(RNS) — In 2022, sensing a need among her fellow Latter-day Saints, Valerie Hamaker started the “Latter Day Struggles” podcast, to address the faith crisis many Mormons were experiencing.
A mental health counselor serving a mainly Latter-day Saint clientele in Kansas City, Hamaker began airing conversations with active members about challenges they were facing with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her husband, Nathan, an ophthalmologist, soon became her co-host.
More than a million downloads later, it seems Hamaker was right. Besides the podcast and its accompanying virtual community where current and former church members talk openly about hard things, the couple now offer related classes and virtual support groups. The people they’ve helped love them and their work.
I’ve seen this firsthand. Since September 2024, I have been embedded as a researcher in one of their weekly support groups. With the permission of the group members, I sit in on the virtual meetings as part of my work studying Mormon faith crises. I’ve been impressed by Valerie’s ability to quietly affirm each meeting’s two dozen participants, helping them process their LDS faith journey.
Valerie and Nathan’s local church leaders in Jackson County, Missouri, don’t see their work that way, though it took a while before their concerns came to light.
“For the first year to year and a half, we didn’t hear a word from anybody in leadership in the church,” Valerie said in an RNS interview with the couple.
The first hint came in August of 2023, as she and Nathan went to see their bishop for a routine renewal of their temple recommends. Both were active members with callings — she in the Primary; he with the Young Men — and both were raising their four children in the faith, holding regular Family Home Evenings and Scripture study. They didn’t imagine there might be a problem.
Not only would the bishop not renew their recommends, he wouldn’t take them through the church’s prescribed recommend interview questions at all.
“I remember him telling me, ‘I can’t give you the interview because you think you’re worthy, but I don’t,’” Valerie said. She and Nathan found this refusal deeply confusing. Never had they heard of a bishop who wouldn’t even grant an interview, deciding in advance that a person was not temple-worthy.
The Hamakers remember the bishop being ambivalent about the podcast, agreeing with some of it, but not all of it. They maintained that the point of the podcast was precisely to help listeners become spiritually mature, independent thinkers.
But he could not be swayed. “He cited tithing,” Nathan explained. “We had said in the podcast that we felt it was OK to pay tithing to outside entities — an honest 10% to any charity that would bless God’s children.” The bishop replied, “That’s not what the handbook says.”
The bishop told the Hamakers he believed they followed Jesus Christ, but he was wrestling with whether they followed the LDS prophet.
Nathan and Valerie Hamaker. (Photo courtesy Valerie Hamaker)
Their temple recommends in the balance, they began a long saga of conversations with him and their stake president. The Hamakers don’t think the church’s investigation came “from the top” in Salt Lake City; they see it starting with earnest local leaders in a very conservative area of the church. They also learned the local leaders were prodded to do so by members of their ward who’d become uncomfortable with the Hamakers’ highly visible work.
“Both the bishop and the stake president kind of spilled to us that a large percentage of our ward had already come to them privately to complain about us and asked the bishop to initiate discipline against us,” Nathan said.
The couple maintained they are simply saying the quiet things out loud, voicing concerns that members already harbor, but can’t express for fear of retaliation. As a mental health professional, Valerie said, it was unethical for her to tell people how to govern their lives — whether or not to stay or leave any relationship, including with a church. “I just want them to be healthy. And because I’m in this community too, I can hold space for the real problems in the church, but also hold space for the value that the church brings,” she said.
In one situation, Valerie said, she was counseled by a priesthood leader to follow her therapist’s professional standard of care when working with people privately, even if it contradicted the church’s teachings. But he also recommended that she should always claim in public that she endorsed the church’s teachings, even though doing so in a support-group setting would conflict with the professional standard of care. The Hamakers thought this rang false and told the leader that was not the definition of integrity they had learned at church.
Valerie added: “I think the foundation of the whole thing is Nathan and I are talking about taboo topics that, culturally, people know they are not supposed to discuss. We are supposed to pretend like there is nothing wrong and that if somebody is in pain, they are the problem. As a mental health worker coaching people directly, I am not going to do that.”
A low point came in early January 2024, when Valerie shared her testimony on Fast Sunday and expressed to her ward of 20 years that she was trying to create safety for all members, no matter where they were in their faith journey. She was followed by the bishop, who, she said, “publicly shamed me and Nathan.” The bishop told the congregation that he loved the Hamakers, who had been in his office “many times” to speak with him, but that in response to ward members’ complaints about them and their podcast he had gone to the stake president for advice.
Nathan reported that the bishop followed that by telling the congregation they all “just needed to love” the Hamakers, adding, “Just remember: Even your bad kids are invited to Christmas dinner.”
This hurtful gaffe led the couple to ask the bishop to apologize publicly. They said he initially agreed to do so, but did not, though they said he was “awkwardly sorry” to them privately.
The couple said that their previous stake president had told them before his release that he wanted to understand their work to help with a smooth transition to the new stake president. Heartened, Valerie spent several hours walking him through “the bridge-building work” they were doing, saying “he seemed open, receptive and validating.” The meetings seemed so successful that she stopped worrying. “He even shared with me that he believed me when I said that I felt that what I was doing to help our people heal from faith crisis was a call from God,” she said.
Since then, the Hamakers have cycled through a new set of leaders, but this “leadership roulette” didn’t improve the situation. In August 2024, they were called in to meet with their entire new stake presidency and new bishop, which they knew was not a good sign. They appealed to their former stake president to provide his promised advocacy but got no response. “No word from this former leader and friend to this day,” Valerie said.
In preparation for their defense, they brought along advocates — Valerie her Relief Society president, Nathan a ward member who had said the podcast had made it possible for him to stay in the church. They also solicited testimonials from listeners who had been helped by their work. Many said the podcast and Valerie’s groups and coaching had given them the tools to heal from their faith crisis and helped them preserve floundering family relationships. Some had stayed in the church.
More conversations, emails and phone calls ensued; they even reached out and spoke several times with their Area Authority Seventy. But “there was nothing we could say,” Valerie concluded. “I couldn’t be reasonable enough. I couldn’t be kind enough. I couldn’t bear my testimony about the nature of my calling from God enough.”
The final strike came Feb. 24, when a text message notified them that a church disciplinary council would be held for them to “consider your actions and statements relative to the doctrines of the Church.” They would not be permitted to bring legal counsel, and any witnesses had to be approved in advance.
The letter did not make any particular charge that would be grounds for excommunication (which the church now calls “withdrawal of membership”). However, it closed with the line, “it is our hope and prayer that this membership council will lead you to a greater trust in the Lord and his designated prophets.”
Exhausted and disheartened, the Hamakers quietly resigned their memberships. On Monday (March 17), they went public with their story on the podcast and through this interview.
They chose to resign, they said, because they felt that a church court “did not make sense in the least.” They believe they are advocating for a healthy LDS church and improving the psychological and spiritual well-being of thousands of Latter-day Saints. They feel “no guilt or shame” about this work, and “completely confident” that God approves of what they’ve offered their listeners.
Valerie called the disciplinary counsel process “fundamentally exploitative and spiritually abusive in nature.”
“They maintain complete control and make sure that no one is present who can push back on the fact that there is no due process, no ‘checks and balances’ and no way anyone can weaken their position of total control.”
Nathan stated: “To arrive at such a meeting would be to endorse the process itself. It would be saying, ‘We give you the power to carry this out and to judge us.’ With all due respect, no thank you. We will not participate.”
While feeling deeply that the church’s disciplinary hearing is unjust, the couple offered forgiveness to the men behind it. “They just don’t get it,” Valerie said. “We understand this. Only a few years ago, we were just like them. Anger is exhausting.”
Their experience has made them more committed than ever to helping Latter-day Saints in faith crisis, said Valerie. The podcast will continue. Nathan said he will definitely miss the temple, where he and his kids did hundreds of baptisms for the dead over the years. Their family was “heartbroken” that the couple could not accompany their third child though the temple before he recently left to serve a mission for the church.
Going forward, they said, they will hold to their commitment to God and to one of the things the LDS church taught them: “Do what is right, let the consequence follow.”
“No matter what the paperwork looks like, they have zero power over God,” Nathan said. “Our own Scriptures say the keeper of the gate is the holy one of Israel who employs no servant there.”
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