This interview of Denver Snuffer by Michelle Stone was recorded on July 14, 2023 and published on her YouTube Channel with her edits on August 27th, 2023. This audio contains the full content of the original audio without her edits.

Michelle Stone: There you are… Can you hear me?

Denver Snuffer: I can hear you. Can you hear me?

MS: Perfect, yep, there it is. We’re just barely getting set up—the last-minute stuff with the kids, always.

DS: Hah.

MS: Okay, let me get this started. 

Well, thank you again for agreeing to talk to me!

DS: Yeah, yeah!

MS: I appreciate it. Okay, anything you want to start with? Should we just go ahead and get going? Is there anything you want/topics you want me to avoid or make sure to cover?

DS: Well, if you ask something that I don’t want to talk about, I’ll just not talk about it. Umm…

MS: Perfect.

DS: I don’t really like doing these kinds of things. So, you know, I’m not enthused, but I’m willing to participate. So… 

MS: Well, thank you!

DS: …we’ll do that. Okay.

MS: We’ll hope for the best! Well, I’m gonna go ahead and start recording, if that’s all right. 

DS: Yeah, that’s fine. 

MS: And then…

DS: Yep. 

MS: Okay. I had a super late night last night. So hopefully, I can remember all the words I need to… I’m a bit sleep deprived. Hopefully, it will all go well. So, okay. 

(Oh, let’s see what’s going on with this. One sec. Gotta get the microphone going as well.)

DS: Do you need me to talk to check volume level?

MS: Umm, I think it sounds good. I’m gonna put you on a separate recording. So it should… I’m sadly low-tech. So it’ll just be the best it’s gonna be. Okay, we’ll go ahead and get started, if that’s all right.

DS: That’s fine. 

MS: Okay.

Welcome to this conversation that I am having with Denver Snuffer. Denver, I really, really want to thank you for coming. I know this is not your favorite thing to do. This is not your cup of tea. But I also wanted to explain… Well, I’ve kind of explained to my audience a little bit about why I wanted to talk to you. There are so many things I would love to talk to you about. For those who don’t know Denver’s story, I’m sure we’re going to go into that. And for anyone who feels nervous having Denver here, I just want to repeat that I have talked to many different people who are not members of our faith who have different journeys and different paths. And I think that we can all rely on the fact that the Lord has given us the gift of discernment, so we can listen to what people say and discern truth and error without fear and without needing to just reject people. That’s part of why I wanted to have Denver come. It’s ‘cuz I feel like his voice has been silenced, and other people have been talking on his behalf in ways that don’t feel very fair to me. 

So Denver, with all of that being said… I guess I should say Denver was/has been a member of the church, I believe, for 40 years. He was baptized, and 40 years later, to the day (if I’m getting the story right) was excommunicated in 2015 for, I believe, a book tour, right? Like a series of lectures you were giving?

DS: Yeah. I was baptized on September 10th of 1973, and I was excommunicated on September 10th of 2013… 

MS: Oh, of 2013. Okay. 

DS: …and it was exactly 40 years to the day.

MS: That is amazing. So, yeah, this is a complicated conversation, ‘cuz I really want my faithful LDS listeners to feel comfortable and welcome and not be afraid, so I’m hoping that people can just listen. But I want to tell a little bit about my… 

So I’ve shared before that I was struggling in my church membership ‘cuz I felt like the church was not living up to what I expected it to be if it was the true church of God. And I was reading the Book of Mormon and just getting these powerful, strong messages from it: mainly, that it was TO us and ABOUT us, that we ARE the Gentiles, we are the ones being called to repentance. And also, what I started to see was this pattern of people coming into the presence of God, basically telling us how to do that. It seemed like an instruction manual with part-by-part, and it starts with Nephi telling us everything he possibly can until the Lord tells him, “You can’t say anymore,” and ends with Moroni basically summing it all up and saying, “If you have…” you know, and right before Moroni, we have Ether, that’s one of the most profound stories, the brother of Jared telling us, “Wait, this is how you come into the presence of God.” And then again, Moroni setting it up. And I felt so… Yeah, I just felt like how… What is going on here? How can I dare believe that this is what the Book of Mormon is about—because someone would have TOLD me! How can I think I know more than everybody else or that I know something different than anybody else? I really, like, it really was actually quite a bit of turmoil. And that was when I was led, really, by the Lord to this book that I believe is… I don’t know if this is the first book you wrote, but it’s the one that I found pretty early on. 

DS: It is…

MS: And it sure… 

DS: …the first.

MS: Is this the first one you wrote? 

DS:  Yeah. 

MS: So this is The Second Comforter (so they can get it in the screen), Communing with the Lord through the Conversing with the Lord through the Veil, and it—for me—served as this beautiful second witness. It gave me permission to believe what the Lord was teaching me without feeling like I was all alone and crazy, you know? So I want to thank you for that. That really was a gift to me. And I want to say also, for those worried about Denver, he wrote this book as a fully active, participating member of the church, I believe serving on the High Council, if I’m not mistaken. And… 

DS: Yeah… 

MS: …and this book didn’t do anything to get you into trouble. This book is not…

DS: Oh, no; heavens, no.

MS: …unsafe for continued members. 

DS: No. And in fact, the manuscript for that book was submitted to Deseret Book, and they took seven months to evaluate it before deciding that they thought the content was too sacred for them to feel comfortable putting out there. But when they finally decided not to publish it, they encouraged me to find another publisher to put it out there, and ultimately, yeah, it got into print. But I didn’t want it advertised; I didn’t want it… I didn’t want to do book signings. I didn’t want it to become something that a lot of attention was drawn to. 

Because I refused to advertise or publicize or do book signings or promote it in any way, I had to bear the cost to get it into print. I had to pay the cost out of pocket for the cover art. I had to pay to get the professional editor. I had to… It took a lot of money to get it into print, but I was hoping it would be a very quiet book—that people for whom it was appropriate would find it, and everyone else would just go their way and pay no notice. But the printer—the month before it went into print—the printer was acquired by the world’s largest bookseller, Amazon; it’s a subsidiary of Amazon that printed the book. And when a title comes out on Amazon and anyone does a word search like… The title of the book is The Second Comforter, Conversing with the Lord through the Veil. If someone picks up and does a search for “the second comforter,” Amazon has worldwide, global reach. And so the, uh… It got more attention than I wanted it to. 

It’s a very personal book. But it’s personal to the reader. It’s taking the reader on an individual, internal journey in themselves. But there are vignettes about me. The vignettes illustrate how to get something wrong. And then the chapter that follows the vignette explains how to get it right. And so it’s personal in the sense, for me, that I’m talking about a lot of personal failures. And it’s personal to the reader because it’s pushing the reader internal to themselves in a search. And your mention of the Book of Mormon… I mean, there are three chapters devoted to Nephi’s struggle and search, because his experience illustrates a great deal about the process. And so Nephi figures prominently for three chapters early in the book.

MS: Tell people what those three chapters are, so they can go and look at ’em…

DS: Oh, I don’t have the book with me. And I don’t have the index. But if you look in the table of contents, it talks about Nephi’s journey and how Nephi came along. I mean, initially, the first thing that Nephi did was to struggle and have a confrontation meditatively and prayerfully with God, struggling to try to believe what his father had said. And it begins with something as simple as that, and then it culminates in what happens with Nephi. And the Book of Mormon, I think, intends to invite everyone—every reader—to go on that same journey.

MS: Exactly. Yes. And I just was rereading… We were speaking to some friends the other n