 John Ogden is a co-founder at Uplift Kids, a lesson library and curriculum that helps families nurture spiritual health. He is also the author of the book, When Mormon's Doubt, A Way to Strengthen Relationships and Live a Quality Life, and has a bachelor's degree in English, literature, and a master's in writing and rhetoric from Brigham-Mann University. He writes at johnogden.com and lives with his spouse and two kids in Prova, Utah. John Ogden. Thanks, Carl. And thanks for all you've done for the conference. So religion, the future of religion is an API. I could start by telling you that an API is an application programming interface that is boring and it doesn't really clarify much. So I'll just give an example. You hop into an Uber and you pull up the map and see where you want to go. And the API here is, at least as of 2018, Google Maps API. So Uber's app ports in data from Google Maps and then that's how you get around in an Uber. Some people have given the metaphor of a waiter. So you order the food, the waiter then goes to the kitchen and then brings the food back to you. And so you can port whatever information you have. Basically it's plug and play. That's a simple definition. So that's an API. APIs have grown in popularity tremendously since 2005 and there are a few reasons for that. One, they help programmers build on what's already been created. You can tell in the instance of Uber, they didn't want to go and map the entire planet before they could build their app. And so they just paid $58 million, in that case, for the ability to port in Google's data. And they also connect separate technologies in a single interface. You could potentially bring in just dozens of APIs into a single interface and create something completely new based on the integration. And they enable speed and innovation. So back to the future of religion as an API, I'm going to tell the same thing rather than define what I mean. I'll just give an example. This is one example. It's not the only example, but there's a story from the Dalai Lama and a reporter came to him and he said, what would he say to Americans who want to become a Buddhist? And the Dalai Lama in this case said, don't bother. He said, learn from Buddhism if that's good for you, but do it as a Christian, a Jew, or whatever you are. So again, that's not the only way to live. I don't think his answer is the right answer for everybody, but I do think it's an interesting idea. He's saying that, as I understand it, you have your own cultural context and if you're going to flip your entire cultural context, that might be drastic, there might be downsides to that. And so he said, what if you kept your cultural context and you ported in ideas from other cultural contexts into your own. So in this case, you have a Christian who is in the Christian cultural context and then ports in Buddhist principles into their Christian cultural context. That's the metaphor I'm using. It doesn't have to be only here. You could have a non-believer and you could say a non-believer could use Sam Harris's Waking Up app and then they could port in Buddhism and keep their culture as a secular person but be porting in various religions. This could also be somebody who ports in ideas from Christianity even if they remain secular. So another story from another perspective is this idea of somebody coming to a Buddhist named Ghassan and they proposed reading the Christian Bible and he said, read it to me. Read me the Christian Bible. And so the person read a passage from Jesus and he said, you know, this passage, take no thought for the moral, for the moral, should take thought for the things of itself and Ghassan said, whoever uttered those words, I consider it an enlightened man. So in this case, it's a Buddhist cultural context pulling from Christianity. So whatever the cultural context, you know, you can port in lots of different cultural contexts into your own and this can become a religious experience in and of itself or it's personalized and decentralized in many cases. But in some cases, this is the way religion has always been. And so I'll talk a little bit about what's distinct and what I'm referring to here. But first I'll talk about what's the same. So here's an example. Egyptian God that has been cast in Greco-Roman cultural context, right? And so this is very ancient. There's so many examples of this. You look at any archaeology and it's like every single piece of archaeology that's right next to another religion. They start blending their architectural, what do you say, they start blending their architecture. And so you can see it's called in academic circles, it's called syncretism and it's all over the place. And it's even very common in contemporary time, in contemporary circles. So here's an example of LDS or Christian theology being syncretized with secular American identity where the founding fathers are almost like it is a role of the apostles right behind Jesus, Jesus holding the constitution, it's just these two cultures that are kind of weaving together in this instance. In Mormon specific contexts, LDS General Conference, they will cite Shakespeare, they'll cite C.S. Lewis, these are pulling from outside, they're porting in Christian and literary examples into Mormonism. So it's very common and one final one I'll give is EFI music, some subset of Mormons heard Christian rock and thought, oh we need some of that. And so they ported that in to Mormonism and which Christian rock is already porting in rock music and rock music is already porting in, you can trace back the lineage. Nevertheless, it's common and I think it's only going to become more common throughout the future of religion because we live in an increasingly connected world. So 500 years ago, if you're a farmer, you have a local church, you might not really encounter other religious views your whole life and so you just have, this is the church I go to and this is kind of all I know is my locality, but we're completely connected today and so the future of religion is a process of integrating whatever is of good report or anything that's praiseworthy, right, wherever it might surface. In this local community, we still have a bit of an aversion to Eastern philosophies but I see that decreasing rapidly, that aversion, I think that people are becoming more and more interested in meditation, mindfulness, Buddhism, Stoicism and so it's only a matter of time it might be before, before in LDS general conference people are are pulling from these traditions more overtly. There's so much wisdom throughout the world, the Bhagavad Gita, there's a few of my favorites, the Bhagavad Gita from Hinduism, Mary Oliver's Poetry, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the Tao Te Ching is another one and the future of religion then is a matter of porting these in and this is what I'm doing professionally is like figuring out how to port in these various wisdom traditions so that they're digestible and so families can can use them in their home and they can take whatever wisdom traditions that they want to explore, let's explore Buddhism together, let's explore Hinduism together and let's bring that in whether they happen to be Mormon, whether they happen to be Christian, whether they happen to be secular, it's a matter of using using the various world wisdom traditions to have a richer religious life. In conclusion, the reason for this is that again we live in a connected world and just to say like I'm gonna only only interact with ideas that are here in my locality you know I happen to be from Provo is very limiting in the 21st century where we really have to be able to be part of a culture this is what the Dalai Lama was getting at you know be part of a culture be part of your local community but bring in a global perspective that's really what I'm talking about when I say the future of religion is an API. Thanks. We've got time for a few questions. Sure, Brian. Thanks John. So what kind of APIs or services can the Latter-day Saint Church provide or Mormonism provide to others? It's a good question. I think that they have like their apps that they've already developed and so being able to port out I'll just say I think that a lot of the strengths in Mormonism are around community innovations like how to gather together as communities and so I don't know how that would look to port out that those ideas of community exactly. I'll have to think about that more. I find it compelling but I don't know exactly what it would look like. Yeah thanks. So do you have like a rule of recognition in terms of what is safe to port in and what you want to firewall the Quran you know what what would a Muslim not want from Christianity what would a Christian not want from Islam do you ever like a rule of recognition? I do. There are several principles that I personally follow. One is like wisdom is paradoxical, God is human, human is God, the doubt is being says that there's darkness upon darkness is that they answered all mystery and so they they're these paradoxes that define wisdom and so that's one thing another thing is timelessness. There are several criteria that I personally use and use through uplift to determine well what is wisdom because I can become very murky but really it would come down to a person could say I disagree with you know they might disagree with me but we would have transparency on what we consider wisdom and what is not wisdom and then yeah follow that yeah. How do you respond to my my friend's criticism when when I told I he told me he'd slept with so many women he couldn't remember it he was European when I was in graduate school and I said well wow I'm a moment you know I only had one wife and he said oh well you've experienced something something that I'll never experience in other words the problem of syncretism is that you lose in the syncretic moment the actual particularity that is pure and so how do you you seem to be promoting syncretism but you don't seem to be saying there's a loss in any syncretism yeah there is a loss in any syncretism absolutely there's a loss community gets diluted and there's a big loss in it a big trade-off and so I I am not saying that I believe that this is that my interpretation of religion is the right way and I've experienced that loss personally and it really hurts I so I I do acknowledge of the trade-off I just don't see how the current state of things is sustainable if we just double down on locality and parochialism and so that's where the tension is I we have to grow to have a global perspective while figuring out how to how to enact it at a local level is very very difficult transition but I think it is the the way that the world is headed and so I think we have to figure out how to navigate those waters so game theoretically marginal intolerances can come to dominate entire markets you know we think about Halala kosher food becomes a preference that most people don't have but you can always find it available and I think there's a good argument that the reason that Christianity historically dominated where it did was because it was mutually intolerant of other religions but clearly syncretism has flourished so what is the difference between a period in which syncretism is an adaptive behavior versus when it is going to be a failing behavior and something else is going to take over the market as it were could you restate that why does syncretism win today out over other propositions hmm I really like this question I'm trying to figure out how to best answer it I want to say that it's because we're in a time of peace that we have like the flexibility and freedom to explore Christianity went out in large part because of Constantine like just dominating it became the Holy Roman Emperor you know if if that wouldn't have happened would Christianity still be around I don't know so in a time of peace like this we have the freedom to be able to explore things but yeah I don't know if that answers your question at all yeah yeah there's one one to hear your thoughts on the kind of syncretism that you're talking about and that tradition in Mormonism with like say for instance Joseph Smith mentioning accept all truth let it come from yes yes yeah that's exactly I think it I think it possibly is it precisely Mormon yeah absolutely yep thank you thank you John