For tens of thousands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the morning after October 7 felt like the start of something extraordinary, something they had never experienced before in quite the same way. Dan McClellan, a practicing Mormon and a Bible scholar with an enormous online following of his own, had just appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast that reaches an estimated eleven million listeners per episode. For a faith community that has long felt misunderstood, dismissed, or simply ignored by mainstream American culture, seeing one of their own sitting across from the most powerful podcaster in the world was electric. It was, many said, a kind of historic validation. Here was a man who wore comic book T-shirts, spoke with disarming enthusiasm about ancient texts no one else could pronounce, and also happened to be a devoted member of a church many Americans still refuse to accept as Christian. The excitement was palpable in comment sections, group chats, Sunday school discussions, and family text threads. But as the hours passed, and as word spread of exactly what McClellan had said and how he had said it, that initial surge of pride collided with a wave of worry, disappointment, and even anger. The episode had become, almost before anyone could catch their breath, a deeply emotional referendum on what it means to be Latter-day Saint in the modern world, and on how the faithful should represent their beliefs when the entire country is listening.
McClellan, who hosts the popular podcast Data Over Dogma, has built his reputation by doing something that feels both necessary and dangerous in an age of viral misinformation: he takes religious claims, usually ones posted online by conservative Christians, and dismantles them with rigorous historical and textual scholarship. He is not, by any standard definition, a conventional evangelical defender of the faith. On the Rogan show, he offered an analysis of the Bible that was purely academic, describing Scripture as a heavily edited collection of documents shaped over centuries by different authors with their own agendas, rather than as a single, unchanging message handed down directly from God. He told Rogan that the modern concept of hell as a place of eternal conscious torment did not really take shape until after the biblical period. For millions of traditional Christians, these are deeply unsettling claims. But for many Latter-day Saints, the problem was different. They were not necessarily offended by the scholarship itself. They were heartbroken that McClellan did not use his moment on the world’s biggest podcast to talk about his own faith, to testify of Jesus Christ, or to explain what Mormonism actually teaches. Some took to social media to praise Rogan’s decision to feature a Bible expert who happened to be Mormon; others lambasted McClellan with remarkable intensity, insisting that he had fumbled an open door and that his silence about his personal beliefs was a cowardly missing of the point.
At the same time, another group of Latter-day Saints, mostly from the progressive segment of the faith to which McClellan himself belongs, had a completely different set of objections. They were disappointed, and in some cases openly critical, that he had agreed to appear on Joe Rogan’s program at all. Rogan, after all, had thrown his support behind Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, had repeatedly given a platform to people who spread misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines, and had hosted the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on multiple occasions. To this group, McClellan’s appearance felt less like a triumph than a compromise. They worried that sitting down with Rogan, in the hope of reaching a massive secular audience, meant lending personal credibility to a media figure whose influence they find genuinely harmful. Ben Park, a past president of the Mormon History Association and a professor at Sam Houston State University, summed up the mood by saying that the episode had become “the talk of the week.” And indeed it was. The debates that erupted in the days that followed stretched across political, theological, and generational lines, revealing fractures within the Church that are not always visible from the outside. Some saw ancient truths being watered down. Others saw intellectual courage and a long-overdue invitation to sit at the center of American culture. Still others saw a missed opportunity for evangelism so profound that they wondered whether the entire exercise had been a net loss.
The debate over McClellan’s appearance cannot be understood without recognizing the broader moment of change inside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is one of the most traditionally structured religious communities in the United States, but in recent years it has been shifting in ways that have surprised both its members and its observers. In 2024, church leadership announced that women would be allowed, for the first time, to oversee Sunday School alongside men, a quiet but significant expansion of responsibility for a denomination that has often been criticized for its hierarchical gender roles. In the same period, church leader Dallin Oaks became the first Mormon president to speak at Washington National Cathedral, the symbolic seat of the Episcopal Church in the nation’s capital, a gesture intended to signal growing interfaith openness. And in December, church leaders encouraged members to consider biblical translations other than the King James Version, which has been the church’s official text for generations. These are not small tweaks. They are movements toward a kind of cultural engagement and scholarly flexibility that would have been almost unthinkable decades ago. McClellan, with his advanced degrees, his public intellectual persona, and his willingness to speak in frankly secular terms about Scripture, embodies this new orientation. He is not an apologist defending the faith against all criticism. He is a scholar who treats the Bible as a complex human artifact and is not afraid to say so. For many faithful members, that is an exciting, hopeful development. For others, it is a deeply uncomfortable one, because it raises questions about what exactly is being preserved and why.
Rogan’s own religious journey added another layer of emotional intensity to the episode. For years, Rogan described himself as an agnostic and frequently spoke with open skepticism about organized religion. But throughout 2025, he made a notable turn, telling his audience that he had begun attending a nondenominational evangelical church and was exploring faith in a way that felt genuine to him. That same year, he had hosted Wesley Huff, a prominent conservative Christian apologist whose entire mission is to defend the core teachings of Christianity and to rebut doubts about the faith. Huff and McClellan are, in many ways, polar opposites. Huff argues for the historical reliability of the Bible; McClellan argues that the Bible is a messy, edited, human production. Rogan’s decision to bring both men on, one after the other, suggests that he is not simply searching for a single comfortable answer but is genuinely interested in learning what the Bible means to different people. During his conversation with McClellan, Rogan asked the question that seemed to be on everyone’s mind: if you spend your whole life studying the Bible and tearing it apart, what do you actually believe? McClellan’s answer was careful, personal, and in some ways surprisingly traditional. He quoted the New Testament, in which Jesus teaches that when you pray, you should go into your room and shut the door, praying in secret rather than performing your faith in public for the approval of others. He explained that he deliberately keeps his personal beliefs separate from his public work, because he wants his scholarship to stand on its own merits. “When you pray, go into your closet and pray secretly,” he said, “and your Father will reward you. Do not pray as the hypocrites do, who are on the street corner to be seen of men.” Rogan responded with genuine admiration, calling his position “very admirable” and noting that his own problem with religion has always been with people who perform their faith in a loud, showy, hypocritical way, wearing it “like a shield of virtue.”
Yet that answer, which struck Rogan as humble and wise, struck many devout listeners as a retreat. They had hoped that McClellan would use eleven million pairs of ears to proclaim the gospel, to share the Book of Mormon, to give his testimony of the Restoration, to explain why he belongs to a church that so many outsiders view with suspicion. When he did not do those things, the disappointment was loud, and it was not confined to a few angry comments. Chris Koerner, an entrepreneur and podcaster from Dallas, posted on October 8 that McClellan had dodged Rogan’s question about faith and thereby lost a spectacular opportunity to confront the world with the gospel. “Own it,” Koerner wrote. “Own your beliefs and proclaim them loudly. Maybe you sell a few less books? Who cares?” That frustration is understandable. It comes from a place of deep sincerity, from people who genuinely believe that eternal salvation is at stake and that every conversation is a chance to invite someone to Christ. But it also collides with McClellan’s own understanding of what he was asked to do. He was not invited to preach. He was invited to talk about biblical scholarship, to explain historical evidence, and to debate the origins of Scripture. He did exactly what was asked of him, and in doing so, he introduced a vast secular audience to the idea that a serious Bible scholar can also be a faithful member of the Church. That, in itself, may prove to be the most powerful witness of all. For the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, still learning to navigate its place in a rapidly changing American religious landscape, the lesson of the Rogan episode is not simple. It is a story about pride and fear, about the desire to be understood and the fear of being heard too loudly. It is a story about a community finding itself at the center of national conversation, excited and uneasy all at once, wondering whether the ancient words of its own scriptures offer a clearer path forward than any podcast, any argument, or any careful scholarly footnote ever could.