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When evangelical podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey sat down to talk theology with Jacob Hansen, a Latter-day Saint apologist behind the YouTube channel “Thoughtful Faith,” the episode had all the markings of a vibrant exchange.
Stuckey, a Baptist Protestant, has previously said she does not consider Latter-day Saints to be Christians. Yet, she was interested in clarifying the beliefs of the Latter-day Saints, she said, and she invited Hansen to help her do that.
In his postmortem on the episode, Hansen said he was surprised when Stuckey framed the conversation as a “debate” instead of a “conversation,” which he said is how it was pitched in the invitation to the podcast.
Their 90-minute conversation, he said, at times felt more like a “cross-examination” rather than a dialogue. Still, he said, he “appreciated (Stuckey’s) willingness, unlike many others, to actually talk to us instead of just about us.”
Stuckey, who lives in Texas, has built a loyal following among suburban conservative women, urging them to defend their Christian beliefs on abortion, sexual identity and faith. Her podcast, “Relatable,” hosted by Blaze Media, has more than 735,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Last year, I traveled to Dallas to attend her women’s conference called “Share the Arrows,” a gathering framed as resistance to what attendees see as progressive attacks on conservative values.
“This is a spiritual battle that is waged in our homes and in our neighborhoods, at school, at your job,” Stuckey said from the stage. “Every step you take, every decision you make and every word you say is a declaration of war against the enemy.”
With her Latter-day Saint counterpart, Stuckey pressed Hansen on questions about the nature of God, priesthood authority, who gets to go to heaven, and whether the Latter-day Saints and the evangelicals even believe in the same Jesus and God. She challenged Hansen’s interpretation of scripture and pointed out where Hansen’s Latter-day Saint beliefs diverged from Stuckey’s Calvinist beliefs.
In his recap, Hansen pointed to a disagreement over God’s foreknowledge: “I’m not going to lie. This just felt like she did not want to understand my point of view.”
I was in a debate club in high school. It was a great exercise in thinking on your feet, persuasive speech and logical reasoning. But what it wasn’t was an effort to deeply understand the other side — to listen beyond gathering just enough information to refute it.
The format of a “debate” assumes that one of the sides is going to come out as the winner. And in an interfaith context, that often means that one side’s understanding of God and belief structure should ultimately be deemed the correct one.
Debate rewards being the most logically persuasive. Faith, however, is rarely reducible to logic, factual proof or even theology.
Perhaps a better framework to talk about faith differences might be a dialogue rather than a debate.
Dialogue is about curiosity and openness. While debate often reduces truths and beliefs to arguments and, by its nature, seeks to expose flaws, a dialogue allows for ideas from each side to be expanded and build one upon another. A dialogue leaves room for uncertainty — something debate has little patience for.
There is also something personal at stake that the format of a “debate” doesn’t always account for — a person’s faith and an entire belief system that’s bound up in identity, community, culture and history. Identifying flaws in such a vast web is close to impossible without compressing it into something overly simplified.
Reflecting on the episode, Nathaniel Givens, a Latter-day Saint writer, posted on X, “I’m not a Latter-day Saint because I think the theology is cool. I’m a Latter-day Saint because I believe the core claims are *true*. I believe Jesus is the Christ, Joseph Smith was a prophet, and the Book of Mormon is ancient scripture, etc.”
When these beliefs are embraced as truths that have shaped a whole tradition, they could be really difficult and often unproductive to debate.
Fresh off the press
- Report: Biden-era agencies targeted Christians for views on abortion, sexuality
- 3 things Ben Sasse would change with more time: More kids, less work, more Sabbath
- Faithful Latter-day Saint women are the ‘greatest rebuttal to Hollywood’s insanity,’ Sheri Dew says at BYU
- ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Orange County’ and what do words even mean any more?
- Should AI have morals and values? I recorded my very first social media video about my latest Deseret Magazine story, “The Soul of a New Machine.” Check it out and let me know if you’d like to see more of this type of video from me.
What I’m reading and listening to
- A formerly undocumented immigrant was appointed by Pope Leo to be bishop of West Virginia Catholic diocese. Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala migrated to the U.S. in 1990 in the trunk of a car. He then applied for political asylum and got a permit to work and stay. He was ordained a priest in 2004 and appointed auxiliary bishop of Washington in December 2022 by Pope Francis. — The Washington Post
- Caitlin Flanagan on growing up in the era of assassinations and the attack at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. — The Free Press
- The Catholic Church is taking the lead on solving the problems around AI and AI companies looking for what the church has to say. Also, I was interested to learn that AI is now less popular than ICE, per research cited in the article. — The Atlantic
- The New York Times interviewed Tucker Carlson on his break with Trump, the war in Iran and antisemitism. — The New York Times
End note
Some of us like to watch sports or crochet. Clint Buffington, a dad from Salt Lake City, has a more unusual hobby. This New Yorker story called Buffington “one of the world’s most prolific hunters of messages in bottles.” He travels to remote beaches in search of missives or other objects (like a piece of an old wedding cake he once found), intentionally placed inside glass bottles and tossed into the ocean. He then reconstructs the stories behind his discoveries.
“A lot of people think of messages in bottles as being sort of flippant or silly or whatever,” he said. “My experience has shown me quite the opposite. I don’t know exactly what the impulse is, but it’s deep, it’s fundamental, and it’s foundational. I think it’s core to being human.”
Here’s one of Buffington’s recent finds.