The Interview Room:
A Closed Door.
A Child. An Untrained Adult.

The Room

The bishop’s office is a small room. In most LDS meetinghouses it contains a desk, a chair for the bishop, and one or two chairs for whoever he has called in. The door closes. The meeting begins. No recording is made. No transcript is kept. No observer is present — or was not, before 2018.

This is where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints conducts what it calls “worthiness interviews.” Every member who wishes to enter a temple, serve a mission, receive a church responsibility, or be deemed in full standing with the faith must periodically submit to one. For youth, according to reporting by KUER, these interviews take place at minimum annually beginning at age twelve, as well as before specific milestones.

The bishop is a lay leader. He is not a trained therapist, a licensed counselor, or a certified child welfare professional. He is a volunteer, typically a full-time member of the working population in his congregation, appointed to the role by his stake president. He receives what the church calls training — a handbook, guidance from the First Presidency, consultation with supervisors. He does not receive training in child development, psychological safety, or the clinical literature on the effects of sexually explicit questioning on minors. He is asked to assess, among other things, the sexual conduct and practices of the young people who sit across from him.

What Gets Asked

The church’s official Handbook of Instructions did not, before 2018, explicitly instruct bishops to ask about masturbation. The word does not appear in the Handbook, according to reporting by the Salt Lake Tribune in December 2017. But the omission had an effect: many bishops interpreted “the law of chastity” to encompass masturbation, and read the absence of a prohibition as tacit permission to go as deep as they deemed spiritually necessary. Some did not. Others routinely asked both boys and girls about it in every interview.

The Salt Lake Tribune documented the pattern in a December 2017 investigation: “Some bishops pose pointed questions about moral cleanliness in these conversations, perhaps quizzing about masturbation, heavy petting or fornication, while others keep their queries more general.” The investigation quoted a therapist, Julie de Azevedo Hanks, directly: youth talking about details of their sexual experience with bishops is “intrusive, inappropriate and sends a mixed message regarding boundaries around sexual conversation with adult men. In no other situation would a parent allow or encourage their minor child to have sexual conversations with an adult.”

The KUER reporting in June 2018 was specific: “questions about sex, masturbation and pornography are common.” These were standard topics in worthiness interviews for youth, driven not by an explicit mandate but by a culture in which sexually explicit questions were understood as part of a bishop’s pastoral role. A bishop who shared in a memoir that the first time he ever heard the word “masturbation” was at age twelve in his bishop’s office is describing a common experience, documented by hundreds of accounts gathered by advocates.

When a youth was confessing what the church classified as a “serious sin,” the questioning could go further still. A 2018 analysis of informal bishop guidance noted that verbal instructions to bishops at leadership conferences often went beyond written policy: if a youth confessed sexual sin, bishops were told they could ask questions “sufficient to understand the extent of the behavior.” The extent to which those questions probed specific physical acts was left to the bishop’s individual judgment.

Sam Young: The Bishop Who Said Stop

Sam Young was a bishop. He served in a Houston congregation in the early 1990s. Years later, his daughter told him she had been subjected to sexually explicit questioning by a bishop from age twelve to seventeen, in one-on-one interviews, behind closed doors. He had raised her in the church. He had not known it was happening. Then he found out that four of his six daughters had been through the same thing.

In 2017, Young founded Protect LDS Children and began a campaign with a ten-word demand: “No one-on-one interviews. No sexually explicit questions, ever.”

The campaign gathered more than 22,000 petition signatures. In March 2018, Young organized a march of 800 to 1,000 people to church headquarters in downtown Salt Lake City, where he delivered books containing 3,000 personal accounts from members who described what had been asked of them as children — or what they had asked of others. The church received the materials. It declined to meet publicly with Young or acknowledge the specific accounts.

In July 2018, Young began a hunger strike. It lasted 23 days. He continued to hold news conferences and publish accounts from survivors on the Protect LDS Children website. More than 800 people shared their stories of trauma, pain, abuse, or discomfort in those interviews. The church made two significant policy updates in 2018: in March, it announced youth could request that a parent or adult be in an adjoining room during interviews; in June, it released a standardized set of questions for youth interviews. Young acknowledged the changes. He described them as insufficient. His specific demand — no sexually explicit questions, no one-on-one interviews — was not adopted.

What Changed in 2018 — and What Didn’t

The March 2018 First Presidency letter updated Handbook 1. The June 2018 letter updated it again. Together they represented the most significant policy revision to youth interview practices in the church’s modern history. They also documented, by the necessity of addressing them, what the prior standard had been.

The two remaining “no” items in the post-2018 column represent the core of what Young had asked for and did not receive. The adult presence provision is opt-in: it requires the youth to ask. Critics noted that the most marginalized children — those who had absorbed the church’s culture of deference to priesthood authority, those from families where questioning the bishop was understood as inappropriate — would be the least likely to exercise the new option. The policy depended on knowledge and confidence that the children most vulnerable to harm were least likely to have.

One critic quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune called the change “cosmetic at best,” arguing it left “all the wiggle room in the world for the bishop never to offer it.” The question of what bishops were told in training sessions — verbally, beyond the written policy — remained closed to outside review.

The Excommunication

In August 2018, Young received a letter informing him that a formal disciplinary council had been convened. The disciplinary council met on September 9 in Sugar Land, Texas. A week later, in a news conference streamed online, Young read the council’s decision aloud in front of a crowd of supporters gathered at the Salt Lake Temple.

The letter Young read publicly stated that the excommunication was not about his position on child protection. Young’s response, to the crowd and on record: “They are wrong about that.” He described the outcome as the institution doing what institutions do: “The whistleblower has been kicked out and labeled with the brand of apostasy. I’ll wear that as a proud label.”

The excommunication completed a cycle that all three previous parts of this series have documented. In Part 1: a bishop called the helpline and was told not to report; the church routed disclosure through its own attorneys. In Part 2: the financial structure that funded settlements was hidden from federal regulators for 22 years. In Part 3: the attorney who told the bishop not to report also held a legislative seat and fought to keep the law that made his advice viable. In Part 4: a former bishop who asked publicly for a change to practices that put children alone in a room with untrained adults asking sexual questions was removed from the church. The mechanism in each case is the same — not suppression of the specific act, but suppression of the conditions that would require accountability for it.

The Same Architecture, a Different Room

The bishop’s interview is the point in the institutional architecture where the abstract becomes personal. The helpline, the financial structures, the legislative lobbying — those operate at a remove. The interview room is where a child sits across from an adult, alone, and answers questions about their sexual conduct as a condition of belonging to everything their family and community holds sacred. Temple. Mission. Marriage. Faith itself.

The power differential is not incidental. It is structural. A child who says “no” to a bishop’s question, or who requests that a parent be present, is — in the institutional logic of the church — exercising distrust of a priesthood leader. The culture that makes tithing mandatory for temple access is the same culture that makes the bishop’s interview feel obligatory. The opt-in adult presence provision works only for children who understand they have the right to opt in. In a structure that defines worthiness, and where the bishop is the designated arbiter of worthiness, the existence of that option does not make the interview consensual in any meaningful sense.

Part 5 of this series completes the picture: when the ward is your entire world — your social network, your family connections, your understanding of your own eternal standing — speaking out carries costs that no NDA ever had to put in writing.