Neo-Mormon Apologetics with Vocab Malone

Jeremiah Roberts (0:00)

Hey, what's up, everyone? This is Jeremiah Roberts, one of the co-hosts here at Cultish. Just want to remind you before we start this episode that our ministry is 100% crowdfunded. So the only way this show has been possible with all the other content is for you to be a monthly sub-partner of Cultish. So if you feel led to support our ministry, so we can allow content to be put in front of you, to allow the gospel to go around the world, go to thecultishshow.com. There is a donate tab, you can donate one time or monthly, as we want to have this content back to you on a regular basis. So that being said, enjoy this next episode.

SPEAKER_2 (0:41)

My name is Eddie and I was in a call. Planet Earth about to be recycled. Your only chance to survive or evacuate is to leave with us.

We've lived, we've lived, as no other people have lived and loved. We've had as much of this world as you're going to get. Let's just be done with it. Let's be done with the agony of it. It's the revolutionary suicide. This is not a self-destructive suicide.

Vocab Malone (1:21)

So they'll pay for this.

SPEAKER_2 (1:22)

They brought this upon us.

I love you, and I want you out of it and with Christ. But you're...

Andrew Soncrant (1:42)

Welcome back to Cultish, everybody, where we enter into the Kingdom of the Cults. Jerry is still on baby duty, but he will be back soon. But I have a very, very special guest with us. I've been into his content since 2017 I was just talking to him behind the scenes, and he wrote a book on the Black Hebrew Israelites, and Barack Obama is in the title of that book. And I remember hearing about it, and I was like, I got to buy this book.

So we have Vocab Malone with us today in the studio, and we're going to be talking about a few things. In this first episode, we're going to be discussing two recent debates that he had with some more popular Mormon apologists. Well, one, we would consider more of a neo-Mormon if you've listened to any of our past episodes like Blake Ostler with Anne Schauff-Voloff or even with Craig, Jacob Hansen, and then he had another debate with Hayden Carroll, and we're going to talk about that. We're going to be dissecting it today. Anyways, without further ado, Vocab Malone, can you introduce yourself, tell everyone how you came to Christ, and then how you got into apologetics?

Vocab Malone (2:46)

Yeah, my name is Vocab. Sometimes, I just go by Cab, and I live in Phoenix.

I got into apologetics from witnessing as far as hardcore. Now, I already had some of my own questions, so I read some books and stuff to try to answer those questions. You can watch some old videotapes to try to get some questions answered, and I would try to share it with people. They would have questions back, so then I have to answer their questions, too. And it really came out of evangelism, and so that was the trail. It was just trying to help my questions and then their questions, you know? And sometimes they're obviously more aggressive, more like objections, but sometimes they're not. And either way, I would have said, let's try to answer these. Let's try to have a discussion about them.

And that's the background. I mean, I was raised in a wonderful Christian home, Armenians, though, but, you know, I was blessed by that, and like a lot of us in those situations, the relationship with the Lord has to be your own. And so that happened to me late high school, early junior college, and changed the trajectory of my life. And so here I are.

Andrew Soncrant (4:01)

Nice. So what were you studying in college before the Lord saved your soul?

Vocab Malone (4:07)

I might have just been a lukewarm Christian if that's such a thing, but I was like, well, let's do marketing. Let's do business something.

Let's go to Ohio State University, stuff like that. And so I got my AA degree in marketing, but I realized two things. One is this isn't for me, especially as my Christian faith started becoming more important. I said, some of this is like manipulation. I don't want to do this. And then the other thing was I realized I didn't know the Bible enough to help people enough. And so I said, well, Bible college. People said, what are you doing? I thought you're going to do the four year thing. I said, I thought so too. And that's how I ended up in Phoenix at Bible college.