Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories Foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners.

To help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community, please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under Support.

All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you.

Thanks for your support.

Hello and welcome back to Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm John DeLin your host and this is part two of our interview with Micah Nicolaisen.

We've spent the first hour talking about his early years at the church, his spiritual experiences that sort of led his deep commitment to the church after being an adolescent atheist for a time, his hardcore mission, his hardcore Sunday school presidency, his exposure to difficult issues.

His conversations with this Bishop and Stake President that were all really earnest attempts at trying to work with his local leadership to address very early on in 2011-2012 the growing wave of LDS disaffection that was soon to become more of a tsunami of sorts to the church.

Now what we're going to talk about is Micah's sort of ventures into sort of Mormon activism on a bigger scale.

I'll just set it up a bit and only these conferences and communities were really strong for about a year to year and a half and it was really exciting.

And then there came a point where things kind of imploded for me and I had to, I, you know, I've talked about this before but you know, Marguine, I started really struggling and you know, we came close to divorce.

This is right August of 2012 and I felt like my family was going to fall apart. I started worrying about, you know, the Mormon stories, you know, brand name is from the context of it remaining sort of a safe, you know, brand for questioning and believing Mormons.

And the community started taking on a life of their own and just frankly I got scared.

And so, you know, come around August 2012 sort of the work we had done at Fallen Apart. I felt like we needed to disassociate our, you know, Mormon stories from these communities somewhat.

I stopped the conferences. I had to focus on my PhD, my dissertation. And so for Mormon stories, you know, August,

2012 became a very dark time and for my family as well. And right around that time, just as a crazy initiative, this was like my final attempt to really make the church work.

This was after Stale DS had come and gone, but I, but I wanted to make one last to Jeffert to really see if Mormonism could be a safe place for, for those who questioned and those who struggled.

And so in addition to, you know, beginning really earnest discussions that were weekly with my state president, you know, starting around 2012.

I also just put out a call and said, hey, I want to start a podcast, you know, Phil Barlow's book, A Thoughtful Faith had really positively influenced me in my university times.

And I wanted to carry on the tradition of Stale DS.com and start a podcast that would be exclusively focused on helping people stay in the church.

And so I put out a Facebook call in one of my darkest hours with the open stories foundation and said, hey, is there anybody interested in starting this podcast and tell me how you remember it, Micah?

Yeah, I remember you posting that and just being like, that's me. I'm that guy. Like I know I can be that guy. And so I actually still remember,

I was about to get in my, I was here. I was in Utah. I was about to get my rental car for work. And I remember stopping because you texted and you message me back saying, okay, let's give it a shot.

...