I'm Neil de grass Tyson.

Hey, I'm Adam Carol Gillette not only listening, I'm the guest and.

Tell her and I am a fourth listener.

And I am the fourth listener.

And that must make me at least the fourth listener.

It's Dogma Debate with your host Michael Rigillio.

For extra content and to join the conversation, please head over to Dogma Debate dot com and join our Patreon Wow.

Is today's episode going to be fantastic?

So good in fact, that normally these long form conversations the second half is for Patreon only.

I'm making the whole thing free because I just I feel like this is an episode that you need to hear.

And that's because I have Jenny Gage.

Jenny is a woman who People Magazine called her the most famous ex tradwife in the world, and she's so much more.

She's an ex Mormon, an ex Christian, and ex Christian nationalist, and by her admission, an next white supremacist.

And these are not easy things for somebody that's come out on the other side of those things to talk about.

And you'll hear it, You'll hear it in her voice that these are hard things to talk about.

But this is an important conversation and once she wants to have and so I really I was moved by Jenny.

Her story is amazing and her insights are amazing.

Oh, by the way, good news, as you know you may may or may not know, but David Smalley is coming back to the podcast.

Original host David Smalley.

No, I'm not going anywhere.

I'm not sure exactly when that is, but just keep keep your eye out.

Things are changing around here, things are getting better around here.

All the same content you love, but we're adding a new element.

David's coming back.

We're changing in theame of the show to serious circus.

It's going to be exciting.

Keep an eye out for it.

Get on Patreon, join our patreon at Dogmentdebate dot com for all the content, the great content that's coming.

But until then, I give you Jenny Gage and welcome to just This promises to be such a good episode of Dogma Debate because I have Jenny Gage here and I am a fan of her content.

She is online as life take two and do I get that right?

I knew ID would.

And her description is a very interesting one.

She is an ex Mormon, ex Christian, nationalist, ex white supremacist, ex Christian, current atheist, current advocate, current liberal.

Would you say, I see, I think current liberal.

So with that incredible introduction, Jenny, Welcome to Dogma Debate.

I'm so excited to be on today.

This is one of those days when I woke up an hour early and cann't sleep because it's like, oh, this is going to be such a fun podcast.

I'm just excited to talk to you today.

Nice.

I hope it's going to be a fun podcast.

So wow, where to begin?

I guess start from the very beginning, which is they let's knock the first one off, ex Mormon, and quite frankly, I think we'll both agree that from Mormonism is where the white nationalism, white supremacist, conservative, all that stuff stems from.

So you are born.

Oh and by the way, ex tradwife, big time extrad wife.

I'm the People magazine interviewer.

I was in People magazine here this past year.

Susan young, fantastic veteran journalist.

She said, you are the most famous ex tradwife in the world.

Yeah, and I thought, what a label.

You know, when we're little kids, we want to grow up and be like, I want to be an Olympic gold medalist or I want to be Miss America.

Now I'm the most famous ex tradwife in the world.

Not a title that I thought i'd hold, but I guess.

You know what, the X there is doing a lot of work.

If you were just the most famous tradwife in the world, I'd feel bad for your most famous ex trad wife.

That's a badge of honor.

So where'd you?

Where were you were you?

Are you from Salt Lake City or the area?

Or tell me everything.

Here's my Mormon story, Michael in a nutshell.

I was born and raised into the Mormon Church, and I'm actually in Arizona.

Mormon we are a little bit different than the Utah Mormons.

We are just as orthodox, just as cloistered.

Bit we tend to wear more bikinis, and I don't know that's really the only difference.

So one really interesting aspect of my Mormon life is that my dad was a brand new recent convert.

He had just joined the church a couple of years before he met my mom and they got married, So he was well into his late twenties early thirties when back in the early nineteen seventies, late nineteen sixties girlfriend took him to church and he would eventually get baptized and then marry my mom.

My mom, on the other hand, her family is multi generational, so she was lifelong born and raised to parents who were lifelong members of the church.

And it was kind of an interesting dichotomy having a dad who's this brand new convert who was a little bit rough around the edges, and then my mom, who was super orthodox, very mormony.

She was like just your typical nineteen fifties more than girly.

So I was born into home.

I was the oldest of five kids.

Wow, I'm Catholic and I'm middle of six.

Just quick question, because we talk about the zeal of the converted, would your dad fall into that category?

Would because of his recent conversion, would you say that he was even more of a zealot than some of the other Mormons you know?

Or I would almost say okay to answer that question.

My dad by the time I was born, which was just a year and two months or so after they got married, my dad seemed to be bipolar and in his zealousy, and I would not learn until just seven years ago today, the mystery behind my dad's relationship to the Mormon Church.

So my dad had been this very gung ho, all in member of the church.

And remember again nineteen sixties, nineteen seventies, he didn't have the Internet, so everything that the missionaries told him was his reality.

You know, he just accepted his truth everything, no way to cross reference, fact check or see if any of the stuff was sketch, So he was all in.

My dad is a writer, He was a journalist, he was an anchorman, and so he was always putting his thoughts into essays and poetry.

And he had a little notepad that he had filled with poems about Joseph Smith and the restoration of the Gospel and all of the miracles around the First Vision and things like that.

In fact, I believe he won a scholarship to b YU where he would meet my mom for a single poem about the restoration of the Gospel.

And you know the Angel appearing to Joseph Smith.

To give him the Book of Morona.

So yep, Angel Maroni, get job Michael.

So he was very, very very he had that new convert fire and then he met my mom at BYU.

They dated for a year and then they had a temple wedding, which does see a lot is a new convert for my dad to have had his priesthood and been able to have that temple recommend so that he could go to the temple and marry my mom, whose lifelong number.

That's a big deal for him to have had that at that point, and I wouldn't know this at any point in my childhood.

I would only find this out when I was an adult left the church.

At their temple wedding, which was in nineteen seventy three, my dad had to literally take his hand in gesture that he was cutting the zone jugular vein.

He then had to gesture that he was slicing his stomach down the middle, and then he had to say that I will I would rather disembowel myself and feed my organs and my bells to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field than ever divulge any of these secrets that I've learned in the temple.

He had to take all these blood oaths while dressed in his crazy cult clothes and doing all the hand gestures and oaths and stuff.

So my dad, in the middle of his temple wedding, which was like three hours long, all this crazy stuff starts to have a mental meltdown, and what he told me what fifty forty something years later, was in that moment in the temple that we began the ordinances, all I could see was cult.

I knew that this was a cult.

I knew that the missionaries had bamboozled me.

And I realized that everything that my Southern Baptist mom had told me was true.

And then I baptized into a colt.

So he says that they went out to the car after they left their temple wedding, and he, once the doors were closed, turns to my mom and says, Kathy, this is a cult.

Your church is a cult.

Like what did we just do?

What just happened?

And my mom starts crying.

According to my dad's version of the story, and then they drive to their wedding reception where all of their family is waiting there for them to slice the cake and whatnot.

So my dad's testimony of the Mormon Church literally unraveled in his temple experience at their wedding.

So by the time I came along, my dad was kind of fetny, like he would lean over in church and whisper to me as a three and four year old child, like, Jenny, that thing that the bishop just said, that's not true, Like Jesus doesn't Jesus doesn't do that, Jenny.

I can remember a family home evening, which Mormons do every Monday night to indoctrinate their kids, when I was maybe kindergartener.

So and my mom asking as kids, if we, you know, can one of you read a scripture?

And she hands me a book of Mormon, and my dad grabs it out of my hands and he flings the book Mormon with the wall and says, Kathy, I thought you said that we were going to stick to Bible versus only if anything is Michael that I didn't realize that my dad was not a Mormon, because somewhere they must have had a conversation where my mom's reason with him.

Listen up, Roger, I married you as a Mormon.

Now we're married, and if you want to stay married, and then as we began and have children, if you want to be part of the children's lives, you're going to have to go to church and pretend to be Mormon.

And my dad would pretend to be Mormon for almost fifty years until I left the church.

Wow, that is an amazing, amazing story.

And I have to say the first thing that really struck me was the slice your throat and say, I'd rather this is part of supposed to be a beautiful ceremony of a man and a woman coming together.

I would rather disembowel myself and tire my organs out like that seems like a very dark thing to bring into a wedding ceremony.

And it is like just a sort of one step away from as tech like tearing people's hearts out on a pyramid.

It's like, Wow, I just you got me on that one.

And then your dad never believed it and you didn't know it.

I mean you must.

I mean the fact that he would whisper to you that you know that's not true or something must have had some effect on you.

But you were a devout Mormon yourself, so you bought it, hook line and sinker.

He was always sitting in church on Sunday, you know, and he did have some monkey ideas.

You know.

He would kind of whisper things to me over the years, and he would try to convince me to read my Bible and not the Book of Mormon, and he wasn't very supportive of me going to a church college.

I went to BYU Idaho, which was called Rick's College at the time.

It wasn't really thrilled that I went there over just a regular college.

But I was just kind of chucked that up to the fact that he was a convert, Like Dad's a convert, so he still has problems and Satan is testing him, so that's why he has some of these wacky ideas.

At times, I just thought he was plain crazy, like my dad has a mental illness, the way that he's bipolar about his faith because he's sitting there in church on Sunday and you know, he's doing all the churchy things, and then he's telling me, Joseph Smith was the son of pradition, So which is it.

Joseph Smith was the son of what tradition?

Explain that to me, the.

Son of tradition?

Those are followers of Satan.

Oh wow?

Yeah.

So And as far as the temple ceremony, I had that same experience at my wedding, and you're not prepared for it at all.

You can any of your listeners can look up the lds, temple endowment, blood oaths, and prior to the early nineteen nineties, I believe I think that stopped just right before or my temple wedding.

You literally promise that you would unlive yourself rather than betray your temple covenants, and you acted the whole thing out.

So what I went through I got married in nineteen ninety five, and leading up to the actual wedding, when you're kneeling at the altar, I had to do a modified version of that.

So for me I had to still make the same signs with my hands.

But then I said, I will give everything that I have, my time, my talents, everything that I've been blessed with to the Church or Jesus Christ of Batterity Saints, including my own life if it be necessary.

So as a twenty year old girl, I didn't quite have to like I'm gonna chot my throat and rip out my own testoms and feel them to the birds and the squirrels.

But I did have to grapple with that moment of what I die for the church?

Will I give my life for the church or Cheeses CHRISTI of Blotterity Saints.

And then after you finish your endowment and everything.

Then you go off into the ceiling room and you at the altar and Tanny, I love you.

Wow.

I So here's a comparison.

I don't know if you've ever heard this before, but as an American male, I'm obliged to be a fanatical about the Godfather films and the Sopranos and have read a number of books on the mafia.

That sounds like a mafia ceremony.

That's exactly what you have to do.

You have to say, like I will kill myself rather than turn my back on the mafia.

Like there's like part there's like a a the FBI actually got a microphone into one of these ceremonies like forty years ago, and like you have to swear that if your children try to rat out the mafia, you'll kill them.

Like it just it's a cult, but it's also sounds a little mafia like like this is wow, that's so funny.

I'm gonna have to find one of my early TikTok videos way back like six years ago, because I did this series of videos where I talked about how I felt like I was a mobster because at every point in my life, there was somebody who's going to do you in about a boom.

You know, Jenny, you had sex before you're married, it being about a boom, and it was always like my eternal life.

I didn't necessarily feel like somebody was going to like gutt me down to the streets.

But more in church, it's very much like the mafia.

There's a lot of death threats.

Wow, I mean eternal death threats, like the destination of your soul.

But in the temple that was literal.

In the temple, the blood oaths were literally rather than sharing this stuff that I chucked down on the temple and nut these ordinances, I will personally cut my own throat, my own intestines open, and feeding my guts to the ship minks.

Wow.

Okay's job.

Which leads me to this question.

I don't know if you have an answer for it.

Is there any record of somebody actually making good on this blood oath?

Has anybody been like well, I promised I would slep my own throat.

Guess I gotta go now.

There was a Reddit thread on this topic of the blood oaths, so I would imagine that it's still up.

But something that I've heard discussed off and on back in the day too.

If you committed a sin, then somebody would do that to you so that they could save your soul, because otherwise you'd be cursed to hell.

So if you had committed some major sin, then the blood oath was the way for you to make it tonement.

So yeah, there was a reddit threat.

I mean, I personally have never known of anyone who I don't know.

I like, certainly I think that that was a part of my mind to set too.

If we want to jump into that for just a second, and like, how PG do I have to be on this podcast?

Can I share things?

We say it all for sure.

So when I and I hadn't gone through the temple, but this is just such a part of Mormon culture that, like absolution, I guess is the topic.

And I shared a complete long version of this on Cults to Consciousness with Shalise.

But when I was a fourteen year old girl, I had a much older boyfriend, he was like a fifty year senior, and we had a coerced sexual experience.

I was a little fourteen year old freshman cheerleader, and it was a horrible, horrifying situation.

I couldn't talk to anybody about it because I didn't want to get in trouble, and I wrote about it in my diary, not realizing that my mom basically just had my diary as a spy mechanism.

So my mom every year for my birthday, I'd get a diary.

That's such a Mormon thing, right, and my mom was just using that as surveillance apparently, So my mom read my diary and read what had happened, and so she makes an appointment for me to go talk to my bishop, and the bishop instructs that I am my mom's to drive me to the Mormon bookstore and by a book for me that's still in existence.

I ten out of ten recommend anybody try to find this on eBay or wherever you can find it.

It's called the Miracle of Forgiveness.

It sounds sweet, written by the Mormon prophet during my childhood, and in this Miracle of Forgiveness, he says that if you commit the sin of having sex, you know, if you're immoral, that you have committed the sin next to murder.

So I'm this little fourteen year old girl.

As punishment, I have to go talk to the bishop you know, my mom reads my diary, takes me to the bishop.

The bishop says, buyer this book.

Jenny read this book twice.

I'm reading this book and that's sinking into my little fourteen year old brain.

I have committed the sin next to murder, So I guess the only way through this is to end my life.

So probably too graphic if I actually show this on camera, but on my inner left wrist, I still have the scars from when I was fourteen years old and took a razor blade to my wrist because I saw it as possibly the only way to get out of the horrible thing that i'd done.

So that it wasn't successful, obviously, So that is it.

That's part of Urtic culture in my lifetime.

Certainly that is shocking and upsetting, and I'm so sorry that you went through that.

But my mind goes too.

Did your mother at that point then, except that maybe she was complicit in this by making you read this book, and that it was the Mormon teachings, that it had been a secular family or a different family, that you wouldn't have had these thoughts.

Did they understand that Mormonism was to blame for their beautiful fourteen year old daughter doing this terrible, terrible thing.

No, absolutely not, because, first of all, my mom was deeply in doctrinated, multi generations of indoctrination, and we were sent to an LDS therapist.

The LDS therapist confirmed what the bishop had said, and so after I made that suicide attempt, I was sent to the LDS therapist.

Our bishop referred us out to this family services lady and she said, you know, so, first of all, you've had sex, and now you've tried to kill yourself.

If you had been successful, you would have burned in hell.

Why don't we focus on getting you out from under the influence of Satan?

And that was that was what everybody viewed was happening.

Nobody thought that the church was to blame my mom, the bishop, my young women's leaders, anybody involved saw that clearly I was under the influence of Satan.

And then because I had lost the spirit, because I was no longer righteous, I had committed this horrible sin, so the spirit wasn't working on me anymore.

Then I had tried to kill myself and who knows what next, you know, So, no, that was all on me.

I had tapped into Satan's power.

You know.

Ruby Frankie.

No, Ruby Frankie was a very famous Mormon podcaster.

She's in jail now, and what was it, Just about two years ago her little nine ten year old son escaped the home where she was, where he had been bound and was being told and she's in jail with a cohort for some really egregious childs child abuse.

Yeah, so Ruby Frankie, she believed that her children were under the influence of Satan.

My mom, everybody around me believed that I was under the influence of Satan.

So yeah, that was my fault.

That was the boy's fault.

Man.

I mean, it's dark, and it's just from the outsider's point of view, I mean it just it does sound so much like, I don't know, Lord of the Rings or something like that, a dark wizard had influenced you.

And I just, man, it's so hard to wrap my head around from my current perspective.

Although I was I was raised as Catholic as they come.

My dad was Opus Day, which is the Catholic Church was too as it stood in the eighties, was too liberal for my dad.

He wanted to go back to pre Vatican two and say Mass in Latin and all that stuff.

So it's I understand it.

And I was afraid of Satan too as a kid.

Uh yeah, you're blowing my mind.

And just to get back to what you said that if you commit a sin and you're going to go to hell, Mormons believe that if somebody murders you that gets you out of it.

Is that that is no longer accepted as Mormon doctrine.

And I'm not sure the exact year, but it's called blood atonement, blood atonement, and they're still even though they stepped away from blood atonement, even though it's no longer part of the temple Ornans.

And that's the interesting thing about Mormonism.

There are kids today who will listen to this podcast and they'll say, that's not the Mormon Church at all, because the Mormon Church doesn't have an anchor where the Bible is the anchor for so many Christian religions.

The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, he did this really curious thing and he's like, yeah, the Bible is kind of important, but who we can't trust the translation.

We have this new scripture, the Book of Mormon, and I as the prophet can reveal new scripture anytime I want to.

So he really, in so many ways sat Mormons adrift in the sea of doctrine because you don't have to go back to you know, what does the Bible say?

What did the apostles teach?

At any given moment, the Mormon prophets can reveal something new and then everything changes.

So it's fascinating.

So Mormons today no longer have the blood atonement.

It's not part of the doctrine.

It's been disavowed in much the same way that polygamy has been disavowed.

Members of the church who discussed a blowdy Saints out of Saltlake City they no longer practice polygamy, and they no longer practice the blood atonement.

But when I grew up in the seventies and eighties, there were still remnants of it found within some of the teachings that I was learning in seminary, some of the scriptures that we were reading, some of the lessons from the prophets that I was still learning in the sixties or in the seventies and eighties when I was a kid.

I hate to keep harping on this, but I have so many questions.

Number one, just the way it was taught at the time.

The person that killed you, are they off the hook for murder?

Are they also doing a good thing?

If you're doing they're doing you favor?

And so God gives them a pass on the whole thou shalt not kill thing, and they get to go to I guess in Mormon case, not heaven but their own planet.

Yes, Mormonism has a lot of sanctified murder.

And I know again some the younger Mormons are going to argue in the Book of Mormon, and this is a book that, like my mom would just get this out and read this to us when we were little kids.

I would read this to my children early on.

In the Book of Mormon, just the first couple of chapters, the main prophet, his name is Nephi, as they're preparing to leave Jerusalem to come to the Americas, right way back, way back in the day anciently, he needs to get some things from one of his uncles, and in this story, he is led to the uncle who then refuses to give him the brass plates and some of the records and things that God required him to take from the ancle.

And so the Holy Ghost commands him that he's supposed to chopply bin set off, and do you want me to pull the scripture for you really quick?

Because it's best?

Sure.

I just don't I like to bring receipts, you know, I don't like anyone to argue with this.

So as a little kid, I would grapple with this concept of when is this a god justified murder?

When is it okay for me to take somebody's life?

Which is I mean, isn't that she hot?

Isn't that just the concept of a holy war?

Yeah, there's no shortage of it in the Bible either.

Canaan I certainly got the wrong end of the stick on that one.

I think the difference though, is that in the Bible, like, if you're a little CHRISTI and get a Bible camp, you're not necessarily going back to the Old Testament, which was thousands of years ago and gleaning every day lessons from it.

Nobody's like, okay, let's learn how to kill the Canaanites or Egypt or whoever.

In Mormonism, this stuff feels very real, it feels very living and very current, and the way that it's taught.

You know, I had seminary lessons where we learned lessons from Laban, where we learned lessons about when it was okay to go to war against our neighbors.

Okay refuses to give up the record to be delivered into his son's hands, is slain by me, fy, so you're going to go to fight or seven here?

Yeah, this was something that I grappled with as just a girl growing up.

When will I know if I am supposed to take somebody's life.

Wow, that is not something a person growing up in this world that has enough to grapple with should be grappling with.

That is too much to grapple with and unnecessary.

My whole life was a battle of good and evil.

I talk about that on my page all the time on my channels.

I'm like, it's so hard to explain to someone who didn't grow up like this what it means to see every day when you wake up, Like the minute my feet hit the floor, Satan and his spirits are after me, and everything that I do is a battle of good and evil, and all of this life is a battle between Satans.

So the spirit takes Nephi this young, he would become the prophet.

He takes him into his uncle Laban's, and the spirit said, unto me, behold, the Lord had delivered him into thy hands, and he tells him that you need to slay him.

Came to pass.

I was constrained by the spirit that I should kill Laban.

But I said in my heart, never any time have I shed the blood of a man, and I shrunk, and that I would not slay him.

And the spirit said, unto me again, slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands.

Behold, and this is this is a scripture that we memorized in seminary when I was like fourteen fifteen, sixteen years old.

This was taught to the kids.

Right.

Behold, the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes.

It is better that one man should perish, that a nation should dwindle and perish and unbelief.

And now, when I NEEDFI had heard these words, I remember the words of the Lord which he spaken to me in the wilderness, telling him to keep all my commandments.

And so basically he takes the sword and he chops off labor.

And said, so I did obey the voice of the Lord and took Laban by the hair of the head, and I smote off his head with his own sword.

Oh, the smoting, always with the smoting, right.

So yeah, as a kid growing up, I used to grapple with that, like, Okay, when do I know that I'm going to need to be an assassin for Jesus?

Like, when's that can happen?

Either I'm gonna have to take my own life, I'm gonna have to take somebody else, because it's better that one bad man perishes that everybody else dwindles.

And yeah, And I mean when it comes to the Spirit of the Lord speaking to you, we all hear voices in our head all day.

It's just us talking to ourselves, you know.

So, I mean it just sets up the risk of somebody taking this seriously and acting on it, somebody who otherwise probably wouldn't have had these murderous inclinations.

Do we know of that?

I'm thinking of the book Under the Banner of Heaven, where certainly the two Brothers chronicled in that book, And if you haven't read it, it simultaneously tells the story of Joseph Smith in the formation of the Mormon Church, as well as a modern story of two brothers I think in the eighties who went on a murderous campaign the Libarons.

Yeah right, yeah, I have family that are down in the Liberian colonies in Mexico.

Also, I mean, notably Laurie Dave Bell and Chad Dave Bell.

They murdered their children because they thought that they were demon possessed, buried them out in the desert.

Ruby Frankie and Jodie Hildebrandt her cohort and the child abuse in that case very similar.

So it's interesting, Michael, like you say, one person might be ratified by that and one person might not.

Just in life in general, I'm the type of person who takes everything very literally.

So I went on the Atkins diet way back when when I was like a twenty year old girl, and I buy the letter.

You know, not a carb passed my lips because I'm all in.

I'm very black and white.

And I have conversations with other people who remembers in a Mormon church who are like, what the hell are you talking about, Jenny, Like, I didn't do that, and I didn't think that, but there were maybe people who didn't take things as literally.

I take everything literally, and I think The most interesting thing about my experience in the church is that I actually believed all of it.

I believed with scriptures taught, I believed what my seminary teachers taught.

I believed what they taught in the temple, and I tried to actually live it all of it.

So that's really interesting and it makes me wonder did you feel a divine presence in your life at that time when you believed it what you said, you felt like you had to wake up and fight demons and Satan?

Did you sense them around you?

Did you feel them when you felt like that you were, you know, a warrior for Jesus.

Did you sense him his presence in your life?

I mean, could you feel these things?

Did you sense that this was real because you could eternalize it?

Oh, that's such an interesting question.

My brain's kind of just like going back over like growing up Mormon.

I would say that to answer that, there's two aspects of that question that were at play in my life.

So, first of all, signs were a big deal for me.

I believed that God spoke to me through little things.

It like it could even be like a fortune cookie.

I had a lot of teachings growing up around listening to the still small voice, in the ways that the Spirit would talk to me, the way that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ would speak to me through the Holy Ghost, who was that personage in the Godhead that was directly tasked with speaking to the mortals.

Right, So, if I if I was seeing a fight with a friend and then I said a prayer asking Heavenly Father to help me smooth over my little middle school tip with one of my besties, and then I turned on the radio and there was a song about you know, you should write a letter.

Then I would see that as a sign from Heavenly Father.

I would think that the Holy Ghost was speaking to me, and I would write a letter.

So it's funny how that I wouldn't have said when I was a member of the church that I was superstitious.

But in many ways I was superstitious.

I was always looking for signs.

I was looking for a TV show or a book, or I would sometimes just randomly open up my scriptures and like, you know, whatever I prayed about, I'm having this problem, should I divorce my husband or not?

And I'd open the scripture and you know, stay steadfast, and the course that you're on.

And well, there's my answer.

Heavenly Father just told me that I need to stay stead fast and the course that I'm want.

So I certainly would if had said, I would have said in the forty four years that I was LDS that I did feel that God was working in my life because I constantly saw signs and I constantly saw science, because I was constantly looking for science.

Because rather than using critical thinking and just like I'm going to check out a notepad and I'm going to write pros and cons whether or not I should divorce this stouche bag, I was always looking for you know, like Grandma died and then there was a rainbow after her funeral.

That was God.

Well maybe you know, we had the funeral on a rainy day.

Maybe that wasn't God.

So I certainly would have said that the Holy Ghost was always leading me.

And then also I think that when you are groomed in some of these high demand religions Mormonism, where you are constantly being put in situations where you have this elevation emotion, that it's very easy for you to have that elevation emotion.

So an example of this, like the Mormon Church is really good at having music, and a very specific type.

You know, we didn't have the rock bands with drums and electric guitars.

It's organ music, these these very old fashioned, pioneer type of songs, and you get accustomed to like this is the way that the Lord speaks to me when I hear this type of stuff.

And so then you get those warm fuzzies, just like I guess for people who aren't part of cults.

You know, when you take all the Christmas stuff out and you smell the sunamond candles, and that feels like Christmas.

Because I had been so deeply immersed in this culture of recognizing the spirit and listening to the still small voice, just going to church and hearing that organ music, listening to the prophets speak, opening up one of my church books at home and just reading I'm turning on some of my music and my CD player.

It made me feel like I was at home.

So I certainly would have said that I had a lot of spiritual experiences.

Interesting.

I think I was very much the same way when I was in high school.

Constant, Like I would turn on the radio and if I was thinking about something and there was a song or a lyric that somehow addressed it.

I was like, that's God, that's God talking to me, which just speaks to I don't know the human condition or our mind or the evolutionary process and how our minds came around that we look for, you know, confirmation, We have confirmation biases.

That's now what I hope to be my logical mind speaking.

But so that you've talked about your husband a little bit there, and that is a big part of your life.

So you married, I'm think quite young.

Right, I was twenty.

I was seventeen when I was engaged the first time, and nobody had a problem with that.

So wow, said the first time.

So there was a a fiance before the husband.

Yes, And I sent him off on a Mormon mission after he soaked me.

By the way, I know, there's a lot of controversy around soaking, So the night before he went on his Mormon mission, he kind of snuck one in on me.

So, I soaking is not what everybody makes it out to be.

But I was soaked.

I think that it's you don't soak, somebody soaks you.

Anyway, Yeah, he went off on a Mormon mission, and then I was coerced.

I discussed on my channel and have written articles and done interviews about the bride trafficking, which is one of the greatest percentages of trafficking.

There's a lot of bride trafficking there, always has been historically, and I was specifically targeted, recruited, and then coerced to marry the man that I was spent twenty four years with.

Wow, just is because I think I know what you're talking about, but I could use some clarification.

When you're talking about bride trafficking, so you know, my mind goes to, you know, I don't know, trafficking like somebody being against their will, stolen away from their parents or whatnot.

But that's not what you're talking about, obviously.

Could you be a little more clear about what you mean.

So trafficking doesn't always have to mean stolen.

You can be trafficked by your own community.

You can be trafficked by your parents, You can be trafficked by school teachers, camp leaders, whoever, government officials.

I I was targeted by a leader who was much older than me, who had a friend that had recently come home from his mission, and the Mormon doctrine teaches that you have to get married, you Catholics.

You don't have to get married right like, you can die single, and that's actually preferable because then you're not stained by sexual appetites or whatever.

In Morganism, to attain highest grief Heaven, to become a god and goddess, you must be married.

Single people cannot become gods and goddesses.

So that's always front and center in your little Mormon mind, that I need to find my eternal companions so that I can form my eternal family so that I can live with God again and be like him.

And when missionaries come home from their missions, it's a big deal to get them married quickly because Mormons also don't believe in sex outside of marriage.

It's the sad next murder, like I already mentioned.

And this guy, I call him Jake, and my channel, he had come home from this mission and his friends, who were priesthood leaders in my stake, set me up on a blind date.

But when they first dialogued with me about it, they said, we want to introduce you to your husband.

This is your future husband, the Holy Ghost has told us, and here's you know.

This is his name.

You guys need to go out on a date.

And then our second date, he molested me, non consensually and in a very shocking way.

Because I thought, because I was out with this return missionary that I was in good hands.

I had the expectation that he was going to respect me, and he didn't.

We went hot dubbing together and he violated me in a way that was absolutely jarring.

And then he went and confessed to the priestood leader our bishop about what had happened, as though it was a mutual thing that me and Jenny did this.

And the priestood leader said, you guys need to get married because of what happened.

So our eleventh date was our dumple way WHOA.

So we were set up by this much older priesthood leader Jason or Jake needs a wife, Jake needs to get married.

Jake can't go to heaven if he doesn't have a bride.

And then after he molested me, I was forced to marry him.

That is heartbreaking, but it also speaks of I mean, I've heard of that in other religions.

Isn't say in the Old Testament that if you rape a woman your punishment is to marry her.

I mean it's just it's heart breaking.

But I mean, where is your mindset at this point you're marrying this man.

Did you in your did you convince yourself you were in love that he was actually a good guy, or did you understand at that time that this guy is a terrible, terrible human being.

And we'll get into how terrible he was leading up to that Valentine he gave you, which blew my mind.

Pulled it out.

I think I have it, do I mean, I could go grab that from my desk.

Yeah, like you too.

First of all, I was still engaged to the first fiance when I was a mission so we'd had two years we didn't see each other.

Mormon missionaries, it's it's a big deal.

They're gone for two years.

You can't have phone calls or anything, so it's not even a long distance relationship.

The church just takes them.

They send them off across the world and they cut all ties with their family and everything and back.

Also, like this was the early nineteen nineties, we didn't have email or anything, so once or twice a month I'd get a letter from my fiance, but we were still engaged and that was so let me just let me explain the scene for you.

So I've gone on a date with this guy because this priesthood leader says, the Holy Ghost is telling me that he's your future husband.

And I guess that intrigued me because I was very obsessed with following what the Holy Ghost is set to do.

Right, So I went on a date with him, and then on the second date, he molests me in the hot time.

Then we go talk to our bishop to repent, to give our confessional.

We're sitting in this bishop's office, Jake and me, just side by side, and when the bishop says, let's hurry up and get you guys married before you have full blown sex, and then mormonhelle, which is called the celestial Kingdom for the rest of eternity, let's get you married.

I said in like, I'm this little nineteen year old girl, super skinny, blonde hair.

I didn't know anything about anything.

I lived this really sheltered life sitting here alone in this bishop's office.

I didn't even know this bishop well at all.

And I said, Bishop Bullock, I am engaged.

I have a fiance.

He's on a mission right now.

So you know, I was just going on the state because Josh Johnson told me to go on the state, but we are not getting married.

And the bishop said, oh, you know, do you think that your missionary wants to marry you now?

Now you've done this with Jake, he will never want to see you again.

So I don't think that it was that night.

I think that it was the next night when my family was gone, because you know, I have little brothers and sisters and parents at home and I didn't want them to know any of this that was going on.

And they left and I was able to track down my missionary fiance's phone number and I called him on his mission, which was a big shock to him, and I told him, I need to break up with you.

I've met sybody.

The Holy ghost has told us that we're supposed to get married, and we were getting married in a few weeks.

I never saw that.

I take it.

You know, we met, We didn't meet in real life, but we met up online.

He found me on Facebook and he actually helped me escape domestic violence twenty six years after this.

Wow.

So he's a great guy, or at least he's.

A great guy.

I would have had a great life with him.

And so when we when we crossed paths again all those years later, I asked him and I said, why didn't you fight more on the phone when I called you that night?

And He's like, I was missionary.

I believed in the Holy Ghost.

I believed that God had told you that you were supposed to marry somebody else, and I didn't want to mess with that.

So I remember him just telling me like, I love you, I hate this, but I hope you have an amazing life.

And if this is truly what she want to do, then I'm wishing you just all of the happiness.

Wow, is he Is he still a Mormon?

Or is he no longer a Mormon?

He is so in a way like it's a good thing that he's en end up with him, because I don't know that I would have ever jumped out of Mormonism if I had had this good Mormon husband.

Instead, I had a bad Mormon husband, so it was a little easier to jump ship.

Yeah, so you married your husband.

Spoiler alert, he was already cheating on you, which isn't surprising since he unconsensually touched you on your first date.

But he was cheating on you from the go the get go.

I didn't know that though, yep, I did not know that right.

So first of all, when we got married, we had this pre wedding interview to go through the temple, I had to get my temple recommend.

The bishop cleared us of that event.

He's like, you guys are getting married, so we're going to raise that you guys are repented of that.

And we had to have this pre wedding interview so that we could get our temple recommends and be able to go through the temple to get married.

And the bishop gave us some advice.

He said, never share any of your sexual past, if you've slept with anyone else, if you've made out with anyone else, anything that's happened in your past.

You know, brother brother Brown, you've repented of that because you've served your mission.

So anything that's happened prior to mission, that's behind you.

And you know, sister Fisher, anything that you've done, I'm sure that you've repented up.

And here's why this was his testification, Michael.

He said, you guys will be having sex with each other and all you'll be thinking about is that other guy that your wife slept with, or that other girl that your husband slept with, and he says, I have seen many a good marriage destroyed because they knew of one another's sexual past.

So we never even had a single conversation around if you ever had sex with anybody, are you a virgin?

And I assumed that he was a virgin because he had gone on a mission.

So the fact that he had done that to me in the hot tibe was shocking, like, oh, say, it must have really been tempting him, because why would he do that?

So I thought that I had been his first.

I thought that he was a virgin when we got married.

I did not know about the cheating while we were engaged.

And there was only one time in our marriage, which was just the first few weeks after we got married, that he came to me and well, brand new knew he was right.

We just went through the temple, We've just moved in together.

I'm twenty by then, and he comes to me one day after work, tears rolling down his face because I have to confess something to you today.

At lunch time, he had an side sales job.

We went to a strip club and I paid a stripper for a sexual experience.

I'm this little twenty year old Mormon girl, totally sheltered.

I didn't even know that strippers were real.

I thought it was just on movies and stuff.

I didn't know that they actually existed.

I've never been to a strip club.

I'd never seen poor and I'd never you know, this was prior to the internet, nineteen ninety five, right, and it just completely crushed me, Like what in the world.

So I start crying and I'm like, I have to divorce you, Like this is over.

I can't live with this.

So I drive to my grandma's house and I tell my grandma and I said, I need a divorce.

We've been married for three weeks now, and you'll you know, you have a temple ceiling.

There's no divorce.

You're sealed to Jason for time law, maternity.

You just got married than temple.

I wanted a second opinion, so I went and talked to our state president.

Nineteen ninety five, sat down with our state president.

Said I have to get divorced.

And the state president said, well, you can get a divorce, like you can go to an attorney and you can get divorced, but you still have a temple ceiling.

And he says, Jenny, there's no good missionary, who's going to want to marry you now?

Because you've already been married and you will still be married to Jake for all of eternity.

So another guy couldn't take me to the temple and be sealed to me.

You know what I mean?

Does that make sense?

What he's saying is after I'm still married to Jake.

Yeah, after death, you you're gonna end up on your planet.

So even if you marry somebody, you guys have to say audios in the afterlife.

And they know this because I'm not going to get into that, that's just talk.

But so I spent one night at my grandma's house and then I drove back home to Jake, and as I remember, he went and like repented to the bishop, and the bishop had him like say his prayers like redescriptures a little bit more.

And then for the next twenty two years nothing, I saw nothing.

And then twenty two years into our marriage, I found out that he had been cheating on me from the very beginning since we were engaged.

But only that one stripper did he ever slip up on?

Wow, that is I guess we'll just finish up the story about your marriage, and then we'll kind of rewind into your experiences as a white nationalist and white supremacist.

But so I'm thinking of the Valentine, which blew my mind.

Why don't we talk about that.

For anyone who's listening.

I just found this Valentine a couple of years ago, and I've been talking about my cheating husband and all the things he put me through.

And while I do have screenshots and voice recordings and videos and other evidence, and when I found this Valentine card, it just blew me away because it is just in such I don't know, grizzly detail, the confession of a lunatic.

And although we've said it three times, I'm going to remind everyone one more time.

This is a Valentine he gave to his wife on Valentine's Day.

Beautiful roses, ribbons.

I love you always, Jake.

Oh what a sweetheart.

And what's funny is when I found this, I was in a very different place.

I had escaped domestic violince about four years before.

I found this in an old rubber made box here a couple of years ago, and at the time that he gave this to me, this was the very last Valentine card that Jake ever gave me.

At the time I got this, I never thought anything weird about it, Like Jake would do stuff all the time, like a lot of the times I'd get a birthday card or Valentine's herd of Mother's Day card, and it would be a big confessional.

You know, I'm sorry that I'm such a creep for this reason or that reason.

I'm sorry, yell at you all the time.

Sorry, I moved out for the past six months.

So they were often confessionals.

This was the one the year that I discovered adultery and learned about his double life.

But I didn't think this was remarkable at the time.

It's like, okay, thanks honey, Like that's really sweet, thanks, thanks for apologizing, right, And so I just stuck it in a box.

And this wasn't remarkable to me at the time.

Two years ago, when I found it again, it was extraordinarily remarkable.

It's extraordinary, And there's a confession in there that you'll read that just kind of blew my mind.

It kind of summarizes Jake, in my opinion, or at least how a person could be like that.

But go ahead, if you don't mind.

Can we What does it say do you?

Jenny?

I'm sorry.

I cheated on you, I lied and deceived.

I've withdrawn love our entire lives.

I've hurt you deep should be deeply drives me crazy every time.

I much not even good.

You suffer at my hand.

I've destroyed your innocent nature.

I've failed as a husband.

I didn't offer the security you needed.

I've caused major damage to our family.

I've worked against you.

I didn't recognize you as my equal partner.

I never understood your needs.

He's just laundry listing.

I don't know this confessional.

Your needs have gone and met for years.

And this is my favorite little bit, Michael.

Most of all, you endure pain and torment with me.

I don't feel empathy, which leaves you all alone, insecure and aluminum.

And he underlines that, and it's all capital letters.

This is where I failed most as your husband.

I will always be forever deeply sorry.

You're an amazing Mercedes woman.

I think he's meaning I'm high value.

I IQ successful, educated, classing, moral, well spoken, feeding the homeless, volunteering in school, working your ass off to always be incredibly amazing.

I love you forever, Jake, Wow, Happy Valentine's Day.

Roses are red, violets are blue.

I've been cheating and cheating him.

Wow.

So we both focused on the same thing, which I felt like just so, I felt no empathy.

I feel what is the exact words, I feel no empathy?

Unbelievable.

Yeah, And anyone who wants to screenshot this if you're watching on the video, and that really is like Jake didn't feel empathy.

I always had to explain to him, like why is that baby crying?

Or why am I feeling this way or doing this thing?

Jake has no connection to other people's emotions.

I used to say that I had to teach him how to human.

And I mean, that's it right there.

And without having any schooling in psychology, whatsoever is that psychopathic behavior?

Who exactly is it that has no empathy?

Psychopaths?

Right, I'm not allowed to legally state any of his psychiatric diagnoses or the speculations from therapists who've worked with me, with the two of us, but yeah, psychopaths don't have emotions, aren't able to make assessments about the emotions of others either.

It is funny too, because this was February, and he says, I love you forever.

You know, I'm so sorry.

I will always be forever deeply sorry.

Like, Michael, what does the word forever mean?

Yeah, he was cheating on me at Yeah, he was still cheating on me at the time, and by October of that year, I would catch him picking up the nineteen year old prostitute.

And that was what ended our marriage, was that last nineteen year old prostitute.

And I know she was nineteen because that's what he typed into the Google search bar, nineteen year old prostitutes Phoenix, and then he got into a chat room found in like how old are you?

She said nineteen?

So I always say that on my channels.

I'm like, yeah, our marriage ended when he abandoned me for a nineteen year old prostitute.

People like, how do you know she was nineteen?

That was the Google search guys?

How was the Google search special?

He was fifty, he was fifty, she was nineteen.

Yeah, So I forever doesn't mean the same thing to Jake that it means to normal people.

Since this is a political podcast and you and I are of similar ideology, it just it seems so apropos right now, that the psychopathic, unempathetic fifty year old man was after teenage girls, which is dominating the news cycle right now, and if anyone's listening years from now, because this podcast will undoubtedly be one of the most famous podcasts in the history of the world.

We're talking Epstein list or that's what I'm referring to, which is what's hot in the news right now.

Unbelievable.

And you didn't leave him at that time when he gave you that again, is this the Mormonism?

Yes, well, let's get into it.

You're a trad wife at that point.

You have no.

Job experience at least I don't want to say you have no skills or do you have no resume, but you haven't been working, so it would be very difficult for you to pick up the pieces at that point.

Was it that fear or was it the conditioning of the role of a wife vis a villa husband due to Mormon doctrine that kept you there or a combination.

I have a really sad substack article.

I'll lift the paywall for your viewers.

Am I able to give you a link that you can put that in your destriction description.

I'll lift the paywall.

In this one, I wrote in my diary about the day that I found out that Jake was cheating on me after twenty two years of marriage.

I was stunned.

My whole world unraveled, and not just cheating on me, like, oh, I've had an affair, but he'd been picking up trafficked girls, and dozens and dozens, by his estimation, between fifty and one hundred affairs of the course of our marriage.

And there's this really sad moment where Jake is on a road trip and I've just learned all of this, and I was standing in the bedroom our luxury condo, folding my laundry and just thinking, what do I do.

Do I change the locks, do I call him and tell him I'm going to file for divorce?

And what do I do?

What's my path forward?

And as I was folding the laundry, it hit me like a bag of bricks.

I had never had a job, I had no work experience.

I had just survived in a verian tumor.

I was dependent on him for every bite that I ate, for the food in the fridge that was feeding the kids, for the car that I drove, and even like this big beautiful bed.

I had this gorgeous bet, and it's like, if I leave Jake, then I'm leaving the bed, the pillow, the sheets, my toothbrush.

He will take everything.

He will end up with the kids.

I have no way to support myself, I have no way out of this, and so instead for the next three years.

And I just did a videoing that on my YouTube this week.

There was this three year window when I knew not only was I marritual and abusive man without empathy who had harmed me and our children and our pets and everyone he could get his hands on for as long as I had known him, but now I was married to this monster who had also cheated on me in horrifying ways.

Doing a little bit of grizly details around that, around STDs and some things that identify.

I want them.

I'm afraid of them, but I think that it helps round out your story and complete it.

So let's have them.

And ladies.

This is also a really good time to say, even if you're married, even if you're in a conservative Christian type of relationship and you think that your husband is exclusive to you.

If I had had an annual STD test when I went in for my physical then I probably would have found out that he was cheating on me just a couple of years in, but I thought I had a yeast infection all one year and it turned out that he had given me five STDs because he was having unprotected sex with prostitutes off the street.

And this was during the time when I was recovering from an ovarian tumor and a hospital quired superbacteria that would actually almost take my life.

I had a near death experience.

I was critically ill for several years, and while I was trying to recover so I could be here for my kids and just be a mom, he was engaged in this dangerous behavior which would give me STDs.

He also put me at risk for HIV and C two of his girls had known exposure to whether those or were positive to those.

And when I asked him about it, during this time that I was discovering his double life from that little window that I was stuck with him for three years with nowhere to go, I asked him, why would you have unprotected when you know that I'm fighting for my life and Michael, this guy right here, this, I feel no empathy.

You struggle or you're you're tormented with me, right.

This man looks me dead in the eyes, the mother of his children, his wife of twenty two years, and he says, well, you were already dying anyway.

So I felt like if I had hurried that along, I would have been doing favor.

And for three years I had to stay with this man because I saund no way out.

I am shocked.

So it was.

I thought I had my head around what a scumbag he was, and then you said that.

Speechless, while I was recovering from my tumor at my parents' house, he had orgies in my bed.

While I was away, he bought me a new Mercedes that he had actually bought so that he could pick up girls and have sex in it because the seats laid down flat.

When I was discovering this stuff, I was speechless for months, like literally.

Like I am so so sorry that you went through that, and I'm so glad that you're out on the other side now, obviously.

And he was in church every Sunday, every Sunday.

And on the topic, go ahead.

On the topic of I know a lot of guys like this.

I know far too many of my husbands or of my friends, my best friend's husbands, and people in my own family that are like this on the topic of Epstein Christian men, and I know that Epstein wasn't Christian, but Christian men fetish I is a certain type of woman, very young, very sweet, you know, the church girl voice, very innocent, with the long, blowy hair, and you know, the pink cheeks.

There's no fetishizing of like Grandma's people like Rosie O'Donnell.

You know, like nobody's fetishizing them within the Christian community.

And unfortunately, I do think that that leads to inappropriate behaviors.

Like my Mormon husband, he thought that a certain type of girl was attractive, young, sweet, naive, innocent Mormon girls.

He wasn't attracted to grown women.

And when I began to age, when I was in my late thirties or the early forties, I was no longer a tract up to him anymore.

Yeah, this is I did an episode about trad wives where it's just me talking, and I said something about that where I was like, you're not like, you're so into your husband, but your husband's only like these tradwives on TikTok and Instagram.

They're all twenty two, and it's like, it's your husband is into that, Like they're not.

They don't love you for you, they love you for your submissivenus and your youth and your prettiness, and they're going to abandon you for someone who fits that bill when you no longer fit it.

It is an indictment to some degree on the tradwife herself that she's allowed herself into this situation sometimes, particularly these influencers.

And I only say because you know they're in there, that's they're literally doing that.

They're influencing other girls, so it makes it easier to speak out against them because they're doing harm.

But it is such an indictment in my opinion, on the husband of the tradwife, that that's what he's into.

Who doesn't, I mean whatever, who doesn't want an intellectual equal, who doesn't want somebody to share this life with and get and go through it with, Like I don't.

Even serve me Christian men?

Yeah, it outs I mean, it's hard for me to wrap my head around.

It's very hard for me to wrap my head around that reality that somebody would want that, but reality dictates that that is something that guys are into I feel bad for them to some degree, and then again I want them all to you know, fall off a cliff for being terrible people.

But you know, are they victimized as well by the Bible or the teachings of the Mormon Church or society on the whole, or culture or the boys will be boys mentality that we all came up in.

It's hard to say, And it's also hard to care at that point, once you've been crossed over and become a terrible human beings, it's hard to say, well, he's a victim too, because he grew up in a society that perpetuated this on to him.

But the fact of the matter is it's a vicious cycle.

And hopefully, I know you certainly are helping to break that cycle.

I hope I in some small way am as well.

I think there's a better way to be I have to say.

On that note, I love that Michael, like we are.

We're the cycle breakers here.

When I was in this culture conservative Christian community and living the trad life life, I thought that it was the only path to happiness.

I thought, you know, I have the dream life.

This is this is how people are supposed to be and the parts of it they worn't so dreaming.

Why I talked that up to Satan.

Satan's tempting as he's trying to make us stop.

It's remarkable to me today, seven years ago I left the religion first, and then two weeks you're the douchebag of a husband.

Every day I wake up and it's like, I can't believe how happy I am.

Like I am unmarried.

I'm happily partnered, but I'm unmarried.

I'm a working woman, fiercely independent, crazy book feminist, and I'm so happy.

I kind of wish that I could go back and just give like a little drop, a little video in the inbox of Jenny in like twenty sixteen, nineteen ninety five, two thousand and two, somewhere in there, like here's the future, here's the happiness that you can have without the chokehold of this religious patriarchy.

Yeah, me too, trust me.

I think about that time machine all the time.

Everybody does.

If only I could go back and warn the younger me against the traps that lay ahead.

But you know what, the time machine doesn't exist.

But we have plenty of time left in this world.

And you're making good and we're making right now.

And isn't that wonderful that you did escape that trap.

So let's get into a few of the other things that Jenny is escaping from.

You talk about the Christian nationalism and the white nationalism or the white supremacy that also came hand in hand.

I think we can pretty safely say that we can lay those at the doorstep of Mormon teaching as well.

But this was a mindset that you were once in that you once you know, you thought that way.

So I think you're in North Carolina at one point you posted a South Carolina South Carolina, uh, and you posted a picture of yourself wearing a Confederate flag pendant, and you talked openly about the fact that that this was who you were at that time, and this was the mentality that you had.

I think we could safely say that the Mormon Church at one time taught that black people were the curse of Ham.

I'm not sure if that's.

Caine and then the Curse of Ham.

So yeah, that their black skin was a sign that they were what affiliated with Satan and so uh, you know that makes and and white people are what the particularly American the white people are the chosen mind blowing that this church is just still loud and proud.

I mean, then again, I'm Catholic.

I came up Catholic and they have the worst child abuse scandal in the history of the world.

At Catholicism seems to be growing, particularly in the right wing right now.

I can't believe how many people JD.

Vance has become Catholic.

Candice Owens, they looked at the Catholic Church and were like, hey, yeah, that break me off a piece of that.

The Catholic Church doesn't openly teach people to be pedophiles, though it doesn't teach people to groom children.

The Mormon Church taught me to be racist, and that that was the ideal.

The Book of Mormon says that the Lamanites, who were supposedly the ancestors of the American Indians, that they were cursed with the skin of blackness so that the white people, and the quote from my Book of Mormon is white and delightsome.

The white and delightsome would not be enticed by the people with the skin of blackness.

And I can remember being taught these concepts when it was a three year old girl.

I always post pictures on my channel.

This is me when I was three, just for contact, because Michael, we have this picture of people who become white supremacists.

You're like in your college years, right, like think you're in that like pot smoking, trying to figure out who you are, a college type of era of your life.

And so you join some skinheads group or you get mixed up and you know, whatever thing is going on.

But Idaho, in the back woods up there, I was this little three year old girl when I was learning that the Indians were brown skinned because they followed Satan and they were cursed, and that I was white, delightsome, and because I was born in nineteen seventy four, I was born into a Mormon church where black people could not go to the temple.

They couldn't get married in the temple, they couldn't become the bishop, they couldn't pass the sacrament.

The black people had to sit outside on the bench during the priesthood meeting.

And that was just normal to me, like, yeah, well obviously they're cursed, Like come.

On, and there were black people that would were Mormon that would come and sit on the bench and oh, yeah, I'm cursed.

So but I'm still into this.

I just interviewed a really good friend of mine who has been instrumental in me deconstructing my racism.

He's been in the ex Mormon community.

His name Spencer.

His dad was the first Jamaican convert to the Mormon Church.

So he joined the church and they moved to Utah from Jamaica.

And his dad was totally happy, just sitting out in the hallway, like, yeah, God cursed my lineage and that's fine, I'll sit out in the hallway while all the white people go.

And that was just normal to him.

So I'm not a ton.

They weren't a ton of black people, but there were some I.

Can't even get my head around that I can't even get my head around that did they at least think that they were going to get their own planet at the end if they were Mormon, or what was the payoff?

What could possibly be the payoff for a black Mormon.

So both the blacks and the Native Americans was the same promise that if they joined the church and were baptized and lived righteous lives, that they could eventually become gods and goddesses, but they would also be turned white.

That was one of the teachings in the Mormon prophets that Native Americans and Africans would be turned white in heaven, which is really traumatizing.

I just did an interview with Spencer on my channel and that was one of the really sad things to listen to, how that he was taught as a child, growing up as a little Jamaican Mormon boy, that your skin is brown because of the curse, but don't worry because someday you'll be white.

And he's like, but I like being black, Like this, this is who I am.

This is my identity that I want to be white.

Yeah, man, my head is spinning.

So what was it like for you though, as a young adult.

I'm wondering, like, when you saw like overtly racist stuff, did you agree with it or were you of a different ilk like like the KKK or the good Old Boys with the Confederate flag on their car and their overt races and their use of demeaning terms and things like that.

Did you associate with that or were you just did you just believe that black people were cursed but they could become white in the Kingdom of Heaven or whatever it is.

Did you affiliate with that did you Did that speak to you in any way?

This is really hard to talk about.

By the time I was a teenager, young adult, and then an adult, I was so deeply racist that I just felt like that was Heavenly Father's plan, Like that wasn't me.

But if for instance, I've talked a lot about, I grew up in the eighties, So Ethiopia was a big thing, right, Like there was this huge famine and it was all on the news.

You know, we see what was going on in Ethiopia all the time, and I believe etc.

All that, and I believed that that was part of the curse, Like, yeah, well, God's cursing those people because they're evil, they're satana, so that's kind of what they get.

Yeah, duh.

And it kind of blunted me to compassion.

I also believed that any type of light and like inspiration, revelation came only to righteous people through Heavenly Father.

So for instance, like the light bulb, at some inventing the light bulb, that was because Heavenly Father revealed that.

True.

I believed that the invention of the TV, the invention of electricity, all of that was revelation Heavenly Father had all of the knowledge and data, and he would reveal to his righteous children.

And I didn't think that black people or Native Americans were capable of receiving any type of revelation.

That's why they were And I wanted to say before these words come into my mouth, this is not who I am today.

But while I was a white supremacist, I would think to myself, that's why you know, Africa is such a hot That's why they were all running around out there in the jungle in loincloths.

That's why the Native Americans never built complex civilizations, because they were cursed.

God didn't reveal any light knowledge.

And I believed from the time I was a young child, when I was groomed into what I call America's friendliest white supremacist cult, to the Mormon Church, I believed that people with brown skin were not as smart as me, that they were not as advanced as me, that they were not as capable as me.

Because I was white into light and I was chosen, I was God's elect.

I was born into Mormon Church.

It was white skin, blonde haircute.

I was multi generations of aldas, and I was righteous.

I went to the church all the time I got married in the temple.

I had this beautiful family.

Obviously, I was so much more righteous than anybody else.

And that's where that supremacy and that superiority comes in.

I looked down on people who were brown skinned for my entire life until I started from the Norman Church.

Wow.

I mean, what a gift to be able to walk away from that and free yourself from that prison of that that those terrible thoughts.

I mean, so I.

Would have never I would have never dated anybody black, because I wouldn't mix my seed was the word that the scripture has used.

And I did sneak in a Mexican boyfriend when I was like fourteen, Dario Ramrez.

He was so hot, and my mom told my grandma that I had this Mexican boyfriend.

And my grandma called me that night and she's like, your mom says that you have a Mexican boyfriend, Jenny, my heart is broken.

You can't date a Mexican.

They're cursed, so please break up with him.

And I did because it's like, oh yeah, Mexicans because they're part Indians, so I can't date them.

So eugenics, I made sure that I married white boy.

Man.

So he asked about my sympathy for the KKK and things like that.

Yeah.

We then moved to the South, so I'm an Arizona Gurley.

I'm already white supremacist.

We moved to the South, and I do and again, like I hate to talk about these things, but I think it's important to dialogue about this.

I absolutely sympathized with some of our neighbors, with the clan.

Our neighbor Brian motor Lawn, he was the clan when the shooting happened in South Carolina, and I went to the country store that was run by like the grand Wizard of our region who was clan, and I bought up all the Dixie flags.

And it's funny.

I sent my dad for his birthday a little like Dixie flag tie pin.

And I remember my family who didn't live in the South kind of freaking out, like Jenny, this is like, what the hell's going on with you with this Dixie flag?

And to me, it just made sense, like we do have to protect our niche and from the people who are cursed taking over.

Man, Michael, I hate talking about this stuff.

I know you do, and stop the second you want to stop.

But can I give a little disclaimer on myself and then if you have any questions about this.

When I left the church, this was one of the things that I didn't even realize that I had to deconstruct.

I went straight into Christianity for almost five years, and there's still the curse of Kan and Adam and Eve and all of that stuff.

And it wasn't until like I was one of the pioneers of ex Mormon TikTok and all of a sudden, I'm on TikTok and I have hundreds and hundreds of ex Mormon creator friends and some of them were black.

And it wasn't until I started to have conversations with the first ever black friends that I'd ever had in my entire life about their experiences within the church that I started to deconstruct and realize, oh my God, like that's not okay to look down on people just because of the color of their skin.

And then I started listening to some science so I found this professor I can never remember she was like Georgetown or Duke University or something like that, but just randomly, like on Facebook, she had like classes that they kind of broadcast.

She do these lectures, and she was a geneticist, So this was like two three years ago, and I started listening to her lecture series and she was going through how that we all came from the fertile Crescent and then everybody was brown skin.

And one day she talked about the genetic mutation that was I think she said six thousand years ago for the blonde hair, blue eyed, and then the flat hair and white skin.

And she's like, yeah, this is the newest genetic mutation.

We have some redheads and then we have the blonde hair, blue eyed.

As people progressed further north, and this moment of realization that everything that I had been taught my entire life by my religion about the nature of the universe, like, oh, all humans used to be brown because of the sun as we developed around the equator, and my blonche ha blue eye.

I was not the descendant of a white European Adam and Eve that was made in the image of a white God and a white goddess Mother, which is what the Mormon Church taught.

I'm not part of that pure race.

We all start off brown.

I'm actually descended from people who you know, I'm as African as anybody else.

I'm just a mutation.

That moment listening to this lecture series is like, that's when it all fell apart for me.

That's the moment that white supremacy collapsed for me.

Wow, And that is such a great story and such a great I mean that it is possible to reach people and to change these long held beliefs.

And you just summarized what the problem with revealed truth is, Like truth is not revealed.

It's tough.

It's hard to find the truth.

It takes data and evidence, and that if you think you're getting truth by just you know, speaking through empathy with a wizard in the sky, you're never going to come up with the right answers.

One thing that I was a little bit curious about, which is a side note, is just because as somebody who grew up mostly in Boston and now lives in Los Angeles, California, and we have certain stereotypes that I try and fight, you know, in my life when you think about the South and like I want to believe like the South has changed.

It's not like we believe it is.

And I have friends that you know, are very liberal and like, fuck those racist Southerners.

I'm like, no, I don't believe it, but you said, like the Klan was all around you.

We lived there until twenty sixteen, twenty fifteen.

I'm an East Coast girl and I'm Arizona almost my entire life, and I was stunned by the blatant racism.

I was stunned by it.

It was next level.

And it's just still there.

Huh.

Maybe it wasn't there as we lived.

We lived in a little town called Camedon, Arkansas, and then we lived said of Greenville, South Carolina.

Greenville itself, you know, I mean there were pockets where it was more so.

But we were out in the sticks in a little place called Travelers Rest at thirty minutes away from North Carolina, and everybody was racist, and they also hated Mormons.

So it was kind of like this double sword, like, oh, well, I'm white, but I'm Mormons.

So I kind of pretended not to be as Mormon while I was living in South Carolina.

Yeah, I mean a lot of the I mean, having debated many many a Christian in my day, they will they are so quick to say like we're not a cult, we're not crazy, We're not like those Mormons.

No, they're nuts.

Yeah, just like no, there's all the same nuts, you're just a different flavor.

Yeah, the cashews, they're the you know, walnuts, whatever it's you're all nuts.

But but you are not this person anymore.

You are your life Take two, and that is why you call yourself that online.

And so why don't we get into a little bit of that that you are an advocate now and you are doing you're doing the Lord's work, the atheist lord's work.

Yeah, so you were a Christian for five years after Mormon, so baby steps, I guess.

But although look as an atheist, like I said, you're all nuts, I don't know that that was any better, to be honest with you, But now you actually as an atheist myself, I'm always so curious, how did that come about?

That you just said, Nah, none of it, none of it's true.

I know a lot of people who've had transitions, and again, being on TikTok and the ex Mormon and ex religious community for the past six plus years, I have so many other creative friends.

I've heard thousands of stories.

I've done so many podcasts and interviews with people, so I've heard a lot of people, and it tends to be people have little kinks in, you know, cracks in the foundation of their faith.

People put it as you have a shelf.

You know, I had the shelf.

There's this thing I didn't believe.

I put it up on the shelf.

Eventually, there's so many things on the shelf that collapses.

That's not what happened to me.

And I'm one of these who if I do something, I'm going to do all the way.

I'm all in.

And again like I lived every aspect of Mormonism, I believed all of it.

I was a true believing, ultra orthodox member of the church.

And one Sunday after this time period where I found out Jake was cheating on me, we've been separated and we had just reconciled.

It was just a couple of weeks into us moving back in together.

And I think that in so many ways, I blame it on the fact that I had had a therapist because for the first time in my life, and during that time of finding out that he was cheating on me and going through all these stuff, all these things, my meant health started to collapse.

And I had a doctor who ordered me to have a psych evaluation, and then I had to start seeing a therapist.

I was forced to see a therapist, and this therapist taught me to kind of listen to myself, you know, like actual use intuition and self reflection.

And it was the first time in my life that such a concept had ever been introduced to me.

I always just felt like shit.

I kind of operated on a spectrum of dissociation to just depression because my life was so difficult in so many ways.

And then I started seeing the therapist, and the therapists like, why don't you actually listen to what your gut is telling Jenny?

And instead of praying about things and asking Jesus to fix this, why don't we apply some critical thinking.

And for the first time in my life, he would sit down and have me list things out, like, let's look at the pros and cons being made to jig, Let's look at the pros and cons of you not having a job.

Let's look at the pros and cons of you looking all of your meals from scratch.

And he started to two things make me critically think.

And then the second thing was listen to my own gut.

And that's a very dangerous thing to teach a deeply devout religious person, isn't it so?

Jake and I are separated and we have this horrible time, and then we moved back in together.

Everything is roses in fairy tales.

Jake has repented, Jesus is going to wash away all of his cheating.

He's not going to abuse me anymore.

And I don't have to mess up my life by getting divorced.

And so one Sunday we go to church.

I have nothing on myself, I have no doubts about Mormonism, and the whole entire Mormon three hours of church was a giant shit show.

The first hour was sexist.

It was all of the women need to be tradwives, and for the first time ever, that hit me funny.

The second hour was anti Semitic.

Literally, the lesson in our Sunday school class was the Holocaust happened because the Jews had rejected Jesus Christ in the altem trip Cross, so that's what they got.

And the third hour, I that was our Sunday school lesson that day.

And Gilbert Arizona twenty eighteen October said October eighth, twenty eighteen.

The third hour I had been sitting there for ten minutes, this little twenty three year old teacher is teaching this lesson and she introduces with this story about her sister in law who's bisexual, and she's like, I'm so embarrassed because I know she keeps them to church and she's wearing pants and she's also bisexual.

And she introduces the lesson, and the lessonson is entitled The Evils of Homosexuality, And ironically, I had always believed that homosexuality was wrong, and sitting there in church that day, I think, like Michael, the way that I describe it to all of my subscribers is I think that we have this hate, this fascism of this evil bucket, and once it gets filled up as human beings, we can no longer take it.

My bucket full of bullshit reached the limit that day and I just couldn't swim and hate anymore.

And I sat them that class like shaking and ten minutes and I raised my hand and I was like, I think that this lesson is so horrible.

And I come to church to learn how to love people because I'm really good hating people.

I don't need to come to church to learn how to hate people.

I come to church to learn how to love people.

This is not loving.

I don't think Jesus would support this.

And I was forty four years old.

I was fifth generation, my kids were seventh generation women.

I said, I'm going to go get my kids and I'm leaving the church today.

And I didn't even have a plan.

It was such this like emotional decision.

And I walked out the door and I texted Jake from like by the drinking fountain.

I was like, maybe by the drinking fountain.

I just told him, I said, if this was the first time Sunday that I'd ever been to this church, I would never come back.

This is so hateful.

Do you want to raise our kids in this?

And he's like no, And it's like, can me either go get the kids?

And we drove home.

And I've never been back to Mormon Church after forty four years, never missing a Sunday, thousands and thousands of days that I have attended Mormon Church, deeply devout, this was my entire identity.

That was it seven years ago October twenty eighteen.

Wow, I mean you must know that that is incredible and the strength it takes to do that.

I mean that was the easy part.

It was rebuilding the life.

It was a take too.

That's the hard part, Michael.

I know, but you know what, that actually was the hard part for a lot of people too, particularly to do it publicly, to raise your hand yeah and say I think I don't know.

I mean, I'm not I don't know that I was in that situation.

I fell away from my remer.

I'm shy.

That was hard.

Yeah, And that's why I'm saying you are brave, you are you are my hero.

I'm like, I'm so so impressed with everything you've said so far and your ability to talk about like the person you were back then, and the fact that you were able to just raise your hand and say, and it's such an such a great statement.

I don't need help learning to hate like and as somebody who appreciates science as tribal beings, you know, this is something that's kind of in us and we don't need help with it.

Hate.

Hate hate comes natural.

Love you have to work at.

And you were strong and raised your hand and you said I'm done, and you said it publicly and you walked out.

I mean, that is that is so admirable.

Thank you.

I still remember like I can close my eyes and picture driving to church that morning.

My life was in such a precarious position.

I'd had this cheating husband, he had lived out of state for me for a couple of years, and we had just moved back in together, and I was just I was kind of treading water and my expectation going to church that day.

I was going because, oh, I want to hear some amazing music and inspiring message, and just thinking I'm doing this so that three hours from now I can come home feeling filled up, like my cup is going to be overflowing with love, and instead my bullshit bucket got filled up and it wasn't the love and the light and the inspiration that I had needed it so desperately to be.

And just having that awareness too, of my therapist making me look at how I felt in search certain situations, I think was really important because there may have been a day that I would have just thought, well, Satan is trying to tempt me to leave church, or Satan is trying to make me unhappy with this, and I would have just said a little prayer and helped Jesus to make me get into lying with what was being said.

A really dangerous thing too that had happened was I had made friends with some lesbians.

So and it was accidental.

I've never talked about this anywhere, but I started a little doTerra business.

It's a multi level marketing essential oils company that a friend had gotten me into.

You know, I was child wife, I didn't have a job, but I had this little essential oil business and I kept having lesbians sign up in my downline.

I wasn't marketing to the lesbians, but I had customers and some of their friends were lesbians.

So I ended up with a team of the essential oils reps that were almost fifty percent lesbian, right, and hearing this little Mormon girl who thinks that homosexuality is of the devil, And we start going to conventions together, and we start doing massage training and a Roman therapy training together.

And they had been boogeymant right, like everyone had taught me that days and lesbians were the biggest boogeyman out there.

And as I started spending time inadvertently, It's not like I had gone out of my way to make these friendships.

They just signed up and I couldn't make them go to somebody else's you know, downline, and they were some of the kindest, most beautiful, delightful people I'd ever met in my life.

And in part not just you know, not because lesbians are better than everybody, although maybe they are, but because I think that in that era, you know, in the early two thousands, mid two thousands, to come out as lesbian and be married and some of them had children and staff, you really have to know who you are.

You have to be a deeply introspective and grounded person, and they were.

This my huge DONTEA team of lesbians was just truly grounded and insightful people.

So that day, sitting in that class, I actually had a comparison point.

I had a team of lesbians who were remarkable human beings.

I had this little Mormon teacher who was teaching that homosexuals are the most satanic thing in the world.

And that comparison point in a way, made my brain explode.

So you can't keep people in a cult when you don't have walls and they're out there in the world and they're actually making friends with autooliberals, feminists, lesbians.

What next, Yeah, lesbians will save the world or lesbians, I say, I love that.

But that so that was walking away from Mormon just out of curiosity.

When was it that you walked away from religion altogether?

Do you remember that moment?

Was there a moment or was that a slow, gradual walk away.

I think I was afraid to leave religion altogether.

So the next week, the week after that, I was in a Christian church with Jake and it's like, Okay, the Book of Mormon's been lying to me.

Jesus is real.

Now I get to have a true relationship with Jesus.

But I had already learned to critically think, and unfortunately, as I was deconstructing Mormonism, then I'd go to Christian church and we'd have Bible study and it's like, oh uh, well, if I really apply my critically thinking and bringing to this, then you know, I don't think the flood could have really happened.

There's no evidence for Adam and Eve.

And then again, unfortunately for Mormon me, for Christian me, I started reading science and the actual data around the creation of the world and evolution, and you know, everything everything denoted that the Bible cannot possibly be correct.

And more than anything, I just had this inner voice that told me that I have no reason to listen to some man made thing that tells me what I should be thinking or where I'm going to go after I die.

An interesting thing about me is that I did have a near death experience while I was fighting an ovarian tumor.

It was actually my six year now my twelve year anniversary yesterday of the day that I temporarily died.

Had a near death experience, and not a lot of people have indes.

I had a secondary indie where I thought that I saw things outside of the hospital room and stuff.

Not a lot of people have indes and then become atheists.

But my indie actually made me more convinced than ever that there's not some divine mind in the sky.

So I think just deconstructing as I deconstructed everything and applied critical thinking to the Bible and listened to my inner voice.

But towards the end, I was going to Christian church hoping that it was true, in part because I have a beautiful Christian partner and I wanted to be Christian for him so bad.

It would have just made it so easy.

I fell in love after my divorce.

Kevin and I have been together We've had a remarkable relationship.

He's such a kind man, and I wanted us to be Christian together.

But I was going to church and just feeling like such a sense of dissociation and from that perspective of othering and making people into boogeymen.

Even the nicest of Christian churches.

Every Sunday, you're sitting there talking about somebody who's going to hell, somebody who's not as good as you, somebody that we need to be the light on the hill for.

I don't particularly think that I should be a light on a hill for anybody.

Yeah, So it's just all kind of fizzled.

And then we had to run in with my son's Christian school, and it's like it's time for me to just suffertice completely and coming out atheist was Michael's rough?

Was it?

Yeah?

I mean yeah, you're still in.

I mean you posted a video not long ago of you at church and you said, like, you know, loud and proud atheist at church, and you were digging it.

You were sway into the song that was your partner up on stage performing music.

So obviously you know how many hours of therapy I've had to have to be able to walk in the doors of those church again.

Oh wow.

So coming out as atheist was rough whate for not just so, I mean, yeah, I uh.

I had an aunt who had cancer and was a beloved aunt of mine who saw that I listed myself as atheist on Facebook some years ago, and she called me up and said that, you know, it was her dying wish that I not be atheist anymore.

So I took it off of my Facebook page because I'm not I'm not going to torture some person that I love if it's hurting them that much.

And all I did was remove where it said you know, a religion atheist And I just just said nothing now.

And she called me up and said, thank you for not being an atheist anymore.

I'm like, that's not not quite how it works.

Facebook isn't the determinant, but good enough.

But it's not like a relationship status, right, yeah, but my relationship with Jesus you could say that.

But so, I you know, I know, you're still in a relationship with a Christian.

But how was it just out of curiosity?

How was it difficult.

The relationship with hearts?

And I finally came clean to Kevin that I no longer believed in Jesus, And he's like, what do you mean?

Like you're just not feeling like you're just your testimony is not as strong.

You just feel like you need to go to church more.

And it's like, I think it's all bullshit.

I burned my Bible last week.

I'm never reading it again.

I won't go to church anymore.

And I believe Jesus was fake, the flood was fake.

Aademy.

You know, I just laid it all out here's where I am, so you know everything read.

I barely made it through that.

It crushed him.

He saw me differently, and it's taken, you know, two and a half years of work for us to come to a place where he doesn't think I'm going to hell and I don't think he's nuts for being Christian.

Right, So my relationship was really difficult.

I had already lost all of my Mormon community when I left the Mormon church.

So, Michael, I have not seen my mom, my dad, anybody for seven years.

The last time I saw my mom, I was Mormon.

My entire family shunned me.

Pioneering ex Mormon TikTok is not a good way to be popular with Mormon fans and families, so those who still want to have any type relationship with me.

Once I started talking about the Momon church, all dropped me like a hot potato.

So I had lost everybody, and I had replaced that community with my Christian community.

And then when I said I don't believe in Jesus, I lost everybody.

And it's funny my Mormon and some of them are like, well, at least Chinese Christian, but then when you go from Christian to atheists, the Christians are lying your its to the double you know.

So that was really hard.

And my partner works at a Christian school, so he had families who were like, he can't work here anymore because his wife is an atheist.

You know, she's promoting satan And it's like Satanism and atheism those are not Those are very distinctively different worldviews.

I went through time period where I was waking up and on my personal Facebook pages and like my emails and stuff.

I had families from the school and families from the church who were sending me these horrible emails and letters and stalking me and running into people around town who had things to say about me walking away from Jesus.

The most awkward was a woman who was kind of friendly towards me, but she just stopped me.

We were at fries one day.

We're at this grocery store here, and she hadn't seen me a church.

I know she'd heard that I had left the Christian church, and she asked us she could pray with me.

She's like, can I just hold your hand and can we pray together?

Can I pray for Jesus to come back into your heart?

And I said absolutely not, Thank you so much, Patty Bin, I'm not doing that, wow, And she was furious.

So yeah, I've had a lot of Christians pray over me in the last few years since I started hosting an atheist podcast.

I just want to quickly point out because I've said it on the show before, but that was such an perfect example of it.

Whenever I'm talking with religious people and they say that homosexuality is unnatural, and I always say, you know, well, a, no, it's not.

Look at the Animal Kingdom, clearly, it's everywhere.

But I always say, what is unnatural is a parent taking a child they love and pushing them out of their life because of who they love in the case of a gay person, or even because they stopped believing and god like, that's unnatural.

Parents shunning children for such minor things like what they believe.

It's it's not an action, it's you're still the same person.

You're still the good person that you always were, and you're still their daughter.

And the fact that they would shun you, that is the poison of religion right there.

My mom wrote a letter, put it in the mail, typed it out, put a stamp on it.

Sent it to me.

You're no longer my daughter, seeing what you do on TikTok, the way you fight against the church.

You're burning all your bridges with your family.

Have a nice life.

I never want to see you again.

So my children have not had grandparents.

I have not had parents.

All the things that I went through after my divorce, the homelessness, sleeping in my car, I lost everybody.

And you know, it's one thing, like it's kind of funny to me if I'm in a grocery store when somebody comes up and says, let me broth with you, that I can laugh at.

But it's the way that everybody ghosted me.

It's the absolute loss of the community.

I've gone through surgeries, I've gone through struggles, We've had, you know, all kinds of challenges, and we are alone.

I am completely alone.

I don't have anyone that I can turn to, and that loss of community has been the hardest thing.

That's that's the bit that I haven't completely rebuilt back.

I am making more friends now, making sure all of them are not Christians that are just trying to convert me.

But yeah, that's that's a real struggle of leaving Christianity.

But I do have to say that that transition, when I finally stopped trying to figure out who God was and where I'm going after I die, where I came from, what it all means, When I finally literally just plunged into the nihilistic void, you know, maybe it's utterly meaningless.

I found more freedom and happiness than I've ever had in my entire life.

Me too, Me too, and which gets me too.

I guess we can kind of close on this because you and I talked recently and you're friends with Brittany Hartley, who we had on the show recently.

Oh, I am obsessed with Brittany.

I love her.

I make all of everybody has to read her book, No Nonsense Tuality.

She's fantastic.

But she and I discussed, you know, is religion good for society, whether or not it's true, and she made an argument that it is.

And one of the things is community, and you know, and that the atheistic world doesn't have that community, the every Sunday and and all that stuff.

And you made a point of sayings, by the way, that's what she said.

You said, by the way, And even after everything you went through leaving religion and how difficult it was, you made a point of writing to me and saying, by the way, I think Britney's wrong.

The world is better off without religion.

All of the data, all of the studies.

And I love Britty and I think that her IQ is at least ten points higher than my, and she's extremely well studied.

She knows what she's talking about.

So I don't ever want to discredit Brittany, and I do just want to share my viewpoint on the data that she talks about and the other people like her discuss.

It's like if we wanted to learn about elephants, and we were going to the zoo to learn about elephants, and let's say, elephants have only existed in zoos.

For the next sixty thousand years, we didn't have any wild elephants anymore, and we were studying how they behave in certain enclosures versus other enclosures, and what type of zoo food they like to eat versus not eating.

When you're studying elephants and zoos, you're not truly studying the nature of elephants.

All of the data, all of the studies around the impact of religion on humans only studies the impact of humans.

And once we have civilized, once we've had great technology of written language and paper and things that we can actually glean information from past people, but we're not able to actually go back into a time before civilization hijacked humans.

And when humans began to create religion, then we also saw the decay of tribes.

We moved from small tribes into larger civilizations where we had stratification and status, and you know, then totalitarian leaders that were ruling everybody's lives and you know, creating human sacrifices and war and all kinds of things like that.

So I certainly think that in societies where our tribes have been hijacked where we have widespread tribal decay, and we live in this structure with the stratification and status, and those leaders at the top have a lot of power.

That religion does make our lives better.

In the United States of America right now, I don't know a lot of my neighbors, and my family is all spread out.

Intergenerational connections have been corroded by our late stage industrialized capitalistic system.

And so yeah, going to church might make my life a little bit better.

My argument against the argument for religion making their lives better is that in a time prior to all of that, and we still had cohesive tribes in a time that we don't have any research for that.

There's no writings that there's no record of that humans did better without religion.

I think that we can exist in truth and happiness and peace the way that any other creature does.

The squirrels are little Arizonader ground squirrels.

They don't have a Bible.

They don't believe in a god that we know of.

The rattlesnakes, the bearsing and some of the more advanced creatures have no evidence of believing in a higher power, and they are happy and satisfied.

I don't think that the fact that modern people seem to exhibit more happiness within a religious structure means that humans are designed to live within religious structure.

What we need to do is we need to knock it all down.

We need to recreate those close, organic, natural connections.

And in many ways religion has supplanted that.

Religion has pushed tribes out, and that is what it did as religion spread around the world, Like look at what Christianity did across Europe.

They obliterated all tribal structure and replaced that with the church, replace that with the priests, and they were making many bye people supplanting their tribes.

Wow, you did it again.

You blew my mind again in this episode.

That elephant analogy was so good, and it really the minute you started.

I was like, of course, of course, and of course because of an egomaniac.

I was like, why didn't I think of that?

But you'll think of something better.

No, that was fantastic, and you've been just such a fantastic guest.

Do you want to remind everyone where they can find you?

You're on you have a sub stack, and everything is life, take too.

Correct, Everything is life take too, So find me over on YouTube.

That's where I'm doing most of my content right now.

I have some incredible guests over there.

I need to have you on because I'd love to hear your life, take too.

I'd love to know more about your.

Story and how you got I would be honored.

That'd be so fun.

Maybe we can do a little swappero.

So I'm over on YouTube.

I do some YouTube lives.

I also have some documentaries.

I can give you links, and my substack is just a nice place for me to write.

I do poetry, I do essays.

I write about some of the things that I don't necessarily feel like sharing with the general public.

So my substack is more of a deep dive into some of the topics around adultery, white supremacy, and things like that, so I can just put it out on the page instead of having to do a video.

Excellent, Jenny Gage, an absolute honor, What an amazing episode.

Thank you, What an amazing guest, and what an amazing person.

I mean, really, your bravery and your ability to talk about these things is it's inspirational for me.

So thank you, not just for coming on the show, but thank you for moving me and for inspiring me.

Thanks for everything that you do.

I think it's important for us to realize that there is definitely a war going on, and not a battle of good me.

Well, it's not Satan's minions, but there are certainly ideologies and ways that different individuals envision the future of America and of the world.

And I'm always very conscious of the fact that there was no God or Jesus who's going to receive us.

All we right now, you and I, all of the people listening, we are literally writing the future.

The world that our children are going to grow up in is in our hands.

And as we put that pinned paper and write out what the future is, we do have to realize that we are in a war against people who very viciously want to keep the white supremacy, want to keep religion, want to keep the control, want to keep people very much immersed in some ideology that has proven to be quite toxic.

So we have to fight.

We have to fight with our words, we have to fight with our hearts.

We have to do everything that we can to turn this tide.

So I appreciate everything that you do.

I think your channel is an incredible instrument for.

Change, Thank you Jenny.

I look forward to our next engagement