as an aspect that we can use in a community to judge each other or to to understand who other people are without knowing much about them.

(46:35)  2012 U.S. Presidential Campaign and Mitt Romney

NS:

So in your next chapter you discuss, and you've already alluded to it and discuss it because it's probably in most people's minds, the highlight of this Mormon moment is this presidential run of Mitt Romney being chosen as the GOP candidate. And you write about the impact that that run had on what you call “competing discourses” of Mormon identity that tend to run along kind of political lines. What were those competing discourses?

AV:

What's really interesting to me, again, as a non-Mormon, but someone watching this with, you know, obviously, like any American, a stake in the outcome of a political debate like this. So for Mitt Romney, who is one of the classic traditional images of what a Mormon man should be and in pretty much every way: here's someone who's been faithful to the church his whole life, who's married and has kids and has this very clean cut, sort of like scandal-free persona, that there's not a lot to hate about Mitt Romney. He's even an attractive man. He's really well-spoken. Everybody loves Mitt Romney, right? But he is very conservative. His policies are conservative. And that aligns in most ways with his faith and with the church and the church's practices and the things that they've supported. But during the candidacy, there were a lot of think pieces coming from non-Mormon popular press and the “mainstream media” about what does it mean for the for the candidacy that he is Mormon. Does that put him at a disadvantage? We've never had a Mormon president. We have only had two Catholic presidents and one at this time, I guess. So it's unusual for us to not have what the broader American public knows and understands, in terms of the spirituality of the the candidate for presidency. There's always been a lot of mediated fearmongering and hyperbole around Mormonism since the Joseph Smith days. So, it's not surprising that there was some of that in the press, people talking about how does Mitt Romney wear his magic underwear and that was there was a headline with the words “magic underwear” in it. There's all kinds of discussion about, and similar discussions when a Catholic runs for office, which is, “will the Vatican control the the country if we let this happen?” So there's similar conversations about Salt Lake City being in control. Or, there were some exposes that were being written about the holdings of the church. And how much power does this church really already have for such a small church in terms of the percentage of the population that are members. It's a massive church in terms of financial and political power. But the interesting things to me mostly focused on Romney himself and how he lived his religion and whether that was a good representation. So, a lot of conservative pieces were written about how he needs to, when they were written by Mormons, how he needs to lean more into his Mormon identity, make more of it, that he wasn't saying enough about his Mormonism, that he needed to make that more of his identity because that would be more authentic for him because in fact, he is very Mormon. And he was often trying to downplay it. He didn't even say the word Mormon, I don't think until the primaries. But then on the other side, there were some more progressive voices, writing about his Mormonism, critiquing his Mormonism as not being really true to the faith that they hold. And I remember one in particular from Joanna Brooks, I can't remember specifically where it was published. It may have been in her, blog, but it was a really good piece about how, in her view, his Mormonism was not was not living up to the standards that she sees in her own church: caring for the poor and caring for the disadvantaged and speaking up for those who don't have a voice and all of those things. And that he by aligning himself so closely with traditional conservative values that he was actually misrepresenting the faith, which does have some historical progressive values. You know, first female voters and, y pushing for more diversity in the electorate. So I think the push and pull between whether Mitt Romney was too Mormon to be president, which was coming mostly from non-Mormon sources, critiquing Mormonism with sort of a fearful lens, like “we don't know enough about it. We can't trust it. It could be dangerous.” And then the other perspective being that his Mormonism was was an asset that he should lean into more, that he wasn't doing it service, coming from conservative Mormons. And then the idea that he's a bad representative Mormon, he's giving America the wrong view of what aMmormon is because he's conservative, coming from a more progressive base. Those conversations were not about Mitt Romney. I mean, they were clearly. But they were really about, what is Mormon? What does it mean to be Mormon? Who is Mormon? Who is the right kind of Mormon? Who's the best kind of Mormon? And, is it fair for a person to stand in for Mormonism if that person is only living a certain kind of Mormonism? This is his Mormonism, and he just happens to be a pretty heterodox, orthodox type of Mormon. But there are so many kinds. Sorry,  I think I said hetero, I meant to say Orthodox, a very Orthodox type. But, there's so many other types of Mormon. I think it might have been Jana Riess who said during the Mormon moment, that Mormons were just constantly waiting to see what would be said about them next. In the press, from other Mormons, from the church itself. Somebody is going to issue a statement or make a claim: Mormons believe X, y, z. Mormons act like x, y, z, this is what Mormon to do, this is who Mormons are. And is that even going to be true? Is that going to represent us? Is that going to be what I think? Why are there voices out there that have that power to get to state this is as a community, as a group of diverse people, that this is the one thing we all are? That can feel very alienating if you don't fall into that description.

NS:

Yeah. There's a really excellent passage that you write in this chapter where you say, and I think you were specifically referencing to the more progressive Mormon media pronouncements, but you say, “these pronouncements rather than critiquing or attempting an objective description of reality, are more akin to ritual performative. By claiming their ideal version of Mormonism, these Mormons hope to create it.” And I think that's spot on. And, a maybe even more contemporary example would be kind of the recent trend of highlighting Mormonism in streaming media. So on Hulu and Amazon Prime. And so you have all these various TV programs that are putting forward a vision or an image of Mormonism. And to me, what's even more interesting than the image that the actual media is putting forward, is kind of what you're talking about here. It's the way that people respond to it. So you have historians and you have progressive Mormons, you have conservative Mormons, and apologist groups that are all responding to the media. And it's not that anybody's really correcting any record per se, but they are putting forward their vision of what they think Mormonism is. This is such a helpful chapter for thinking about how that works in the religious community. So, thank you for that. I want to be considerate of your time. And so I will tell listeners that there are two really excellent chapters, one on Mormon apologetics and what you call “dissenters.” And kind of the way that people respond to those two groups, it's very more internal, less focused on the outside mainstream media's view of Mormonism, but more internal debates. But then about how apologists and dissenters are, how do I put it? Not not necessarily punished, but they’re

RA:

Disciplined.

NS:

They're disciplined. Right. They're disciplined by the institution to be, again, kind of similar to what we've just talked about, to be a particular type of Mormon. And in this chapter, I think you make really interesting arguments about a particular type of Mormon masculinity. And what that looks like there. Really quickly, the next chapter, you talk about Mormon feminism, which with the rise of the Ordain Women movement and the Wear Pants to Church event that happens and various Facebook groups, I mean, these are just excellent chapters that I hope people will be able to read and to wrestle with. Anything you would want to say about those two chapters. They're actually kind of a really interesting pairing, as far as gender goes. But anything you add about those?

AV:

Just they both are still kind of, the stories being told in those chapters, are still being told. And that has been very interesting to watch. And, I hope that there are other historians picking up where I left off in those two chapters because it's not a finished story. This is all part of history, but it's not over. The consequences, and kind of the waves that have been rolling, are still rolling in both of those cases. And, in all of these cases, but those two in particular. So, very eager to see what the future of Mormon gender roles looks like for the next ten years, really.

(57:55) Gospel Topics Essays and the Digital Age

NS:

Absolutely. And so then your last chapter is one I would like to spend just a little bit of time on because, to me, in my opinion, it has one of the more consequential arguments. You say that, “the pressures and features of a mediated Mormon moment in the digital age kickstarted incremental yet significant structural changes within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, changes made possible and necessary by the flattening opening power of the internet.” And so this case study focuses primarily on the gospel topics essays, which we've referenced previously on the podcast. But can you discuss some of those compelling takeaways that you present especially related to this argument, right, about how the internet and these pressures forced incremental change within the church?

RA:

Yeah, a lot of older Mormons that I have met through this research and that were part of my husband's family, whenever I would discuss this with them, I remember at the time, they had no idea this existed. Like, it's so funny now because I was so hyper focused on studying what was happening. And I was really involved in all these online discussion groups where people would, you know, the church does something and everybody's posting about it, right? Right away. But the average Mormon was not stalking the pages to see, they were not constantly refreshing LDS.org to see what would be posted next. And in fact, pretty much everyone that I talked to, who was not part of  Mormon studies groups or focused on the academic study or apologetics type of groups. They they didn't even see this stuff happening. They didn't know about these essays. It was not really publicized much either, to my knowledge, within various awards. The polygamy essay and the race and the priesthood essay, those things were not taken up to be Sunday school topics. They were not mentioned much in those settings. It was there, so that it would be there. It existed so that it would be a thing the church had said on the record so that people couldn't say the church hadn't said anything on the record. But all of that to say, at the time, there were forums primarily run by former Mormons, where these things were being discussed. MormonThink, which I think David Tweed was the author of a lot of the posts there, just sort of exploring Mormon history around race, Mormon history around polygamy, any other kind of controversial things from the church's past, the burning of the press or anything like that. Those kinds of things sort of explored in a lot of historical detail in these sort of lengthy, highly cited documents. They're published and often published anonymously in these online forums. And, those things start to circulate a lot among online Mormon groups. People would send copies of those documents to people and have them read it to see if they agreed with it or if it challenged their views. Former Mormons were using it to sort of proselytize their new worldview to family and friends. And I mean, once those records are opened, once those things are out there and it's not something you can just downplay and say it's anti-Mormon literature, it's not true. It's cited and you're bringing your receipts and you're showing that this is actual history that we have to confront. At that point, you can't just tell people, “don't Google it.” It's not that they're googling it. It's being put in their faces and people are talking about it. Those topics have to be addressed. And so, once you know that Joseph Smith married teenagers, then you need a little more information and you're going to go looking for it. So the church had an opportunity to respond to those things in a way that they could control and that they could shape what the response would look like. And so those gospel topics essays are very highly curated PR pieces more than anything else. They said on them, “we thank historians who contributed,” but they don't say who the historians are. They have no byline. They're not written by or authorized by the First Presidency. They're not official church doctrine. They're just these random pages that exist that talk about history. And they are cited. They have lots of citations, but they present one side of these histories for the most part. I mean, they do discuss things that are difficult, that can't always be accounted for, some of the issues related to race. Those things are described as having been a cultural product of their time. And that kind of interpretation of historical events provides a faithful response that is just intellectually complicated enough to be satisfying without being disruptive to faithful Mormon belief in practice. So, the Mormons that I spoke to who saw those documents didn't think they were real. I'm talking about within my own husband's family. They thought that someone had hacked the page or that it wasn't really LDS.org, that this was a different website that was redirecting because they didn't think the church would ever say those things. It was so different from what they had ever heard. But if you read through them and kind of analyze the rhetoric of the letters themselves, the essays themselves, they're not really that challenging to traditional faithful belief, but they give enough information. So it's kind of been the the church's way, historically–and I think I talked a bit about this in the first chapter–just that historical tendency to provide just enough information, for possible deniability. And by presenting information and explaining through a faithful lens, the issue has now been addressed. And maybe can provide what some people have talked about being sort of like a inoculation effect for younger Mormons now. So it won't be so shocking when the next generation is 20 years old and someone sends them this information, they'll say, “yeah, the church told us about this. We knew about this already. And here are the ways that I understand it and can rationalize it or explain it.” And that can work. If people see them. Now, I don't know that the church took the Gospel Topics initiative where it could have gone to really be that tool. They wrote several and dropped them. They felt like press releases or llike PR pieces that were done in the moment because Mitt Romney's running for president and people are paying attention, and we need to explain these things. But there's so many more things that could have been addressed and discussed and could have been some really rich conversations. It does probably make a difference to have someone whose background was in marketing as the president of the church at the time versus someone who is a heart surgeon. Right? I mean, that's a big difference iin terms of the church's focus on messaging and sharing information with the public and with the membership. So, there's been a big shift in with the presidency of the church shifting, there's always a shift in priorities. But this has been pretty dramatic in terms of how much information is now being shared versus what's just no longer going said or what's no longer on the record.

NS:

Yeah, this is just a really fascinating chapter, and one that we can continue to see in real time. The church is still releasing gospel topics essays. And they continue to kind of drop, like you're saying, in this PR fashion. There's been some recent ones on, I think the most recent were on polygamy and then also on Joseph Smith's character and then specifically within the polygamy one there, you can also see how it's tailored towards specific movements, ground swells in Mormonism about denying certain parts of Joseph Smith's polygamy. And so, yeah, it continues.

AV:

Yeah. And they're written in a way that as an academic or a historian, you can sort of appreciate the type of writing and the type of information. But I think these newer ones are very much more like a Sunday school lesson than the originals. I think there were nine that dropped when they first came out. Those were so lengthy and well cited and very well researched and they did present multiple sides of the situations. And like other historical factors, they were less sort of just faith-based promoting compared to “Joseph Smith's character.” That was like, wow, that is, “he's so sincere, he’s never pretentious.” I mean, as a non-Mormon reading that one, that tells me nothing. That one's not helpful at all to me because it's just a faith promoting story. That’s what that one is. It doesn't read like a historical account or like a historical interpretation. So I think there's been a big shift. I know there in lthe same folder, technically, but I don't know. Now I haven't–I don't think I've seen the newest one on polygamy. If it's come out just in the last little while. So that may be different, but I'm curious to see it.

(1:09:05) Concluding Questions 

NS:

Well, I just think that your book does such a good job of setting the stage, and contextualizing why and how these kinds of things come about. And so for listeners that are Latter-day Saints, that do come across these documents and they see it most likely on social media being shared by friends or acquaintances, they can make sense of that, and then they can make sense of whatever kind of commentary people attached to them, because more often than not they're shaping and projecting a type of Mormon identity that they would like to see. So I really appreciate that chapter. As we conclude, I always like to to end with a few questions that broaden the discussion just a little bit. First of all, why should people not necessarily interested in Mormon studies read this book?

RA:

Thank you for asking that, because I feel like this is one of the most important things that I hope people, probably everyone says this about their own book, like, “oh, this is not just for people who like whatever, like this is for everyone,” but this is a book about Mormon case studies. But those case studies, I'm trying to use those to show broader truths about our lives and our identities, particularly in the United States, particularly in the internet age. But this is a book about what negotiating identity looks like under all of these competing forces, all of these various allegiances that we have, all of these various aspects of our own internal and external identities. It's about Mormonism because Mormonism is a great place to visualize these things happening, because it's so obvious. There's so many factors and  there's so many different really rich examples, especially during that time period. But you could write a book with the same premise about sororities, or about football fans, or about evangelicals or, whatever. It's not even just about religion. It's about how we do identity today. And how, as an individual, I try to understand my place within my communities of varying allegiance. So, my closest groups and then those external to those groups and moving out in concentric circles forever. How do I place myself in there? How do I show everybody else that I really do belong? And how do I decide if that's where I want to be? And none of that is just me making a decision. A lot of it is the social context and the social meaning making that we engage in together with everyone else. And some of that is  stuff that we have some control over, and some of it is just our context that we're in. So in the case of religion, in particular, religion has historically been a category that we could use to give our lives some meaning and to understand our particular roles. What should I be doing with my time here? I only have so much time in life. And then I'm gone. And in that time, I have to prioritize something. I have to do things. So making meaning of that time that I have, religion has always been a great way to try to shape what you should do at that time, to obligate you to do certain things, to encourage you to make you feel good about the choices that you're making. And it's not a Mormon story. The competing forces on our time and the allegiances that we have and the affiliations that we're able to have, that is a human story. So I think that, iif you're interested in identity more broadly, or community more broadly, this book is about that. Mormons are really interesting to study. And I jumped on that bandwagon because they came and knocked on my door. And the rest was history. And I'm glad I did. It was a great project. It was great. I learned from so many really helpful and caring people who just contributed their stories and spoke to me and spent time with me, but I could have written this book about so many other groups too. And it's really,I think, just a reflection on our human condition and kind of what we're doing, trying to make meaning of the life that we have.

NS:

That's an awesome answer. And yeah, I can second that that is what this book does. And as a Latter-day Saint, and somebody that works in Mormon history and comparative religion, this was a back and forth thing for me because it was “yep, that's what I experience or experience and that's what I know.” And then it was a fresh take on a lens on it. But then it was it was expansive because it was pushing. I think it will push a lot of readers beyond the context that they know. And so if they're not Latter-day Saints or familiar with it, they're going to see themselves in some way, shape, or form in it, or the communities that they've come from. Last question. And, you can answer this as an academic, or any other way. But how did the project influence or confirm or change your approach to the study of religion in general?

RA:

That's hard. I think it challenged me. I went into this already with the premise, which you're not really supposed to do in research, but already with the premise of: it's complicated and diverse, and I can't  impose my perspectives and try to understand it in simple terms, like, “historically we have always done.” I have to be open to being surprised by the diversity that I will find. And that was definitely a finding that was definitely my experience. But, I have kind of come back around to the utility of categories in terms of understanding shared experience, because although we are in this kind of postmodernity time in which people have so much more freedom to express all of these various aspects of their identity and in whatever way they would like, the constraints on our identity appear to be growing stronger, too. And even, you know, especially, I guess, in the political moment that we find ourselves, the power of allegiance to various communities of belonging, whether that's your political party, your racial or ethnic group, your religious group, communities, maybe even your workplace. We need those, we unfortunately need them more than ever. Maybe right now, we need to be able to rely on one another. So I think policing boundaries is not what we should be doing. But at the same time, we should recognize the utility of these kinds of communities and be willing to invest in building them. And, not necessarily tearing them down by dissecting them into so many parts that they no longer have meaning. So that's the kind of–I feel like I'm sort of beating around it because I don't want to say anything that will get me in trouble. But I think, in the political moment we're in, that we all need to choose. We need we have choices to make in terms of where we belong. We have choices to make in terms of what we want to support. When it comes to politics, religion and everything else. And those choices make a difference. So making those choices, choosing communities to support and belong to. And, I hope that my work is never taken to mean that it doesn't matter who you say you are or what group you say you belong with because you can nuance and craft your identity in so many ways that it becomes virtually meaningless. Because that's not true. What is true is that we're communal beings where we live in community with one another, and we make meaning together. It's not an individual project. And, we need to work together to achieve our social and our goals of well-being and living in the world. So it's an important project that we should dedicate ourselves to when we can.

NS:

Very well said. Just to briefly add to that, this speaks to the importance of education and research in the humanities and social sciences, which we hope will be around for a long time. But, I mean, that is ultimately in many ways what these disciplines, whether in media studies or religious studies, history, English, literature, right? There they are about exploring these things that you're talking about. And, there can be lots of different motives for people getting into these different areas of study, but they help us learn about how things work and who who we are. So this book does a great job of that. Final and last question is, what's next for you going forward?

RA:

Oh, next for me going forward. I'm going to go home and I'm painting a hallway today and I have a lot of trim to stain because my family just moved. But I know that's not what you meant. What is actually next for me in terms of research and projects? I'm currently actually working on some research that has to do with access to local news and information in rural Oklahoma, which is a little bit different. But I will say that the thread that ties all of the research together that I've done so far seems to be information access and who has access to what kinds of information and how. And, with an advocacy goal of increasing access and transparency. So that's where I'm at right now. But really, what's next for me is paint. I'm going to be painting.

NS:

Both of those projects sound really important. And we will look forward to your future work. But thank you so much for being on the podcast. Again, listeners, this has been Rosemary Avance, who is a professor at Oklahoma State University in media and strategic communications. We've been talking about her recent book, Mediated Mormons: Shifting Religious Identities in the Digital Age, which was published with the University of Utah Press this year. Thank you so much, Rosemary, for being on the podcast.

AV:

Was a lot of fun. Thank you so much.

(1:20:32) Outro 

NS:

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Scholars and Saints. Please be sure to come back to hear more conversation soon. A special thank you to Harrison Stewart for production editing and to Ben Arrington for providing music for this episode. To hear more, visit mormonguitar.com. Thank you for listening.