The Peep Stone

What's up with Steve Benson?

2007-06-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has fallen out with the LDS Church can identify to a certain degree with Steve Benson. On the other hand, most of them have no idea what it is to be Benson. Grandson of the former president of the LDS Church, Benson grew up in a family that enjoyed the blessing or burdened with the curse, depending on your perspective, of being closely related to the highest levels of leadership in a controversial religious movement.

Benson became an inspiration for disillusioned Mormons everywhere when he dared to question the competency of his grandfather to govern the LDS Church as the man slipped off of this mortal coil. LDS leaders defended the ability of President Benson to continue to lead the Church, but there was a growing sense that others were actually governing the LDS Church in the president's name and with his electronic signature.

Benson then went on to become one of the more prominent personalities of the ex-Mormon movement. I was personally intrigued with his account of a meeting with members of the Quorum of the Twelve, who had invited Steve and his wife in to discuss problems with LDS doctrine, history, and practice. Benson discovered that in spite of the awe most Mormons have for these leaders who counsel with the 'Lord,' they were just men who had no more special insight into the difficult issues of Mormonism than anyone else.

For any of us who grew up believing that these men were actually experiencing literal visitations with heavenly beings who were instructing them in how to run the affairs of God's kingdom on earth, this information was world changing. I was grateful that Steve Benson chose to share this information with the rest of us, since the LDS leadership, while not explicitly encouraging the popular LDS impression of their near-divinity, nevertheless benefits from the aura it confers on them. I became aware of all of this long before I quit attending the LDS Church, but the information certainly helped smooth the ride on the way out.

So, I am grateful to Benson, as many doubters, liberals, ex-Mormons, and future ex-Mormons should be.

Not long ago I started lurking and the Recovery from Mormonism bulletin board hosted by the Ex-Mormon Foundation. I thought it would be really cool to watch these ex-Mormon heroes at work--people like Steve, Tal Bachman, and Bob McCue. At first this is what I saw, and it was often quite cool. Tal has a wicked sense of humor, and it was clear that Bob was on quite a journey of exploration as a former Mormon.

Then there was Steve. Steve was quite an unpleasant surprise in his RfM board persona. Reading his posts was like seeing the rational and sensitive guy of his exit stories morphed into Dan Peterson's more childish, ex-Mormon, and equally evil twin. If someone disagrees with Steve, he starts a campaign of maligning inference, confusion, and red herrings that would make any unscrupulous LDS apologist proud, if only he were on the other side of the argument. It doesn't matter to him that many of his interlocutors agree with the most basic premise upon which he operates--that the Mormon Church's claims are bogus. If you don't agree with Steve to the full extent of his bile and vitriol, you are aiding and abetting the evil cause of Mormonism.

Sadly, one gets the impression that Steve in leaving Mormonism has found and now promulgates a new form of rigid orthodoxy and authoritarianism aimed at insulting his former Church without reason or restraint according to his own narrow vision. In the horror movie of Steve's ex-Mormon imagination Joseph Smith is definitely a con-man and a pedophile. Anyone else who imagines the worst when it comes to things Mormon is definitely on the right track as far as Steve is concerned. He stops short of supporting outlandish conspiracy theories about Mormon plots to take over the world, but I fear only just.

To Dream the Improbable Dream...

2007-06-05T06:45:00.000-07:00

Joseph Smith, Jr. claimed that he translated the Book of Mormon from gold plates he uncovered from a hill that has since been given the name "Cumorah." It is unfortunate for those who believe his claims and archaeological science that he delivered these plates up to an angel. This means that we have no way of determining: a) whether he in fact had plates; b) what was written on those plates if they existed; and c) whether Joseph Smith provided a faithful translation of those plates.

Obviously the case for Joseph Smith's claims regarding the Book of Mormon would be much less problematic if we could at least identify ancient congeners from the western hemisphere that matched either the description of the plates or the content of the translation reasonably well. These problems are so obvious that Mormon scholars generally do not refer to them until a critic of the LDS Church raises them. When the problems are raised, most Mormon scholars go into the "it's not impossible" mode.

Because the LDS Church makes faith in Mormonism contingent upon the literal veracity of Smith's claims, it is very important to the Church that these claims not be *impossible.* For those who do not come to the question with a belief in Mormonism, however, it is enough to say that his claims are highly improbable and move on. Lacking the evidence that would truly make their case probable, however, the intrepid scholars of Mormondom focus a lot of attention on the best they can muster. This has led to some chuckle-worthy statements, like Dan Peterson's suggestion that Book of Mormon horses might have been tapirs, and the like.

Recently, the Deseret Morning News published an article on another of the more improbable supports for their case that there were Nephite gold plates in America. The BYU library has just purchased replicas of second century A.D. military diplomas from the ROMAN EMPIRE inscribed on bronze. The author of the article writes about how the BYU scholars are interested in the similarities between the technology of these plates and the description of the now absent Book of Mormon plates once possessed by Joseph Smith.

"The comparable size and thickness, the use of alloyed metal and binding rings, the fact that one part is open and another sealed, the fact that the plates bear the names of witnesses, the combination of all of these factors in a pattern, make the Roman plates relevant to the Book of Mormon plates."

The claim that the Book of Mormon had a sealed portion is also related to these diplomas:

"The ingeniously designed plates feature an open presentation of the text and a sealed interior portion, a double copy that protects the document from those who might tamper with the contents.
"We refer to such records as doubled, sealed, witnessed documents," Welch said."

For those who know little about the subject, all of this sounds very intriguing. It is true that ancient civilizations wrote things on the durable surfaces of stone, metal, and fired clay. In the eastern hemisphere there are many examples of writing on bronze, gold, and other metals, and in both hemispheres there are examples of writing on stone. Indeed, one might say that the ancients understood that something written on a hard surface might last much longer than one written on a more perishable one. This is not very interesting.

What is interesting is the use of a very specific kind of Roman legal document from the second century A.D. as evidence that people living in the western hemisphere could have written a similarly described document in the fifth century A.D.. The first problem, of course, is that as far as we know the peoples of these hemispheres did not have much contact in the first millennium A.D.. It is highly unlikely that the Romans either transmitted this knowledge to Nephites or received it from them. If the Romans picked up this specific practice from the Ancient Near East, where the Book of Mormon peoples allegedly derived from, then it would be much preferable to use the Near Eastern example, with its rings and seals, and dating to the period when Lehi and his family lived near Jerusalem, or perhaps earlier.

The real problem here, of course, is the utter lack of anything closely similar either in physical appearance or literary content to the Book of Mormon plates in the western hemisphere. In the Book of Mormon, the family of Lehi brings the technology of writing on ancient plates from ancient Palestine. They steal a record on brass plates from a distant relative and that set of plates becomes the technological model for most records mentioned in the book. In other words, based on the Book of Mormon text one would think that keeping records on metal plates was a common practice in the western hemisphere. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of evidence in the western hemisphere pointing to the widespread ancient use of inscribed metal as a means of preserving text--not to mention the specific technologies Welch points to in the Deseret article.

In life and scholarship, we are better off placing confidence in things that are likely to be the case. Sure, every now and then the unlikely turns out to be true. But, it is usually discovered to be true through the usual methods of careful investigation in science and scholarship. Mormon scholars at BYU are, at least from a rationalist perspective, placing the cart before the horse when they assume that the Book of Mormon existed in the form Joseph Smith claimed and then use that as the basis of further investigation. Second century military diplomas from the Roman Empire are only interesting to American archaeology when that specific technology has already been established as having been used in the Americas.

It gets worse. We know, for example, that people have erroneously theorized that the technology for building American pyramids came from ancient Egypt. Here is a case in which we clearly have extant pyramids to examine, and the conclusions drawn are in favor of the independent development of the technology of pyramid building--not dependence on the Egyptians. In the case of the Book of Mormon we do not have the plates to examine, and the story of their appearance and subsequent disappearance is unlikely in the extreme. When is the last time an archaeological discovery was made by angelic intervention?

Finally, if we are going to use Joseph Smith's story as the basis for saying that ancient Americans possessed technology of a very specific type, then we need to examine that claim in the context of everything he said about ancient America to determine whether it is likely he was correct about the plates. It is not my purpose to go into the details of Book of Mormon anachronisms or ecological aberrations, but this is exactly where this kind of information would be pertinent if we pursue investigation along the lines I am proposing. If Joseph Smith is wrong about horses, elephants, and many other Book of Mormon descriptions of the ancient Americas, then the probability that he was wrong about the plates increases as the errors mount.

Without observing the proper order of investigation, certain far-flung "connections" act more as a red herring than corroboration. It was interesting to observe that both Egyptians and Ancient Americans built pyramidal structures. In the end, it did not prove that ancient Americans came from Egypt and brought a knowledge of pyramid technology with them. I would like to say that the same is the case with the Roman military diplomas and the Book of Mormon plates, but unfortunately there is no way of determining what the Mormon plates precisely were, or if they were, until we can examine them ourselves or we discover something much like them in the Americas. The LDS community does a grave disservice to its people when it trains them to indulge in such shoddy reasoning. In the end, it will not sustain them.

No Defense Like A Disingenuous Defense

2007-05-26T19:16:00.000-07:00

Elder Robert S. Wood of the Seventy wrote a little piece in the most recent Ensign entitled "The Quest for Spiritual Knowledge." Wood begins his article by talking about how the divine witness he received of the Book of Mormon he had received at the age of 16 was almost immediately challenged by a nameless non-LDS friend who happened to have a list of Book of Mormon anachronisms on him. He boldly declared that his friend was "too late" because he already had God's witness. Nevertheless, Wood told his friend he would keep the list.

Wood then goes on to say that over the years item after item on the list has dropped off as the discoveries of academics have vindicated his divine witness. Only one item, which he does not specify, stubbornly remained. Never fear, however, for just a few years ago he mentioned this list while speaking at Cornell University, and a 'distinguished professor' (unnamed) said to him, "You can remove your last item, for our (who?) studies indicate that it is not an anachronism." Wood then poses the question, "What would my life have been like had I withheld my conviction of the Book of Mormon until I resolved all the questions my friend had given me?"

So, what on earth does this guy think he is doing? Is he *trying* to look like he's full of crap? Is he not aware that in an attempt to use evidence to prove one's case it is useful to actually discuss the evidence in question? What was on this list? How were these issues settled? What was the final stubborn item? Who is the 'distinguished' Cornell professor? Is she or he LDS? Let's look at some evidence! Or, if we aren't going to do that, let's quit using non-evidence as though it were evidence.

You see, in most places bold claims require more than, and I mean literally, "I heard it from some guy that the thing in question wasn't a valid argument against my claim to a miracle." Either the Ensign has a supremely daft editorial staff, or this guy really thinks that the fact he said all of this unspecified stuff happened really means anything. I am sorry, Mr. Wood, but it does not. You either come up with the facts, or you don't tell the story.

The problem is that Wood's target reader just may give him a pass on this. After all, that is what they, and most religionists, are trained to do. It's not just the fantastically implausible tale of the Book of Mormon, but also the vast sea of things improbable to damn near impossible that are written in the Bible or the Quran. It seems that if someone gets God involved in telling an improbable story, there are always plenty of folks who will hang around to listen, and a few who will buy the book, join the club, and drink the koolaid. Why? Because God is just that important.

I think Trey Parker and Matt Stone got it essentially right when they depicted Martin Harris saying in response to Joseph Smith's claim that God would not let him retranslate the plates because God was angry, "Gee, if God is angry with him, he *must* be telling the truth!" But let's be perfectly clear about this. The claim that God is in the works is not a license to suspend good judgment. The supreme irony is that the very same people who make fun of Jim Jones and the koolaid will tell you that they would happily hand over their wives to Gordon Hinckley if they believed God had told him to ask for them.

As my atheist friends are wont to say with no small amount of wisdom, "fantastic claims demand only the best evidence to back them up." It is too bad that in our weakness and humanity we hope so badly for things to be other than they are that we are just waiting for someone to pass the koolaid. I know, koolaid is an extremely provocative term, but koolaid it is when the decisions that result cause the misery and death of so many people. I am not saying that religion is uniquely culpable. No. And I think that the exercise of a responsible spirituality can be a marvelous thing. But today we see a rash of hucksterism that reaches into the highest office of the land that has played the religion card almost incessantly. That being the case, I have little patience for Mr. Wood's brand of "evidence."

The Best Part...

2007-05-08T06:36:00.000-07:00

So, in my book the PBS documentary "The Mormons" was a wonderful thing. One of the best parts of it, however, may not get a lot of attention. For this reason I have decided to post a link to this awesome resource: the documentary interviews. These interviews are longer versions of the material that went into the documentary. Even these interviews are edited, and I dearly hope that PBS gets wise and puts together a resource for accessing all of the interviews in their unedited entirety.

Here I will quote some of my favorite bits from the Gregory Prince interview. Prince is co-author of the recent biography of David O. McKay. His views match my own so well that I wish I had half a dozen people like him in the boundaries of my ward who were active and reasonably vocal about their views. I might even go to Church again, if that were the case. Anyway, here is Prince...

On gay rights and the marriage amendment:

"The question is, what is the real issue about gay rights, about same-gender marriage? Is this really a threat to the institution of marriage? No. That's a straw man. The threat to the institution of marriage is heterosexuals who either thumb their noses at marriage in the first place or who don't take the marriage covenant seriously. To put all of that on the backs of gays who want to establish a legal union is cruel, and it's wrong. ...

There is irony if you step back and look at the current situation regarding gay marriage, and another situation that also involved marital relations, and that was 19th-century polygamy. ... Where we've come down on the two is quite different, and yes, I think there is irony in that. ... And yet if you are stepping back, each one of those is a reinterpretation of the traditional family. ... There is irony in comparing them a century apart."

On Joseph Smith:

"No matter which way you cook it, Joseph Smith is a bundle of contradictions, an unschooled, roughhewn frontiersman -- which is what New York was in 1820 -- who founds a church that has become a worldwide church. It shouldn't have happened, but it did. ...

[Joseph Smith] was what he was, and it doesn't really bother me. I look at great leaders, particularly religious leaders before and since, and they've all got blemishes, as do political leaders, particularly the charismatic ones. Joseph, if nothing else, was charismatic. And that just seems to be the inseparable baggage that these great people bring with them, and you have to be able to deal with it. …

Some people in the church, even sitting at a high level, tend to reduce it almost to a geometric equation. If Joseph Smith wasn't this, this and this, then the church can't be true. That does us a great disservice, because it turns out not to be as clear-cut as that."

The Book of Mormon:

"Perhaps the most prevalent viewpoint in the church is either the Book of Mormon is a literal history of the Americas before Columbus or it's wrong. There is an alternative somewhere between those two. If you look at the Bible, some of the greatest books of the Bible -- and in my mind in particular the Book of Job, which I feel to be one of the greatest books in world literature, is fictional. Its message is independent of its historicity. That's the key in dealing with the Book of Mormon. Whatever its message is, it continues to resonate with the people who encounter it.

It's not because of its doctrinal sophistication, because if you look at the Book of Mormon compared to the Bible, the level of theology of the two is quite separate. So that's not the attraction. It's not the historicity, because the people who read it don't come away from reading it thinking, "Well, that was an interesting history." It's that there is truth within that book, just as there is truth within the Book of Job that is, in fact, a fictional book. ...

That's the message that people need to get. Forget about the container for a while. Get inside of it and grab the truth that's in there, regardless of the form that it's in, regardless of how it got to be in that container -- and then you win. ..."

On being a Mormon intellectual:

"Being an intellectual in this church is a hard way to make an easy living, for two reasons. One is the wealth of source material: If you go back and look at the history, it's enormous -- and troubling, because it doesn't always square with the public relations version of things. The second reason it's difficult is there is an anti-intellectual bent in the church that in some cases has gone so far as to push people out simply because they were thinking people, either overtly pushed them out by excommunicating them or sending the message that they're not welcome and we'd be a lot happier if you'd just have the good grace to leave, and leave quietly.

So it's not an easy lifestyle, but people don't tend to choose that lifestyle. You are that, or you're something else. I don't think you choose to be an intellectual. It's the way you're wired. It's the way you view the world. So there you are, and if you're going through that journey alone, it's a very perilous and lonely journey. It turns out there are many other people in the church with a similar mind-set, but they are a loose amalgamation at best. It's been with difficulty over the decades that those of us who consider ourselves within that philosophy try to hang on to the church for ourselves and try to hang on to others and keep them in."

On Mormon "certainty":

"There is a strong thread within the church that clings to the notion that I have to be able to say in public, "I know," regardless of what the "I know" involves. Unwittingly that has created a culture that says to the other ones who can't say that in honesty, "Gee, there must be something wrong with me, because I can't say, 'I know,' if I don't know." I think that the desire to be able to go up to the pulpit and say "I know" is not unique to Mormonism. I think that pervades the entire world, and it's why fundamentalism in whatever clothing -- Christian, Judaic, Islamic -- is a dangerous thing, because it gives a false certitude to people. They think that the tough questions in life can all be reduced to one-line answers, and they can't. If you think that's where the world is and you try to live in that world, it's destructive ultimately. So we have to be able to move at some point from, "Oh, yeah, I know," to, "Listen, here's where I am. I think I know some things, and I've experienced some things, and there are a lot of things I don't know. But I'm here for the duration, so let's move forward together and help each other."

On the Book of Abraham:

"One response that has been a very loudly stated response ever since then was, "Those were the wrong papyri." It doesn't address the fact that some of the diagrams, the facsimiles that were part of the Book of Abraham, were with those papyri, and they are the right ones. ... An alternative explanation is to say this is all fiction. ...

There's plenty of ground in between -- and that's the ground that I live on -- that says: "Why does there need to be a one-to-one relationship between historical artifact and modern Scripture? Isn't it the product that we're looking at, and the effect of that product on this community of believers?" And if that is the essential question, and I think it is, then we don't need to worry about the literal relationship between [the artifacts and the Scripture]. ..."

On problems facing the LDS Church:

"Another area is the challenge of feminism; that you have, particularly in the American church, tens of thousands, if not more, women who are not out there picketing, but who are aware that their position in the church is not what they would want it to be. They're looking at this issue different than their mothers or grandmother did.

You have the challenge of intellectualism, and this is a challenge that does not just come from within. Mormonism, because of its importance as an American-born world religion, is ripe for scholarly inquiry. You have scholars, Mormon and non-Mormon, believers and nonbelievers, all focusing their tools on studying this important religion. ... Those are some of the challenges we face now, and not one of those is easy. ...

The strategic problems facing the church don't face me personally. ... The problem I deal with, within my own family, is boredom. My kids ... say, "Dad, this church is boring." When I talk to other kids, they use the "B" word also. If we can't move those kids out of that mind-set, we can lose them. There are so many more alternative voices that they can listen to. You've got hundreds of channels on cable TV. You've got the Internet. It's not the world we grew up in, where you had few competing voices. There are hundreds if not thousands of competing voices, and they are sophisticated and attractive. And if we can't take the essential message that we have and somehow package it in some way that is not so boring to them, we're going to lose them."

On homosexuality and the family:

"We have not yet gotten to the point of understanding the biology of homosexuality, to the point where that understanding enlightens the policy and the behavior of individual Mormons toward homosexuality. ... Are we going to tell [gay individuals], "You must live alone for the rest of your life because you can't fit in this other mold," or are we going to let those people live as what they are, even if it is different than what we are? I hope we can get to that point. What we call it, how we structure it, I don't know. But I think it is cruel to apply different standards of behavior to one group than we do to other groups. ...

The church did a survey 10, 20 years ago and found that half the members of the church were of single families, which means that one-third of the adult membership of the church is single, either never married, widowed or divorced. So to cling to the notion that the only acceptable family unit is a mother, father and children flies in the face of reality. We can accommodate single parents in the church; we should be able to accommodate other forms of family life that are strong, that are nurturing, that are faith-promoting and that are enduring -- but we haven't been able to do that yet. ..."

Reacting to the Whitney PBS Documentary

2007-05-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

I finally finished watching "The Mormons," the 4-hour PBS documentary about the LDS Church by Helen Whitney. I very much enjoyed it. Sure, there were some inaccurate, oddball, and annoying aspects to it, but on the whole I thought it was quite positive. Big plusses in my book were the insights and experiences of Sarah Barringer Gordon, Kathleen Flake, and Margaret Toscano. I am ready to run out and buy professor Gordon's books. I was also pleasantly surprised that Whitney used such a positive quote about Joseph Smith by Ed Firmage. Yes, Firmage is ex-Mormon, and yet you never would have known from his statement about Joseph Smith in which he compared the Mormon prophet to Mohammed and Isaiah.

The faithful Mormon response is somewhat predictable. Many, if not most, of them did not like it. In fact, you can follow the link in the title of this post and read Deseret News' collection of largely negative responses to the documentary by a host of faithful LDS people.

One aspect of the documentary that has produced some unintended humorous consequences was the choice not to identify commentators by their Mormon (non-)affiliation. This has led to some complaints about that Islamic Studies professor *Daniel Peterson* who should not have been consulted, according to the unhappy viewers, about his bizarre views of their faith. Yes, folks, these faithful Mormons had no idea that Peterson is the most prominent Mormon APOLOGIST of our day. This funny mistake reflects badly on the general LDS membership, but quite well on Peterson, who comes off much better in person than the jackass persona he has carefully cultivated on the internet.

I must admit that I was being somewhat inaccurate in my description of the LDS interaction to the documentary, when I said they 'did not like it.' Truth be told, many were enraged by it. Their vitriol toward Ms. Whitney and PBS reminds me just how far outside the Mormon mainstream I am. Even if we are kind enough not to identify it as the mainstream, there are so many Mormons who apparently went apoplectic over the show that I am more convinced than ever that I do not want to hang out with these people. You should know, gentle reader, that I doubt they miss me anyway (at least most of them).

At the same time, I have a great deal of sympathy for these folks. After all, they are conditioned to prize obedience to their Church leaders as the only safe way to navigate these treacherous days of apocalyptic wickedness. Then they are fed a version of their own history and image in the world that would make Walt Disney jealous. In other words, it is calculated to produce a certain positive emotional effect (that I cannot denigrate as being insignificant), and it does so with almost mechanical effectiveness. Finally, they are told not to listen to what anyone outside of the LDS Church has to say about their faith.

I hope this helps to explain why so many Mormons offered the moronic 'insight' that people shouldn't go to a Chevy dealer if they are shopping for a Ford. Who came up with that? If I go shopping for a car, I check out all of the makes and models. Of course it would be stupid to go to a Chevy dealer to ask about Fords, IF MY MIND WERE ALREADY MADE UP. But, going out to shop with your mind made up is to ask to be ripped off. We clearly need to look elsewhere if we want to discover why there are so many successful Mormon businessmen. Once again, however, this is a mantra that is habitually intoned in LDS discussions about how non-Mormons, especially representing other faith traditions, generally misrepresent Mormons. Can you blame them for knowing their culture so well and acting accordingly?

To my Mormon friends who are unhappy with the PBS documenary I offer a simple recommendation. Read the title of the series of which this Mormon documentary is a part. It is "The American Experience." If you think about it, that helps us contextualize this particular presentation of Mormonism. The PBS documentary was not written to make you LDS people feel like you just attended General Conference. It was not supposed to be a missionary tool designed to draw more people into the LDS waters of baptism. Instead, this documentary places the phenomenon of Mormonism within the context of the larger American experience. It therefore offers not only those inside voices that praise Mormonism to the skies, but also those of outsiders who have been impacted by Mormonism in some way. In other words, we get to see how America (and others in the world) responds to Mormonism, and from some pretty brilliant folk.

Ex-Mormons are part of that picture, and I thought they were edited quite tastefully. To those of you who hated Margaret Toscano, all I can say is that you are damned lucky Whitney didn't stick a Sonia Johnson interview in there. At least Margaret still loves Mormonism and feels a part of the faith and culture. The fact that she has been exiled from the LDS Church does not seem to have utterly soured her on it. For those of you who are angry that Ken Clark was on, all I can say is that I am mystified by your objections. On the whole, I thought he was quite mellow. It is obvious he does not believe, but I did not find his statements especially disparaging in tone or content.

For those of you who are angry about all of the time devoted to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, I have two words for you: September Dawn. Mormons should be dancing in the streets and sending personal checks to Helen Whitney for having presented a generally unsensational and balanced view of this dark chapter in Mormon history. Why? Because that is certainly not what you will get from the film September Dawn, and unfortunately many more people will watch that film than the number who tuned in to the documentary. September Dawn was co-written by a Born Again Christian, and we all know how much these folks love Mormonism. One last thing--you have to consider the context when you ask why Whitney gave so much attention to the MMM. We live in a time when religious zealots are blowing themselves up for their faith. How the extreme and pernicious devotion that led to the MMM should not be pertinent in our day is mysterious to me.

Terryl Givens unhappy about PBS documentary

2007-04-29T10:22:00.000-07:00

I recently commented on the Church's advance response to the PBS "American Experience" four-hour documentary on Mormonism. The Church's news release referred to unnamed scholars, some of whom participated in the documentary, who were deeply displeased with its emphasis on polygamy and take on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I was bemused by the omission of the identity of these scholars, wondering why on earth they needed to remain anonymous.

Well, it turns out that at least one of these anonymous scholars, and one who did appear on the documentary, was Dr. Terryl Givens, professor of Literature and Religion at the University of Richmond. Dr. Givens recently visited Duke (University, I suppose) and told members of the Church there that (and here I am quoting a paraphrase of his words posted on RfM) "the film will be a major disappointment to Church members who are expecting a favorable or even well-balanced treatment of the Church."

The criticism continues:

"Part of this is due to choices by the director but in some cases higher-ups at PBS' Boston affiliate, WGBH, mandated changes or edits that made the documentary less favorable. Note that the PBS affiliate in Boston is the one handling the documentary. Bro. Givens seemed to think that this had something to do with displeasure over the Romney campaign. My advice would be to watch it, but I wouldn't recommend it to your non-Mormon friends."

Here is an excerpt from the 4/28 article by Peggy Fletcher Stack published in the Salt Lake Tribune:

"But Givens, a professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond in Virginia, takes strong exception to the film's inclusion of footage of some modern polygamists and their leader, Warren Jeffs, who is charged with being an accomplice to rape for conducting a marriage to which the bride objected. The LDS Church discontinued its official practice of polygamy in 1890.

"This does a grave disservice to the church in light of Helen's stated objective to get beyond the stereotypes," Givens said.

"Nineteenth century polygamy is part of Mormon history and deserves to be told. But there is no possible justification for including Warren Jeffs. It is misrepresentation at best and defamation at worst."

That would be like "showing photos of serial killer David Berkowitz, "Son of Sam" in a piece on modern Judaism," said Givens, who was interviewed at length for the film. "They are trying to turn PBS into 'Big Love' or 'Jerry Springer.' "

For a scholar, Givens indulges in some pretty sloppy reasoning here. Warren Jeffs' crimes directly resulted from his pursuit of a lifestyle that had been mandated as essential for exaltation in the kingdom of God in 19th century Mormonism. David Berkowitz claimed to have been a Satan worshiper when he committed his murders. Unlike Jeffs, whose activities were tied up in historical Mormon practices, Berkowitz neither claimed, nor gave any indication, that his crimes were motivated by or related to the Judaism of his adopted parents.

Givens elsewhere took aim at Will Bagley's contribution to Whitney's work on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I am not aware of the piece where Givens does this, unless it is in the lds.org Newsroom commentary I refer to in a prior post. In any case, here is Bagley's response:

"A copy of this fanatical assault on a beautiful film about Mormonism reached me through the email grapevine. Long experience has shown that apologists have little regard for the truth, and I would like to appeal to you to suggest that your fellow ward members watch the film and make up their own minds. I care little for whatever Dr. Givens thinks of my work--altho he shows no evidence of ever having read a page of it--but that work speaks for itself.

What does bother me is his zealotry, which apparently extends now to trying to destroy Helen Whitney's career. I suppose this modern Savonarola was offended he could not act as the film's censor and make it as happy and inspirational and dishonest as a Lee Grosberg or Keith Merrill movie.

"The Mormons" is a sympathetic, humanist look at a new religious movement that baffles outsiders. The American Experience presents all sides and opinions about Mormon history, but the film puts a very human face on Mormons. I expect it will increase understanding and sympathy toward Latter-day Saints and deepen the American public's understanding of a religion that is too often caricatured and mocked.

As for my "personal mission of trying to destroy Brigham Young," I pretty much put that in the tank when I published the heroic portrait Thomas Bullock paints of this frontier dynamo at the highpoint of his career in "Pioneer Camp of the Saints" lo these many years ago. And despite Dr. Givin's [sic] terrors, the Old Boss and his reputation is likely to survive even Helen Whitney's beautiful film."

If I were to guess who it was that wrote the commentary on the Whitney documentary at lds.org's Newsroom, I would say Terryl Givens. Givens perhaps felt silly, or a little vain, writing about himself in the third person, so he instead referred to a nameless collection of scholars that probably includes the Mormon friends he ranted to.

Balancing Reality and Fantasy

2007-04-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I posted a piece on the LDS Church's response to the April 22 broadcast of PBS's "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly" in which the program was criticized for certain comments made regarding temple covenants. Unable to locate the piece a second time, I mistakenly believed that it had been removed. As it turns out, the piece is still there, and so I will now comment on it using quotes.

As I mentioned the first time (I have since edited the post for being erroneous), a high-level Baptist official made a controversial remark about temple covenants on the show, which elicited this commentary from unnamed Church writers:

"Dr. Phil Roberts, president of the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, claimed, for example, that Church members who attend the temple — including Mormon politicians — swear “allegiance to the Mormon president.” This is simply not true. The center of temple worship is a commitment to God and devotion to the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In a place of quiet reflection, Church members contemplate and decide how their temple attendance will be reflected in their personal lives."

I did not see the broadcast, so I can't comment in full on Dr. Roberts' claims, but I will say that the Church response to them is incomplete and, therefore, arguably evasive. It is true that 'commitment to God and devotion to the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ' are central aspects of LDS temple worship. It is for this reason that for many years I enjoyed worship in the temple with my fellow Latter-day Saints.

What began to bother me, however, was the central position allegiance to the Church as God's kingdom on earth held. In fact, I would say that some of the greatest covenants in the temple center on the devotion of the individual member to the LDS Church. I came to think that the greatest commitments I make in life should be to God instead of a Church run by human beings. This is one of the reasons my interest in participation in the temple waned in recent years.

In any case, to say that 'Church members who attend the temple — including Mormon politicians — swear “allegiance to the Mormon president”' is a reasonable inference, which one might take issue with, but the Church does not so much engage the assertion as misdirect. The reason for this, I suppose, is that the truth of the matter is so close to Roberts' assertion that any attempt at an honest response would leave people with the impression that Roberts was essentially correct.

Who the heck are these people?

2007-04-28T20:54:00.000-07:00

In describing reactions to the long-awaited Whitney documentary on Mormonism, the Church relates these reactions:

"A few scholars, including some who appear in the documentary, have seen substantial parts of the program.

Their initial reaction: Church leaders and members are extraordinarily eloquent in explaining the tenets of their faith. The film is not superficial, which is often a criticism leveled at television coverage.

However, some raised concern about what they feel is a disproportionate amount of time given to topics that are not central to the Church’s faith. For instance, polygamy comes in for extensive treatment in the first program, including substantial attention to present-day polygamous groups that have nothing to do with today’s Church. The time devoted to portrayals of modern fundamentalist polygamy seems inconsistent with the filmmaker's stated purposes of getting inside the LDS experience, and of exploding, rather than reinforcing, stereotypes.

Other scholars criticize what they say is an imbalance in the treatment of some topics, particularly the events at Mountain Meadows in 1857. One said the film provides a distorted and highly unbalanced account of Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre alike."

Now here is a model piece of clarity. Why, pray tell, are the "few scholars," the "some," and the "other scholars" not mentioned by name? Are they ashamed of their sound opinions and reasoning? Do they fear Whitney's wrath for having criticized her work? Or, do they even exist? Are they instead figments of some PR firm's imagination?

One thing they do not fear is tooting their own horn ("Church leaders and members are extraordinarily eloquent"). It looks to me that someone in the Church hierarchy, perhaps, wanted to make an anonymous complaint and attribute it to nameless "scholars" in order to add that air of objective authority. I guess I can't blame them. I remain anonymous, but, then again, I am not the one with the power.

BYU students on Cheney's visit and protest

2007-04-22T14:47:00.000-07:00

I decided to check out as much of the coverage of the BYU protest as I could find to try to figure out what it was the students were saying about Cheney's visit and the two demonstrations (pro-Cheney, and anti-Cheney). Some interesting rhetoric came from both sides of the issue--rhetoric I find somewhat revealing and disturbing.

To me it sounded as though the anti-Cheney demonstraters had been given a script. They all spoke of how Cheney did not represent BYU or its students, although none of them were very eloquent about the reasons why he didn't. One student referred to the vice president's ties to Halliburton and his permissive attitude about the use of human torture during interrogations. For the most part, however, students expressed that Cheney did not represent them or the University.

One reason for the continuity in the script was because a communications professor at BYU had presented their position more eloquently and probably molded the overall rhetorical strategy for the others. Woodworth's strategy was to condemn Cheney on moral grounds, a position that is likely to find more sympathy among people who purport to take their morality very seriously.

The other reason for this approach was that the university's administration placed some strictures on the protest in advance. In the words of one student, "...they sent an email out with a list of different things you could put on your sign. There's no real freedom of speech here, like a real protest, and you can't criticize the BYU administration at all, which is the point of the protest, but to get the protest approved they had to say they were just protesting Cheney, even though in reality the protest is about the BYU administration's decision to bring Cheney here."

So, there you have it. A polite 'protest' because it is the only kind that is allowed. The students were told when and where they could protest, how long it could last, what they were forbidden to say, and that they had to 'keep it down.' No shouting, etc. When they left the protest area, they were not even allowed to take their own signs home with them. If Martin Luther King and Ghandi had observed such strictures, we would still have segregation and a British India. And this is exactly why BYU handles things this way, because they do fear their youth and don't want change.

Allowing these young people to speak for themselves is very revealing. It helps us get behind the purported intentions and self-representations of those in power to what is happening among these students on the ground. It helps us understand what the BYU system is teaching them to do and to value. I thought this was particularly poignant:

"I've had fellow students to tell me to turn in my temple recommend, or that I am not a real Mormon, or that I don't support the First Presidency, all of which are completely false. We're just regular, good Utah Mormons who happen to disagree with the Vice President." -Diane Bailey, BYU College Democrats

You will not find similar sentiments coming out of the mouths of BYU College Republicans, because no one questions the Mormon loyalty of conservative Republicans. What does that tell you about the LDS Church as it is lived and taught at its flagship university? Leaders and adults may *say* that there is no political bias or agenda, but the behavior of the kids on the ground tells a more revealing story. It's a milder version of the child who reveals something embarrassing about his or her parents in Primary. The child just doesn't know what to hide.

What troubles me most, however, is the rhetoric of the pro-Cheney demonstraters. Regardless of political sympathies, I should think we would all be troubled to hear things like this:

"It's just an honor to have such a large part of the administration come and recognize us and speak at our graduation ceremony...to recognize us as one of the top universities, I mean, usually they speak at the Ivies, and its just such an honor to be up in that caliber." -BYU student

"We're excited to have him come, because we're excited for the opportunity for BYU students to have that close of a personal interaction with someone who has such power and an ability to alter and change the day to day actions of the United States and much of the world." -David Lassen, BYU College Republicans

Doesn't seem like such a big deal I suppose, but remember that this is a university that prides itself on providing a Christian learning environment. In other words, we might expect the values that Jesus taught expressed in the views of BYU students. Instead, we hear quite the opposite. The first student quoted above is impressed by recognition from the world. "BYU is just as cool as the Ivies now!" The second is impressed by POWER. "We get to have close personal interaction with a powerful man." This is interesting in the context of the anti-Cheney demonstraters who essentially made an argument from values and ethics (the recurrent theme of their position).

Hinckley reaches out to touch your BYU student

2007-04-21T19:11:00.000-07:00

I recently watched an amateur video shot during the marathon two-hour protest against Cheney's commencement invite that BYU students held in a "free speech zone" on BYU campus. First of all, let me say my hat goes off to all of you idealistic young Mormons who are willing to make your voices heard on Rush Limbaugh's dream campus.

Kudos to you, O Plucky Ones! Your optimism and trust that you are making a difference against all evidence to the contrary is truly touching. And I can see that your fearless master, Cecil Samuelson, took notice and duly deigned to appear in person to show his warm sympathy for your cause. His "we're not afraid" was both heartfelt and utterly convincing. There is a man who truly cares about what you think. And he should, for according to all claims, BYU is a university, where people like Cecil are paid to help improve your thoughts. Do you think he is happy with the results of his hard labor?

Let's look at this from a different perspective. There is a cuddly little nonagenarian in Salt Lake City who wanted to reach out and touch you on that warm spring day. His heart went out to you as you expressed your feelings about the pressing issues of the day. In fact, he was so anxious that you feel his concern that he relied on HIRED GOONS to make sure your signs were gathered into a safe place and that you were shepherded out of your free speech zone to the unfree speech zone that comprises your daily lives on campus.

Consider this, O parents of the BYU students. When a University, a temple of the mind, has to designate a 2-hour free speech zone, you know your child's education is in expert hands.

Anyway, when I saw that giant, cuddly Polynesian bear of a fellow in his Secret Service suit placing his hands on your children, I thought of the love of President Hinckley for each of your little ones. He would have loved to have been there in person to intimidate your precious children into cooperating, but he just isn't that intimidating, and he didn't have time to make the trip.

Sad isn't it, when you think of it. There is a man in Salt Lake City who commands immediate respect from just about every person on that campus. Had he come in person, the bright-eyed, faithful BYU students and professors would have stood in awe, singing 'We Thank Thee, O God, For A Prophet,' eager for any half-credible explanation for his invitation of one of the most despicable public figures since Richard Nixon to BYU campus.

Surely the prophet, being God's primary spokesman on the earth today, would have a real good explanation. After all, not only is he the numero uno spokesman, he is also the Lord's PR man. And besides, he didn't need an explanation. I would wager that the little charmer could have cracked a wry joke, as he is wont to do, and much good will would have been won without any real dialogue or a change in the commencement program.

Such is the charisma of the Mormon prophet. Interesting that he shows absolutely no inclination to get involved and smooth out the untidiness created by the invitation he made. Interesting that the influence of this 'gentle man of God' brought the intimidating presence of Polynesian bouncers to put your children in their place, and will yet bring the bloodstained plutocrat Dick Cheney to serve as their moral exemplar. By the way, I bet they shipped that bouncer down from Hinckley's personal detail, just so that BYU students could fear the hand of the man who clasped the hand of the prophet.

Let me ask you, BYU parents. Is this what you envisioned when you sent your kids to BYU? Is this what proximity to the Lord's anointed wins them? Are you feeling the love? Because you should know that that love is Gordon Hinckley's love. I don't know about you, but I find that disconcerting.

Orson Scott Card: One Odd Duck

2007-04-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

OK, let me get something out of the way. I love "Ender's Game." It is a really fun novel, and I hope it is made into a movie some day. Oh, and I suddenly have an urge to read the Alvin Maker series.

Having said that, I find the author of these novels, Orson Scott Card, a completely perplexing individual. Or maybe completely predictable. He is perplexing because as intelligent as he is, he seems unable to parse the problems of the LDS Church in a realistic fashion. He is completely predictable, because like many intelligent people who continue to cooperate with authoritarian regimes, he has a fancy set of partitions and blinders that help him stay on the right side of the regime.

Card begins a recent article entitled "Is Mitt Romney Serious?" with a slew of disparaging comments about Hillary Clinton and high praise for the probity of Mitt Romney. Is *this* guy serious? I quote:

"Everyone knows that Christian evangelicals hate Mormons so badly that if they had to choose between a bribe-taking, FBI-file-stealing, relentless-lie-telling, mud-slinging former first lady, and a Mormon ex-governor who doesn't lie, who's still married to his first wife, and who supports the entire Christian evangelical agenda, they'd still rather die than vote for a Mormon."

All I can say, Orson, is that you have devoted at least part of your dear soul to sheer lunacy. First of all, in your contention that Christian evangelicals would rather vote for Hillary Clinton than a Mormon man, you are laughably off target. I think it should be abundantly clear by now that what Americans really fear is a female president. I am sure evangelicals would be happy to overlook Mitt's Mormonism in order to get his maleness, whiteness, and dubious, opportunistic social conservatism. They, and millions of other more closeted misogynists, would happily sell their mothers to get to the polls to oppose a woman occupying the Oval Office. The fact that it is Hillary they would be opposing only provides a pretext to hide their deep hatred and fear of women.

As for your conviction regarding the moral probity of Mitt, this too is evidence of your indulgence of illusion. Mitt is not honest. The guy betrayed his polygamist ancestry in order to head off the gay lobby's political use of Mormon polygamy. He said that the federal government had been correct in harrassing and persecuting the religious practices of his own ancestors! I would say that if evangelicals have any reason to be afraid of Mitt, that would be the right one.

The fantasy continues:

"They try to leave the impression that the Mormon Church is racist, wacko, breeding like flies, and obscenely rich. "This tithing has helped the church amass an estimated $30 billion in wealth," says The Week. "Mormon holdings include the biggest beef ranch in the world and the largest producer of nuts in the U.S."

Here Card blames the press for attacking the LDS Church instead of facing the issues. In truth, the LDS Church does have things to answer for. I am sorry that Mitt has to take the brunt of this (am I?), but if his beloved Church had acted with sensitivity, integrity, and openness, he wouldn't have half of the troubles he is having.

Let's face it, the African American community has not let the United States off the hook for slavery (and rightly so), and so it is even less likely that the LDS Church will be let off the hook for an implicitly racist theology that persists to this day. And, for the record, I think the Church should be actively pursued by black activists for failing to apologize for racist doctrines and practices.

In other words, let's be realistic instead of whiney. Is it *fair* that people attack Mitt's Mormonism? Is it classy? Hell no! But since when is politics about fairness or class? (Well, it's obviously got a lot to do with social class, but that is not what I mean.) My guess is that Americans continue to be suspicious of Mormonism, and that they believe they have good reasons to feel that way. Mitt will pay for it. The Church and its membership can continue to indulge in persecution scripts, or they can actually openly and honestly address the issues that make others uncomfortable.

There is much talk about Mitt's situation being comparable to Kennedy and his Catholicism. I think there is a *huge* difference here. Sure, at the time people thought that Kennedy might obey the pope instead of acting in the interests of this country. Now we know that American Catholics listen to the pope about like they read Leviticus. They recognize his authority and largely ignore him when convenient. As a Catholic acquaintance of mine once said, "the only way to be an American Catholic is to attend mass and otherwise act like a Protestant."

Mormons have quite a different relationship with their prophet. And all Mormons know this. *They* even contrast him with the pope. Any Mormon can tell you that while the pope is both infallible and ignored, the Mormon prophet is fallible only when you need to make an excuse for him. Otherwise his most irrelevant muttering on Larry King is obsessed over with amazing energy.

It also makes a huge difference that Utah is smack dab in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, while the Vatican is located in Italy. Mormons aspired to have an independent theocratic nation in the Mountain West not even a century and a half ago. Brigham Young sympathized with the Confederacy. He enshrined racism in Mormon theology. Mormons authorities lied repeatedly about the practice of polygamy to the government and their own people.

In other words, unlike the pope, the Mormon prophet has been America's homegrown issue for many, many decades. The fact that this is still an issue in the Romney campaign is less evidence of human prejudice, which we can take for granted as always being present, than of the failure of the LDS Church to deal with uncomfortable issues in a satisfactory manner. The Church must bear the responsibility for this failure. One cannot rely on the fairness of American politics or the uprightness of the press on the best of days. Mormonism's leaders and rank-and-file members should stop whining and do something about things they can change.

Somehow, I am not confident they will.

Dutcher on Dutcher

2007-04-20T07:01:00.000-07:00

LDS filmmaker Richard Dutcher recently bid farewell to the community of LDS cinema and the LDS Church too. His comments, some of them barbed, elicited an outpouring of bile from Kieth Merrill, whose worst work (Legacy, Testaments) is one of Dutcher's targets. To his credit, Merrill apologized.

As a Mormon of sorts, I find Merrill's bile and penance a familiar script. Mormons can get angry in the most juvenile ways, and then absolve themselves through their equally dramatic regret (I am quite familiar with this behavior because I have often done it myself). Both the bile and the regret are sincere, and yet oddly calculated at the same time. I know that subconsciously calculated is an oxymoron, but somehow it seems to fit here. Maybe 'culturally programmed' would be the better term.

Dutcher, too, has his stock Mormon rhetorical faults. There is a measure of arrogance in his initial farewell that is also familiar. Yet, Dutcher's rhetoric also has a wonderful self-reflective quality that transcends the usual boundaries of Mormon moral navel-gazing. It seems that every time I see a Mormon I have not been around for a while, that person engages in some talk about being scandalized by the state of the world (usually the lack of morals in the media) in order to communicate their continuing allegiance to the "true gospel."

Dutcher has so much more to offer than this. He understands Mormonism with the sympathy of an insider and the perspective of a more dispassionate outsider, all at the same time. Perhaps this is why his Mormon movies are effective, and Kieth Merrill's Mormon movies are cinematic pop tarts.

Dutcher recently added an addendum to his farewell, and man is it powerful. I think it is even more on target than his original farewell. This guy "gets it." My favorite part was his discussion of the ritual slandering of the "lost soul" in historical and contemporary Mormonism. I'll let him speak for himself:

"Thomas Marsh was one of the leaders in the early Church. Most of us know him only as that silly man who left the Church because his wife cheated another sister out of some “milk strippings.” The matter ended up with local Church leaders who determined that Sister Marsh had, indeed, acted dishonestly. As the story goes, Thomas was so offended and angry that he left the Church and didn’t come back until he was an old man, dead broke and half-senile.

But there’s so much more to the story.

Although the “milk stripping” incident is factual, it is not the reason Thomas Marsh left the Church. He left in those chaotic days in Far West, shortly before Joseph was arrested and taken to Liberty Jail. These were the days of Sidney Rigdon’s reach for power and his “Salt Sermon.” They were the days of the Danites (Yes, Virginia, there were Danites), and the days when Oliver Cowdery left the Church. Oliver’s complex and difficult decision was made at a time when his life was being threatened by other Church leaders. It was a crazy, dangerous time and Thomas was right in the middle of it. I’m sure those old milk strippings were the last things on Thomas Marsh’s mind when he mounted up and got his family the hell out of town.

Yet this man’s complex life, and his difficult decision, has been reduced to an inaccurate Sunday school lesson in Pride. I believe this “lesson” is a slander, and a violation of a very complex human being.

Although it may be out of my hands, I do not intend for something similar to happen to me. At least not without a fight.

It’s unpleasant to acknowledge, but the LDS community has a history of character assassination. It is an ugly truth, but it is the truth. I have often joked (darkly, and among friends only) that when wandering sheep stray from the fold, Mormons don’t go looking for them. What happens is: somebody climbs up on a really tall tower, takes out a high-powered rifle, gets the poor straying soul in the cross-hairs, and then blows his wandering brain out.

When individuals leave the fold, why do we find it necessary to blacken their names? This has been the case since the earliest days. Back then, a church member or leader could be in full fellowship one day and considered a wonderful, decent, loveable human being. The next day, if that individual chose to make an exit, he was the “blackest, basest of scoundrels,” an “adulterer” and a “counterfeiter,” etc.

Today, we’re a little less melodramatic. But still, when a scholar, artist, intellectual, or even a rank and file member of the Church decides to leave, his character is instantly under attack: “I think he’s gay” or “I bet she’s having an affair” or “I’ve heard he’s a drug addict,” etc.

Just for the record: I’m not having an affair. I’m not gay. I’m not a drug addict. I’ve never tried to illegally reproduce hundred dollar bills and I haven’t killed anyone. Sadly, I can’t even claim to have beaten anyone up, not since the 9th grade anyway. (Actually, now that I think of it, I didn’t win that particular fight. A neanderthalic 12th grader beat the snot out of me.)"

Dutcher then continues to speak about his leaving the fold as a progression through Mormonism instead of an eschewing of his experience in it--the latter being the usual ex-Mormon trope. It was this that I tried to express in my last post, but Dutcher does it so much better. I really like this guy.

The Church is "True"

2007-04-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

I have been spending too much time over at RfM (Recovery from Mormonism). I question my purpose for visiting almost every time I pop over there. I think I do it because every once in a while some interesting tidbit appears from behind the 'Zion Curtain.' I find myself wanting to believe that the guy who is claiming to have worked at the COB, recently been a mission president, or some such, is actually the real deal. These guys have the unflattering stories that reveal the Church for what the skeptical among us want to see in it: a fumbling organization wherein the ambitious few prey on the good intentions and gullibility of the many.

Yup. It's not pretty. And this is really as good as it gets, at least for me. I am generally tired of all of the stories about the Church destroying people's lives, fabricating history, working for the Republican cause, etc. You see, I take all of that for granted by now. And, revisiting it for the umpteenth time is, well, boring. I know others out there really need to see that they are not alone, that the Church has hurt other people, etc. I generally find more people like myself out there on the good old DAMU. Different strokes, right?

One thing that I truly have lost patience for, however, is the declaration that a person has discovered that the LDS Church is "not true." I understand that for them this is a very important personal discovery, but others out there have discovered something even more worthwhile--that "true" was a problematic assertion in the first place. So if the expression that Church is "true" is fraught with problems and complexities, then the idea of the Church not being true is really vexed. Unfortunately, LDS people never had any discussion about what the former meant, so skipping right through to the "not true" part just leaves so many unanswered questions.

I can agree that I once thought that God had restored His Church through a farmboy named Joseph Smith. I once thought that this knowledge, and the life that I would lead on that understanding, would save me from some woes I now view as either imaginary or beyond fixing. I used to get up at Church and assent to all of this kind of stuff by using the expression, "I know the Church is true." I have to say, however, that I quit using that language long before I quit attending.

I think the problem with it, for me at least, was that it did not begin to cover the nuances of my actual thoughts and feelings on the issue. Such a statement, if used carelessly, could cover a multitude of doubts and misgivings in a manner that I found increasingly deceptive. This is the reason I quit saying it. Not because I suddenly thought the LDS Church was of no value, but because I wanted to express something of my real experience of it. At the same time, I understood that most people did not want to hear about that stuff.

Then I found the internet, and I felt a rush of liberation. I formed a Yahoo! group for liberal Mormons, and some interested friends and I started batting around the ideas and feelings that one is not comfortable sharing in the chapel. Having found that liberation, and having expressed those thoughts and feelings, I increasingly saw testimony baring as woefully inadequate. It was easy to drop it, because I now saw my statement encompassing so much I could not express, that I had no confidence I was sharing anything more than a gross banality. Worse yet, people listening to me say it could jump to whatever conclusions about me they wanted to.

In that wonderful spiritual journey, I grew into secular humanism. Ah, the dreaded evil. A spiritual humanism is the perspective that most appeals to me. Sure, there were many discoveries along the way about the inadequacies of Mormonism and the LDS Church. I found that most of what faithful Mormons believed about the LDS Church, its history, and its doctrine were things I no longer believed, at least not in anything but the most symbolic sense. This has not led me to say, however, that "Mormonism is not true." Somewhere along the way that expression lost all meaning to me. Instead, I came to understand that Mormonism was part of my learning process in life. For a time it gave me some valuable things, a long time. Now I no longer get out of it what I once did, and I do not want to participate in it or assent to it any longer.

Sure, I *could* say that "Mormonism is not true," and that would save a lot of time, but there is also something crass about it that would make me feel as though I never learned anything along the way.

The Book of Zelph

2006-12-19T19:17:00.000-08:00

Brothers and Sisters,

I would be truly ungrateful if I did not stand before you this day and bear my testimony concerning the Book of Zelph. The Book of Zelph is an ancient record, inscribed on plates of leather, that the Lord revealed to Josh Anderson, his latter-day prophet, seer, revelator, and translator. It truly is another testament of the Book of Mormon, confirming its truths and answering difficult questions like, "how did Lamanites get Asian DNA?" God has truly not left us helpless in these perilous times. No longer need we rely on FARMS apologists and their LGTs and whatnot. I have tested the divinity of this work according to the promise recorded in Melph (5:4):

And I promise thee that if ye ask if this book be not true, and roll a pair of dice with a sincere heart, and desire exceedingly for the book to be true, yea, the dice shall reveal the truthfulness of this book unto thee.

I rolled the dice many times, and they did come up with the right answer... eventually.

In the name of Cheese and Rice, Amen.

Here lies Hiram.

2006-12-19T18:26:00.000-08:00

Thurl Bailey ROCKS!

2006-12-19T17:52:00.000-08:00

Just when I thought I would never see a Mormon celebrity with some pizazz, I stumbled upon the website of Thurl Bailey, former member of the Utah Jazz. Go check him out for yourself at www.ThurlBailey.com. President Hinckley should look into getting the GAs webpage intros like that one!

The Church is as true as the Gospel, or is it?

2006-12-19T16:48:00.000-08:00

True is a word that covers, well, almost anything in Mormonism. "The Church is true" is one of those all-purpose phrases that tends to end anything approaching interesting or controversial speech in the LDS Church. Not surprisingly, there has been some confusion over precisely what is to be considered 'true' and what is not necessarily to be considered so.

In the area of apologetics, something is to be defended as true until it is no longer useful, or it is even embarrassing, to do so. Wonderful new definitions of Book of Mormon geography and ethnicity are springing up in response to the troubling realization that perhaps the book does not live up to its own claims. There is a hierarchy of true that helps apologists navigate these troubled times. At the pinnacle, or core, depending on how you picture it, reside those things that must be maintained in order to have any excuse for an LDS Church, period. Just about anything else is up for grabs and may be dumped to protect what really must be true for the sake of institutional survival.

It was fashionable at one time to separate the trueness of the Church from the trueness of the Gospel. An LDS GA even had the cajones to speak about it in the October General Conference of 1984. His name was Ronald Poehlman. His message was inspirational. He suggested that the Church was merely a vehicle or tool for transmitting the Gospel. Members might utilize it to their own benefit, but they should not mistake the Church for the really important stuff--the Gospel.

Well, the powers that be did not approve of that one bit. They had Ron rewrite the whole thing, or, rather, they rewrote it for him. Members needed to know that the Church was indispensible, and that without the Church there could be no Gospel. There could be no rebel hippie types inspired by the free-wheeling thoughts of Mr. Poehlman. He was required to re-record his talk so that history could be changed for you and me. Check the record. You'd never know the original talk was ever offered.

Another interesting view came from Eugene England, who wrote "Why the Church is As True As the Gospel." His fascinating argument essentially boils down to this: it takes an organization as screwed up as the LDS Church to test your soul enough to get into the highest degree of celestial glory. No other organization could possibly offer the same challenge to your sanity and self-respect. Only the LDS Church, therefore, is true enough to allow you to experience the soul-wrenching trials promised in the true LDS Gospel. They are a match made in heaven. OK. This is admittedly my reading of his talk.

I have yet another interesting perspective. The Church is a human organization rooted in the career of the self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Smith. Joseph had some cool ideas, and some damned stupid ones. You can tell which ones were stupid partly from they way they contributed to his assassination. You know, ideas like polygamy and destroying a printing press that did not belong to him. The heirs of Smith have some nifty and some stupid ideas too. I'll leave it to you to sort out which ideas fall into which category--and this is the way it should be.

As a human organization, the LDS Church can be altered to suit better the needs of its members. Unfortunately, because most Mormons tend to deify the Church, they have no appreciation of this fact. They also have no idea of the power of their voices. They believe that the leaders of the LDS Church hold all the power, and that these leaders alone have the right to make changes. So, the Church goes trundling along, sprouting ex-members in its wake. And it never asks itself whether crucial course corrections are in order.

Instead we hear delightful talks from leaders like Elder Bednar, who places all the blame for leaving on individuals who take offense at things they shouldn't be offended by. Surely, no one could have a real reason for leaving, because, from the Bednar perspective, such a thing does not exist. Or there is Elder Ballard who tells people just to chill out and not fret over stats to the point that these mean more than people. Once again, the people need to change, not the organization. It is close to perfect.

NEWS FLASH! Organizational problems are not always the fault of individual members! Outside of the LDS Church, people sometimes realize that if an organization has problems, the problem just may be the organization's! But if you maintain that the Church is true in the sense that God has put everything in place as it is and only he can change it, responsibility can only lie with the poor schmucks who just don't get the divine plan. It is they who need to change and to repent. The Church is as close to perfect as anything can be. Boy, you were really silly not to see that.

I propose that we approach our Mormonism in the spirit of the old, hatcheted Poehlman talk. You have the power and responsibility of choosing things in this life. We used to call that "free agency." You have the freedom to think that the Church may indeed have problems, which someone could fix if they would extract their heads from their asses. You can go to Church or not go. You can believe in what Joseph Smith taught on issue "X" or not. You can be Mormon and drink the damned coffee. Are you going to hell? Are you even going to a lower kingdom? Hell no. Let God be the judge of that. Or, if you don't believe in God, to hell with it.

My own little spot on the DAMU

2006-12-19T16:22:00.000-08:00

Nothing excites my vanity like the thought that every once in a blue moon one of those cybernauts with an interest in Mormonism--positive or negative--drops by my little corner of cyberspace. I have only recently become aware that this blog is linked at a couple of other websites on the DAMU.

I also discovered that I am not the only peep stone owner out there. Little did I know that the prophecy of everyone having their own seerstone would be fulfilled right before my eyes! Just one more on a long list of confirmations that the Gospel is true.

One of my fellow "peepers" (I just couldn't resist) is named Simeon. Poor Simeon recently suffered a trauma in his DAMU life when his dear wife ratted him out for his wicked blogging. My sympathies to Simeon. I too have gazed into the stone and seen the darkness that lies within. I too have written down my revelations for posterity. I am just grateful my spouse never took it up with local Church leaders.

Sadly, Simeon is not alone. There are many LDS spouses out there whose love of God extends so far as to sacrifice marital trust. These spouses believe, as does the Church that trained them, that one must simply act out of a regard for the eternal welfare of another's soul, even if that means screwing them over royally in the short term. It's kind of like those good old days, when Joseph or Brigham called a man on a mission and then promptly took his wife and property--or doled them out to other worthy brethren. They know what's best for you. Really.

When people can be convinced that all of this is somehow part of the divine will, they can be convinced of nearly anything. And that is how we end up with people who sell out their spouses to the LDS Church.

All the latest on Hiram

2006-10-27T19:21:00.000-07:00

It seems like forever and a day since I last posted anything. Much has happened in that time too. First of all, I started a new job, and that job is very time consuming. But the BIG news is that I stopped going to church at my LDS ward.

"How did it happen?," you might ask. Or, "it doesn't surprise me in the least," you might say. Surely someone who complains about the LDS Church as much as I do can't hold on for long. Perhaps, but then there is Robert Kirby, who has done plenty of complaining and finds himself returning week after week--as far as I know.

To answer that one person out there who might both read this and ask the first question, I was not the one who motivated the big exit. It was instead my wife, who, upon taking our daughter into nursery one Sunday, felt a wave of nausea overtake her as she recalled all of her unpleasant experiences as a young woman in the LDS Church. Very soon she contacted a member of the bishopric to explain how she could not continue, and she had me deliver up her temple recommend.

So, I was shocked. I mean, I had been complaining and criticizing for years. Here my wife, moved by deep-seated pain, decided to put a stop to her participation in the Church abruptly. It took this to get me to stop too. I have lived in paranoia and fear for some time that I would get delivered up to the powers that be--as if they really care. Now, unless I break the 11th commandment ("thou shalt not publish") I should be, like many other disaffected LDS people, just fine in my apostasy.

Now, oddly, I find myself in mourning. I guess it isn't so odd really. A child can mourn the death of an abusive parent. I can mourn my partially self-imposed incarceration in the LDS Church. I say partially because I did not choose to be raised as a Mormon. Neither did my parents. My 19th-century ancestors thought it was a good idea.

Many of them had lived under an English monarch, so perhaps the freedom to have Joseph or Brigham as a king didn't seem like such a bad idea. Now, I understand that the decision they faced wasn't exactly put in those terms. Rather, they thought they were off to join the people of God in building His kingdom--Zion. To achieve that goal they were willing to sacrifice. Unlike me, they did not have such a radically individualist concept of freedom to make some of these sacrifices seem odious.

As I have grown older and looked on as the Reagan Revolution aged into the would-be hegemony of the Religious Right--as I have seen us endure humiliation and shame ourselves in the quest to rid the world of evil by throwing billion dollar weapon systems and innocent lives down the tubes, settling for the illusion of security and selling our birthright for a mess of pottage--I have come to value my dissipating personal freedom.

I believe in having a say and a stake in my personal future, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant it may be. I feel damn fortunate to have had what little freedom I have enjoyed. I believe that people can govern themselves. It is my hope and ideal to see more people empowered to govern themselves. While this may be overly optimistic, it is an optimism I believe we must indulge. Considering the alternatives is simply unthinkable.

This faith in humanity is precisely what has affirmed our decision to quit attending the LDS Church. The idea that God chooses another person to rule over me and to speak the divine Word to me is no longer acceptable. This is, simply put, a spiritual monarchy. Inculcating in people an unquestioning obedience to arbitrary authoriy is a great way to transform adults into spiritual children and slaves. It does nothing to bring about the avowed goal of eternal progression to divinity. Correlation has brought hierarchical control so close to the average member that there is no longer any room to breathe.

Oh, I still consider myself Mormon. I am a Mormon inasmuch as I believe that progression toward better things is a worthwhile ideal. I am a Mormon inasmuch as I believe that it is vital to search after further light and knowledge. I am Mormon inasmuch as I believe in the value of cultivating a polite and respectful environment. I am Mormon inasmuch as I value the adventuring spirit of Joseph Smith, even though he clearly went too far when he sought multiple wives and a Mormon monarchy. I identify with the restless creativity of Joseph Smith and his audacity.

Today that adventuring spirit has departed. The audacity has hardened into arrogance. The Joseph Smith of today's LDS Church never existed. His image is a whitened sepulchre. He has been reduced to a palatable and quantifiable object of devotion. St. Joseph of a Bransonized Nauvoo.

How do I hold on to my Joseph as I let go of the Church he founded? I hope it is in continuing on the quest for more wisdom and knowledge. I hope it is in my pledge to be a friend and brother with a determination that is fixed and immovable. I hope it is in my cultivation of the Grand Fundamental Principles of Mormonism. I still seek for the kingdom, but the kingdom I am seeking has no kings unless all are sovereign over themselves. It is a unity of heart and mind that comes through love, persuasion, and toleration, not compulsion or constraint.

In recent days I have read about Elder Holland working to drum up support for Mitt Romney's presidential bid. I have seen the Church's refusal to comment on what is happening with all those pine benches in the Tabernacle--of all the silly things to hush up. I have read the racist comments of a BYU-Idaho professor and the hateful taunts thrown at a little child because his mother is a Democrat in Rexburg. I have read with sadness the parting comments of BYU's one black, female law professor, who discovered that the LDS Church really does not support women in the workplace when it has a say in the matter.

In short, I have discovered that this is not my Church, and that I do not want the people who actively seek after these things to be my people. Do I hate them? No. I am simply choosing what I hold to be the better part.

The Mormon King by G.W. Anderson

2006-08-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

The following little ditty was posted on a discussion board by an LDS apologist. It's pretty funnny, even if it isn't very flattering of old Brigham.

LYRICS
THE MORMON
KING.

Words by G. W. ANDERSON, Irish Vocalist.

Air--King of the Cannibal Islands.

Oh hark kind friends while I do sing,
About Brigham Young the Mormon King,
Who swears that he'll do everything,
Out in Salt Lake City.

He also says we'll rue the day,
That e'er we came into his way,
For all of us he'll surely slay.
Out in Salt Lake City.

Poor Brigham's mind it can't be right,
Or else he's surely lost his sight,
To think he'd a Yankee 'fright,
Away from Salt Lake City.

CHORUS...........Old Brigham mind your P's and Q's,
Or we will show you what to do,
If we get our hands on you,
Out in Salt Lake City.

Old Brigham he has somewhere's near,
About seventy wives and children dear,
Oh Lor' they must be very queer,
Out in Salt Lake City.

They say their children are quite tall,
And like their father loudly squall,
And often make old Brigham bawl,
Out in Salt Lake City.

If that's the case some future day,
We'll make him bawl another way,
For his motley crew we'll surely slay,
Out in Salt Lake City.

Old Brigham must'nt think we are fools,
To be knocked about like wooden stools,
But we will let him know our rules,
Out in Salt Lake City.

If any fuss he goes to make,
The whole of his city we will take,
And then fasten him unto a stake,
Out in Salt Lake City.

If we get old Brigham in our paws,
We'll make close his heavenly jaws,
And let him know that we've got laws.
For old Salt Lake City.

A Chinese internet any Mormon can be proud of!

2006-05-10T11:35:00.000-07:00

I embark on this commentary with some ambivalence. Like most people, I like a pleasant environment. I may not have created the most comfortable environment for everyone on this blog, but ordinarily I enjoy to spend time in places that are clean and with people who are polite, friendly, and in control of themselves. Does this characteristic give my Mormon background away? Mormons are past masters of creating pleasant environments. Mormon temples are the apotheosis of pleasant. They are not very lively. Mr. Rogers would have felt very comfortable with the level of stiumulation in a Mormon temple.

The Chinese government is also interested in maintaining what it considers to be a pleasant environment on the internet. The New York Times online edition of May 9 reports that 500 students at Shanghai Normal University are employed voluntarily as internet monitors, who report explicit and controversial material and steer heated debates in more 'appropriate' directions. The students who participate deny that they are controling speech, but claim they are rather "guiding" it. They are very concerned about the moral environment of the net. Says one volunteer monitor, "a bulletin board is like a family, and in a family, I want my room to be clean and well-lighted, without dirty or dangerous things in it."

Sound familiar? The reasoning sounds very persuasive at first. After all, who wants to live in a garbage bin? Like many of you, I prefer a safe environment. I suppose the problem is that I prefer to make my own decisions regarding my safety. We rightly fear the Patriot Act precisely because in embracing safety uncritically, one can sacrifice a great deal of constitutional freedom. Such freedom is not simply a legal fiction, it is supposedly one of the pillars of Mormon theology. Some would call it moral agency. Modern technology is challenging our belief in moral agency. Agency can be lost through addiction, and modern technology has found the means of fostering addictions very effectively. Agency isn't gone, but it is severely challenged by powerful drugs, etc. Freedoms also leave us exposed to their misuse by others with whom we disagree.

How far are we willing to go to seek after safety? How much power do we want to hand over to governments and other human leaders to protect us from ourselves and the decisions of others? At a certain point, the power we give to these people will be used by them for their own interests. Not yours and mine. It's the nature of the beast. Any institution that hopes to continue its existence will fabricate its moral imperative to exist, and will thus take the measures necessary to continue that existence at the expense of others. For this reason we must be very careful when we give power to these institutions to keep us safe.

In the case of the Chinese government's bid to tame the internet, it is clear that there is an effort to strike a balance between the safety of the internet and the safety of a governement that sacrifices a great deal of what Americans value in the principle of freedom of expression. Mormons as a group tend to feel comfortable with the idea of voluntarily sacrificing a great deal of their personal freedom for the safety of the kingdom of God. As long as that kingdom exists within the boundaries of larger entitities that really call the shots when the chips are down, this is not viewed as especially dangerous. You can get out by writing a letter. Therefore, Mormons are happy to look to leaders to give them the guidelines to remain safe from the ravages of "the world", which is usually characterized by the worst aspects of extra-Mormon reality.

I agree that this is relatively harmless. No one but Mormons need be concerned. Until, of course, the financial might of the Mormon Empire is committed to efforts like fighting against gay marriage, the supposed dangers of which seem largely illusory. We fear these seemingly benign institutions like the Mormon Church today because they organize themselves behind political issues and exercise a great deal of power thereby. The fact that Mormons want a safer internet may translate into you living with a more restricted internet in the future.

You may be happy to sacrifice pornography in order to have a safer internet, and if this were the limits of the issue I might be inclined to agree. Mormons claim that the political issues they involve themselves in are moral in nature. There is of course, the little issue of the definition of moral. And, from my perspective, Mormons have a bad record of separating the moral from the cultural and the political. Was ERA really a moral issue? Is the motivation to raise the gay marriage amendment issue now unrelated to the election cycle? Is it related to the election cycle for purely moral reasons (i.e. use of the strategic advantage of elections for the sake of the issue v. use of the issue for the electoral advantage of a party)?

One small example may illustrate my concern quite handily. Years ago a young, female BYU student was hrown out of BYU for protesting against Geneva Steel. It boggles my mind that a student, who did nothing to violate the school's honor code, was expelled for protesting against a business! While this kind of travesty does not happen every day at BYU, it is an interesting and troubling example of the kind of injustice that can occur when we give institutions too much power in the quest to remain safe from the world. Every institution will try to expand its powers in the quest to thrive and achieve its agenda. We cannot, however, allow these institutions to get out of control.

Go back and read the words of Jesus in the New Testament. The Sabbath was made for man. This dictum should apply to all institutions. When these institutions become harmful to human progress, let them change or die. Of course, we are the ones who must change them.

Please, learn about Correlation.

2006-04-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

Few things have had such an impact on LDS life as the development of Correlation. Through Correlation, the auxiliaries of the LDS Church, including the women's, children's, and youth programs all lost much of their autonomy as they passed under the more direct control of the Priesthood. Follow this link to "By Common Consent," where a panel of scholars of Mormonism share their views about Correlation. This thread should not be missed.

Mormonism entering the Academy

2006-04-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

Mormon Studies continues to be a hot issue on the Bloggernacle. Recently, at Times & Seasons, the news that Claremont has established its first chair for Mormon Studies elicited scores of responses. Understandably, many faithful Mormons are excited by the prospect that their religion has become the focus of greater academic attention. In spite of some reservations regarding placing Mormonism under a secularist microscope, Mormons are cautiously optimistic that more academic attention is a mark of increasing respect for the faith and its founder Joseph Smith.

Unfortunately, discussion of the rise of Mormon Studies is temporarily mired in the question of why D. Michael Quinn cannot land a job. As proponents of Mormon Studies observed, Quinn would arguably have some hurdles regardless of the Church's attitude toward him (although some of these issues are the result of unjustifiable Church actions). So, while we may feel justifiable sadness for his current plight, these problems should not be the predominant focus of the current discussion of Mormon Studies. Having said that, his story raises many of the issues that should cause concern for those interested in the academic study of Mormonism, because it is what his story teaches that makes some of us very uncomfortable.

Nate Oman has called out Hellmut Lotz for being paranoid with regard to the prospects for Mormon Studies in an environment where academic institutions are sensitive to the feelings of the Mormon community, many of the donors for chairs in Mormon Studies are faithful LDS people, and in at least one case the LDS Church was contacted with reassurances about the university's intentions in having a Mormon Studies chair. On the face of it, all of this seems reasonable and no cause for alarm. Add to this the fact that the academic paradise of totally unfettered inquiry and speech is a fantasy, and you begin to wonder why people are the least concerned about LDS influence on the study of its faith.

Are people like Hellmut merely indulging in unwarranted alarmism? Why be concerned about LDS influence on the academic study of Mormonism?

The reasons for concern are rooted in recent Church rhetoric and action. They include 1) the Church's record of anti-intellectualism and hostility to academic inquiry; 2) the political alignment of the Church with groups who seek to remake society on religious models; and 3) broader institutional control over the thought and expression of LDS people through the instrument of temple covenants. The last in particular is both subtle and insidious in that endowed members of the Church make expansive oaths of loyalty to the institution of the Church, thus creating a situation in which the least hint from the leadership is all that is necessary to persuade members to pursue or to avoid a particular line of thought or course of action.

Let's consider a few events in recent LDS history that have caused people like Hellmut and me concern about the Church's regard for academic inquiry into Mormonism. First, in 1981 LDS apostle Boyd Packer gave a paper tellingly entitled "Do not spread disease germs!" about the responsibility of Mormon historians to write faith-promoting history. Evidently anything but historical rhetoric designed to promote the missionary and devotional interests of the LDS Church is comparable to communicable disease. This all sounds perfectly reasonable, no? In this talk, Packer sought to define the proper writing and teaching of Mormon history and thereby dissuade Mormons from pursuing academic perspectives that might challenge a Mormon's belief in the status quo version of official Mormon history.

In 1989 LDS apostle Dallin Oaks cautioned members of the LDS Church against listening to "other voices" and "alternate views," pointing to unofficial LDS publications (Sunstone, Dialogue) that frequently took a critical perspective when dealing with the institutional LDS Church. It should be noted, for the sake of perspective, that in a Church of millions of members, Sunstone has never reached 20,000 subscriptions. One wonders why a worldwide Church with such a large membership should need to call attention to the very few people who read articles espousing critical perspectives, and the even fewer who write them. This was followed up in 1991 by an LDS First Presidency warning against attending certain "symposia," again a swipe at Sunstone.

A decent barometer of the official LDS stance toward academia would be the atmosphere at its flagship institution, BYU. Consider the following: 1) administrators have in the past planted spies in classrooms to make sure that professors were not teaching or promoting certain political views or theories like "evolution;" 2) BYU students have continued to inform on professors voluntarily in a quest to hone their own righteousness or gain the attention of Church authorities; 3) by the year 2000 BYU had seen the firing or resigning of a number of academically competent professors for their political views, research, or philosophies. One English professor was fired essentially for publically airing pro-choice views. Keep in mind that the LDS Church is not officially a pro-life institution.

Consider now the political alignment of the LDS Church. The Church committed many thousands of dollars and its members' time and efforts to the defeat of ERA. One of their sadly amusing tactics was to rile up LDS people by focusing on the horrors of uni-sex bathrooms. The LDS Church now allies itself with the Religious Right in the fight against gay marriage. To this end it has enlisted the help of BYU professors to prostitute their credentials in offering specious expert testimony in court. It has also committed millions of dollars in funds, all of which ultimately derive from tithing moneys, to the cause of seeing that 3% or so of the population do not acquire the privilege of marrying the person they love. The dirty little un-secret of Mormon politics is that they have skewed right for some time. Read "The Mormon Corporate Empire" to see how far in bed Mormons were with the fringe Right up to (and beyond) the mid eighties.

Think of it. The Religious Right is the same group of folks that want to bring their religion into the schools either directly or through the backdoor theology of Intelligent Design. On the local level they bully school administrators and teachers to keep evolution from being taught to the children we hope will one day find a cure to cancer and AIDS, build and pilot rockets to carry us to Mars, etc. Fat chance if the theocrats have their way. These folks also lead the fight in equating human conception with full-blown personhood in a quest to make abortion of any kind (including cases of rape, incest, and danger to the mother) illegal. Thanks to people of their ilk the hands of US scientific researchers have been tied in stem-cell research. If the most extreme of these groups had their way, the United States would be the Western equivalent of a medievalesque Islamic regime like Taliban Afghanistan.

The leaders of the LDS Church have certainly made their point with regard to their position on LDS intellectuals, politics, and scholarship. They have orchestrated BYU firings, and local excommunications, even going so far in the case of Simon Southerton of coming up with a highly questionable pretext to get rid of him. After writing a book about DNA and the Book of Mormon, Southerton was subjected to Church discipline for a long past affair he engaged in while separated from his wife.

Is there any question about how the Church feels when intellectual arguments lead members simply to question contemporary Church teachings? By the same token, is it at all unclear to the faithful member what the Church expects of him or her when investing in a Mormon Studies chair? After all, these folks have probably covenanted in an LDS temple to commit their entire lives to the welfare of the LDS Church.

As far as the institutions taking up Mormon Studies are concerned, given the Church's record of dealing with its ideological foes quite aggressively, is it any wonder that they seek to avoid the Church's and LDS community's ire when bringing the academic study of Mormonism into the university? Is their willingness to bend over backwards to reassure the LDS Church an unqualified positive? I rather think not. The fact that universities are so inclined is more an indicator of Mormon hypersensitivity than it is of non-LDS sympathy.

There is no question in my mind why one should scrutinize the way that Mormon Studies are conducted. Any academic pursuit should be subject to scrutiny. Indiscriminate leftist hate for the military and the Republican party within the academy should be subject to greater scrutiny. Since the LDS Church and its members have, especially in recent years, shown a proclivity to limit speech severely within their own community, to fight against the extension of human rights outside of their community, and to cooperate with groups whose stunning anti-intellectualism is not only shame-inspiring but downright dangerous, surely it is prudent to be concerned about how the LDS Church may influence, directly or indirectly, its presentation and discussion within the world of academia.

Finally, if there is paranoia about the Church's possible role in Mormon Studies, it is surely one that was born in the Church's own paranoid behavior. Any Church that would instruct its members not to take notes in meetings and not to circulate them on the internet clearly has some issues with trust. Any Church that is willing to cooperate with the Religious Right cannot cry foul when it faces the consequences of that choice to its own image. Any academician worth his or her salt would be remiss in their professional duties if he or she was not wary of the influence of such an organization on the academic study of said institution.

William Call on Mormon Testimony

2006-04-13T17:12:00.000-07:00

The following is taken from William Call's 2000 book, "The Cultural Revolution":

A Mormon's "testimony" feigns certainty via a supposed knowledge that negates real understanding. He who knows "beyond a shadow of a doubt" has no need to comprehend, discern, or master. The "knowledge" given by the Holy Ghost both precludes and takes the place of understanding. Is anyone as ignorant as he who thinks he has God's knowledge, and is any religion as void of knowledge as one that suppresses understanding with supposed "spiritual" knowledge? A Mormon "testimony," because it has no foundational suport, is a confession of ignorance concerning that which it is supposed to affirm absolutely and without question. It is a declaration that man is completely dependent on God so far as religious questions are concerned. The claim that one can found one's religion on the "knowledge" gained from "prayer and testimony" is a denial that man in and of himself can do anything to gain knowledge concerning religious truth other than to humble himself before his God and submit himself to Church authority.

"Spiritual knowledge" received from a source that cannot be separated from one's own prejudices and which has little or nothing to do with an acquaintance with the matters in question is ignorance. Mormonism's "testimony bearing" is an ackowledgment that the believer does not need to delve into religious questions; all he needs to do is "pray with faith, nothing doubting" and "keep the commandments." The rest can be left to the "still small voice" that "whispers" in his ear and instills "burning testimony" of the truth of whatever the Church claims is true. Mormonism's religious enthusiasm as exhibited in the form of testimony bearing takes the place of doctrinal and ecclesiastical understanding and removes any responsibility one might have to master one's religion. Both rank and file Mormons and their leaders are dependent on their testimonies. They cannot question what they already "know" is true. And so it is that a Mormon testimony is more than a denial of life's uncertainties; it is a denial that a critical evaluation of any kind is effective or necessary so far as discovering religious truth is concerned.

Wanna be like Mike?

2006-04-06T10:03:00.000-07:00

D. Michael Quinn is one of the best and most controversial scholars of Mormonism. Dr. Quinn has made discussion of treasure digging and magic an indispensible topic in scholarship of early Mormonism. He wrote a groundbreaking two-volume work on the development of the Mormon Church's hierarchy. According to a Wall Street Journal Online article written by Daniel Golden, he is also finding it impossible to find employment in the area of his expertise.

I have an interesting perspective on this story. Before I explain why Dr. Quinn, one of the foremost scholarly authorities on Mormonism is having a difficult time finding a job, I will share my perspective.

For some time I lurked or posted over at FAIR. FAIR, which is among the links on my blog here, is an online apologist resource. It has a discussion board. In one forum on the board, apologists of all stripes and critics of Mormonism gather to slug it out. I grew tired of the predictable slant in moderating the board. If criticism reached a certain level of pointedness or effectiveness, a thread would get shut down, usually right after someone like professor Daniel Peterson had the last word.

I am capable of being practical. FAIR was created for the purpose of promoting Mormonism. Arguments that call truth claims of Mormonism into question are likely to get shut down. In my last thread at FAIR I made the mistake of bringing up the employment of two men who had written an inept review of Vogel's biography of Joseph Smith. Although men like Daniel Peterson have no problem using the ad hominem when it comes to identifying the atheism of critics of Mormonism, he did have a big problem when I called into question the scholarly objectivity, such that it can exist, of two men who have to hold temple recommends to keep their jobs.

My point was not welcome, and I was put on the 'queue.' This meant that anything I wrote had to be approved by the moderators. I tried to post something through this route once, and my post never saw the thread. I am sure the moderators really are too busy to screen these things, which makes putting people in the 'queue' very similar to putting on the gag. Fair enough. I have learned my lesson.

The apologists had their own day of realization when they abandoned ZLMB, the leading board of the time, because in spite of favorable moderating policies carried out by a team of LDS and non-LDS moderators. They felt they were being victimized by the biting posting of critics. So they left for the safe harbors of FAIR where agressive moderation in their favor made their lives more comfortable and their arguments more likely to seem to prevail.

Now we get closer to the point of this exercise. One of the FAIR board's most prolific posters and moderators is a graduate student at Claremont College. She is studying religion. She likes to crow about how the days of amateur Mormon scholarship by "counter-Mormons" (a 'counter-Mormon' is a secularist amateur scholar who writes Mormon scholarship with a secularist agenda) is drawing to a close, and that people like herself are the vanguard of the future of academic Mormon Studies. Sounds to me like her triumphalism is motivated by something more than guess work.

I had no idea how true this could be until I read the Goldman article. Mr. Goldman briefly documents how it is wealthy Mormons who are funding Mormon Studies chairs, and that these donors' views ultimately influence the hiring process. You pay for the chair, and it happens to turn out that they hire someone you don't find offensive. There's no conspiracy here. We're simply talking about the money of those who are flush and motivated (wealthy Mormons) dictating, to no negligible degree, how the academic study of Mormonism will be conducted.

The Goldman article also shows how people like Mike Quinn are edged out in other ways. Quinn made the mistake of asking BYU prof. and Mormon historian Thomas Alexander for a letter of recommendation when he went up for a job at the University of Utah--a state-funded institution. Alexander cautioned the U against hiring Quinn because his controversial scholarship would cost the university donations. Now, it is clear to me that Alexander stabbed Quinn in the back, but what he said is true, and in the modern, capitalist, corporate university knowledge is controlled by money.

For this reason Mike Quinn has been turned down for at least two jobs he was eminently qualified for. When he had a visiting position at Yale, BYU threatened to withdraw funding for an academic conference on Mormonism hosted by Yale if Mike were allowed to present a paper. In the end, Quinn personally yielded and merely introduced a paper for someone else. Once again, it is the power of money that determines which information sees the light of day.

These are the realities of our world. Don't be fooled. The Academy is not the place where any well-founded argument can have a fair showing in the arena of ideas. It is not the place where any useful question can be asked. And where it concerns different fields of specialty in Religious Studies, expect that the person who teaches your child about Islam, Evangelical Christianity, Mormonism, Catholicism, or New Age spirituality, will increasingly be a person who has an agenda to spin that informaion in a panegyrical manner.

What is at stake here? Honest education. Do we want Religion Departments at major universities to become arenas for proselytizing? Is Religious Studies a valid field of academic endeavor when the people who staff it are well-educated missionaries for their personal faith? It sounds OK when you think of your faith being taught by someone who sees things in a favorable light and teaches accordingly, but what if you are an Evangelical and your child is learning Mormonism from a Mormon, or Islam from a Muslim? Does it seem just a little more like missionary work then?

Apologists argue that if you want accurate information about a religion, you should go to a believer. I say that if you want someone to try to persuade you to join a religion, go to a believer. If conversion is your goal, by all means restrict your exposure to favorable sources. If education is your goal, then consider different perspectives, not just a believer's.

If you are a well-published, Yale-trained scholar like Mike, you may forever remain unemployed in the field of your expertise and fame. If you are a relatively unknown, unproven, brassy polemicist at FAIR with a graduate degree from Claremont, you may just have an eager financial backer. Wanna be like Mike?

"Dogs and cats, living together--mass hysteria!"---Dr. Peter Venkman

2006-04-05T07:39:00.000-07:00

Last autumn, my wife and I became the proud parents of a beautiful baby girl. In my opinion, the present age provides the best prospects for women's freedom and happiness. She can obtain an advanced education, pursue a career, find her true love, have access to decent medical care, and avoid starvation. Her income will be closer to equal to that of her male counterparts than previously. Laws protect her from discrimination, harrassment, and violence. In other words, our baby girl can have a bright future.

Still, we have a long way to go before women are given equal consideration. Much of the problem is with perceptions. It is difficult to change people's attitudes, no matter how much you legislate a problem. My conservative friends love to point this out to me. They also think that there is no problem with their attitudes. Fancy that.

Last week I received a wedding announcement in the mail. Normally I would be overjoyed to receive such news. This time my joy was tempered by the realization that only a year and a half ago, the bride to be was sitting in my youth Sunday School class. Not only is this woman quite young to be getting married, she was also by far the most intelligent young person I taught that year. She understood complex concepts and picked up on subtleties most adults miss. When she read something, she did much more than understand the surface meaning of the text. She really grasped what she was reading, rather than simply repeating the Sunday School liturgy.

Before I go on, it is important for me to say that I sincerely hope that her marriage brings her great joy. It is most important that each of us has the freedom to grow and find happiness in this life. If that means getting married at a young age, then bully for the person who is so fortunate. I wish more intelligent folks who treat their fellow humans with true compassion would have more children who will behave as wonderfully as they do.

I guess what troubles me is the exaggerated emphasis that the LDS Church places on getting young women married. This young lady whose announcement I received spent a single year at school at Brigham Young University. One year. Maybe she'll go back. I have no idea, but I sure hope she does. As someone who spent some time with the young people of my ward, and who knows something of what the young women are taught from inside sources, I know that far too many bright young women are being discouraged from pursuing any career by their LDS elders.

The young women in our ward are being warned that the woman who works is supremely unhappy and that she deeply envies her friends who can stay home with the children. Unfortunate is the poor girl who "has to work because her husband does not support her" (you catch the assumption that she would not work simply because she wants to?). Yes, I bet there are these poor souls out there. But there are also the poor souls who married because they felt they had to, who hate being tied down at home, who are miserable as parents, and who raise their children to be equally miserable humans.

You see, the real problem is not working or staying home. The real problem is a society that tells people there is a single way to be happy in this life. Everyone is expected to live by that one plan, and there are to be no exceptions. If you choose something else, you aren't playing by the rules, and you probably won't attain the eternal rewards. The well meaning people of your community look down at you with that self-satisfied illusion of compassion that says, "poor thing, if only she were as fortunate as I am."

We can say that the problem is with the people, not the Gospel. And I hope that when it comes to the REAL fundamentals of the Gospel we are right. But what is fundamental? Faith, repentance, baptism, and enduring to the end. Loving God and your fellow human beings. This is the full extent of the law. These are the requirements.

Some people, including the leadership of the Church, also have a thing about gender, however. And they are deeply concerned that people conform to their understanding of gender so that a very angry Jesus does not come and destroy everything like Sodom and Gomorrah. Except that Sodom and Gomorrah were not destroyed because mom wanted a job and Balthazar loved Shiz instead of Sariah. The incident that broke it for Sodom was the violation of ancient mores concerning hospitality.

But the LDS Church, grasping at a way to remain relevant to its members without being useful or interesting in the least, came up with the Proclamation to the World on the Family. At the risk of gross oversimplification, I will boil the Proclamation down to what I think were the essentials they were really concerned about when they drafted this thing. If dad doesn't go to work, if mom doesn't stay home with the kids, and if Adam tries to marry Steve instead of Eve, God will rain down blood and horror upon the land.

What if dad stays home with the kids while mom goes to work? What if the whole family is happier that way? What if Adam really loves Steve and never had any interest in an Eve in his life? What if the tiny percentage of people who truly love a person of the same gender get married? Is it true that God will destroy us?

Since my homophobic friends like to bring forward the example of Sodom and Gomorrah, I will try to illustrate something useful using the very same text. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the homophobes are right about the interpretation of the Sodom story. God destroys Sodom because it is thoroughly wicked. This depth of turpitude is reached when street gangs go pink. Consider Genesis 18:

26 And the LORD said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.
27 And Abraham answered and said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes:
28 Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous: wilt thou destroy all the city for lack of five? And he said, If I find there forty and five, I will not destroy it.
29 And he spake unto him yet again, and said, Peradventure there shall be forty found there. And he said, I will not do it for forty’s sake.
30 And he said unto him, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak: Peradventure there shall thirty be found there. And he said, I will not do it, if I find thirty there.
31 And he said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord: Peradventure there shall be twenty found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for twenty’s sake.
32 And he said, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for ten’s sake.

Now, I have no clue what the population of ancient Sodom was. Let's lowball it and say that three hundred people lived in Sodom. I say three hundred because recent estimates of David's Jerusalem are around several thousand. Ten righteous people out of three hundred would be a little over 3%. Recent estimates place the gay population in the United States at roughly the same percentage.

Let's assume that God would be as forgiving today as He was then. What is the likelihood that this 3% would shift to over 97%, thus bringing the wrath of God down upon the heads of all? How likely is it that over 97% of our population will leave dad at home, place mom in the workplace, or be a married homosexual (assuming that this were legalized in all of the states)? I would say it ain't gonna happen.

We have a long ways to go, even if the leaders of the LDS Church are correct about this, before God rains down with blood and horror upon us.

But I have truly digressed. As I ponder about the things I want my daughter to learn, the values I want inculcated in her impressionable mind, the apocalyptic fury of a vengeful God who doesn't like women to work in the outside world doesn't even touch the list. It is no mistake that the Church whose leaders place these kinds of values at a premium sees its young women marrying as soon as they hit 18. I just hope that my daughter doesn't marry so young and for the wrong reasons.

The Power of Stories: Mormon Racism

2006-04-03T07:27:00.000-07:00

President Hinckley instructed the men of the priesthood not to discriminate against people of other ethnicities in the Saturday Priesthood session of General Conference. For speaking out against racism, President Hinckley deserves praise. Was this effort, however, sufficient?

Let's consider the problem of polygamy. At one time leaders of the LDS Church taught that engaging in polygamy was necessary to reach the highest degree of exaltation. In other words, to become deified, one needed to live the law of polygamy. It took two official statements of the Presidency of the Church and decades of cooperation with local and federal authorities to marginalize polygamy in LDS culture. Generally it is only the highly dedicated person who reads a lot of the Journal of Discourses that ever considers how odd it is that Mormons think they will be exalted without living the Principle. Some of these folks join the Fundamentalists.

In other words, polygamy is pretty far behind us as a people. My wife would not tolerate me engaging in it. Few LDS women would.

Unfortunately, racism is a more persistent problem because it involves attitudes that many secretly carry in their hearts. No one has to be commanded to be a racist. All it takes is exposure to racist thought coupled with an irrational fear of those who are different to be eligible. As human beings, we are prone to stumble when it comes to reason and courage.

Unlike polygamy, which still manages to lure a few people out of the mainstream Church here and there, racist ideas and practises are very recent phenomena for Mormons. In 1978 the Second Official Declaration, which resulted from the prayers of President Kimball and the other leading authorities of the LDS Church at the time, ended the "practise" side of the equation. The LDS priesthood has been extended to peoples of all ethnicities.

The "idea" side of the equation is still sadly very present among too many members of the LDS Church. What is the "idea"? From as far back as the year after Joseph Smith's assassination, we find Orson Pratt, one of the Twelve of the day, teaching what would essentially become the normative position on race:

"At the time the devil was cast out of heaven, there were some spirits that did not know who had authority, whether God or the devil. They consequently did not take a very active part on either side, but rather thought the devil had been abused, and considered he had the best claim to the government. These spirits were not considered bad enough to be cast down to hell, and never have bodies; neither were they considered worthy of an honourable body on this earth...and hence the negro or African race."

Ordinarily I would not employ an elipsis, but the passage is so long, and the sentiments so vile, that I thought it best to truncate it.

The above quote comes from the year 1845. Essentially the very same teaching can be found in the first edition of Elder Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine, which was published in 1958. I had never known where McConkie could have come up with such stuff, especially when it did not appear in the scriptures. Now I know.

I also understand better why these teachings present a real problem. Pratt, or someone else, went to a lot of trouble to come up with a mythological justification for slavery. He crafted a narrative that fit more or less into the unique theology of Mormonism about the pre-mortal existence. The significance of this fact cannot be overstated. The power of creating such narratives was the gift and responsibility of a seer, and it was exercised mostly by Joseph Smith. His successors exercised it rarely, Joseph F. Smith being the last president of the Church to provide a major narrative about the other world.

Unfortunately, at least in this case, stories are much more powerful than the dry legalistic language of the Official Declarations. One remembers stories long after one has forgotten the wherefores and whatnots of official statements. In this case, the narrative involved is the very foundation of an LDS person's concept of personal identity. Being polluted with Pratt's racist myth as it is, something more dramatic than an Official Declaration or instruction not to be racist is required to combat it. In short, many members maintain a racist perspective because they recall easily the powerful and fundamental story at its roots, a story that continued to be told up to and after 1978.

In the case of Adam-God, the First Presidency issued a statement specifically designed to correct the teaching. At least one apostle fulminated over the pulpit about the falseness of it long after the Presidency corrected it. James E. Talmage was commissioned to write a statement on theology that directly contradicted the theology of Adam-God. It has been made clear that Adam-God is false doctrine, and that those who promote it will be subject to Church discipline.

The result of the Adam-God crackdown is pretty clear. Today, very few people even know that this was once taught by the second prophet of this dispensation as the "Doctrine of the Priesthood." Only a very small, studious minority even bothers to think about the issue in depth. Adam-God is, for the mainstream LDS Church, a dead doctrine.

Since the Church's efforts to marginalize polygamy and Adam-God were so successful, it would seem that similar efforts might be committed quite usefully to ending the widespread "folklore" that black people were cursed for their inaction in the pre-mortal conflict with Satan and his minions. We cannot simply stand on the idea that God finally decided to give these poor people a break by lifting a curse. The people are not poor but wonderful. The curse never happened in the first place.

The Second Official Declaration is inadequate to put an end to the belief in a curse. Official, and highly visible statements, along the lines of the efforts against Adam-God, are necessary to put the matter to rest. People should think that it is sinful for them to believe in the curse. There should be no loopholes. No concept of a curse that was lifted. People should be persuaded to believe that they may face Church discipline for teaching such a thing. Perhaps the matter should be incorporated into the temple recommend interview. If bishops have felt to inquire into people's soda drinking habits in worthiness interviews, why have they not felt similarly inclined on the subject of racism?

In other words, given the fact that the LDS Church, when it is really serious about stamping out something, gives real teeth to its efforts to do so, their efforts to stamp out racism in the Church do not seem to me to be very serious at all. Who has been excommunicated simply for being an unrepentant racist? Why do conservative Mormons proudly crow on the Bloggernacle that the Church is not racist, but that it was God, who could not possibly be racist, that cursed blacks and then extended his grace in 1978, all the while sincere in their conviction that they are not racist for believing such a thing?

Clearly something needs to change here.

Corporate Mormonism

2006-03-27T10:49:00.000-08:00

LDS Mormonism is a corporation: The Corporation of the Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While many liberals see corporations as sinister entities, working evil in the world in a godless quest for the almighty dollar, corporations are tools of human fashioning. We do have the power to regulate them. At least I hope we do.

I have been reading up on Scientology. It is an unusual belief system, but as a Mormon I have very little room to criticize it for its strangeness. One reporter in Rolling Stone magazine suggested that Scientology inflates its membership numbers. There are, so she claims, far fewer Scientologists than they have led people to believe.

Still, they have plenty of money. So much money that they have been able to fund several large headquarters in different US cities. The real estate alone must be incredibly expensive. Where do they get all their money? For one thing, their "e-meter" sessions cost a fair amount, and like Freemasonic initiation, the price increases the higher you advance in the system. They have no problem encouraging clients to go into debt for their treatments.

They also have some high profile, celebrity members (Tom Cruise, Beck, Isaac Hayes) who have undoubtedly contributed some serious cash to the cause.

Being a corporate entity, like the Mormon Church, it is conceivable that Scientology could sustain itself through its investments and business possessions. I have no idea what kind of portfolio they have, nor do I care to know. I simply find the possibility of a corporate church with vast holdings and diminishing members extremely intriguing. Theoretically, one could have a guilded temple with no parishoners.

The LDS Church brings in over several billion dollars a year in tithing. Members, like my wife and I, pay ten percent of our income to the LDS Church every year. On top of that we are expected to pay additional offerings to feed the poor in the local unit. The latter I have little issue with. The former, according to personal belief, is presumed to belong to God. Business has been very kind to the Almighty, at least in the case of the LDS Church. Different parties have estimated their holdings to be tens of billions of dollars in value.

Like Scientology, they have some wealthy members: CEOs, owners of giant corporations, and the like. If these folks tithe, then they are contributing far more than I ever will. But again, is it possible that the LDS Church could sustain itself as a corporation as its members dwindle in number? The LDS Church also inflates its numbers. It allegedly counts everyone in its records, some long after they have removed their names, or converted to another religion. How can they keep up with all of that change anyway?

No harm, no foul. I guess. It bothers me to think that the tithing we pay may be committed to the fight against gay marriage, or some other worthless project like that. I have no problem giving God his due. I just wish he would find nicer estate managers.

Theocracy

2006-03-23T12:17:00.000-08:00

For some time there has been a minor feud between two LDS apologists: Daniel C. Peterson and Kevin Graham. Peterson for various understandable reasons has greater support among the apologist denizens of the FAIR universe. He is better known, more published, a professor at BYU, and an excellent writer. Kevin, for his part, is a solid thinker and a decent writer. Both men believe in the truth of Mormonism and have undertaken to defend it against its critics.

Numerous threads at FARMS provide evidence of the rancor that has arisen between them. Oddly, the subject about which most of this ill will exists is Islam, not Mormonism. Peterson, a professional Islamicist, is understandably sympathetic toward and protective of the culure of his expertise. Kevin Graham, although not an expert, is a quick study and has made a number of excellent points which are critical of Islam.

Mormons fall on different sides of political issues that touch on Islam, as the Peterson/Graham debate illustrates. Still, I think there are reasons why some informed LDS people sympathize with elements of fundamentalist Islam. I think one of these reasons can be encapsulated in the word theocracy.

A few nations like Iran have succeeded in establishing Islamic regimes that reflect the strict values established in the Koran. While most Americans distrust these governments and abhor the terrorist acts supported by them, there is a certain blindness to the role religion has played in this matrix of theocracy and violence. Why the blindness on the role of religion? I believe that one reason is because on a certain level some Christians and Mormons abhor the violence while envying the limited success of theocracy in shaping the lives of the peoples of these countries according to the precepts of highly conservative religious minorities.

The Mormon marriage with American government was once viewed as partial and ideally temporary. God revealed to Joseph Smith the Lord's tolerance of the Church 'befriending' constitutional government in the United States, but at the same time Joseph Smith had himself anointed king of the kingdom of God on earth--this as he was beginning to mount his campaign for the U.S. presidency. Joseph may not have seen the contradiction between establishing theocracy and participating in American democracy, but few Americans today could stomach a presidential candidate who engineered his own kingship in a shadow world government scheme.

Oddly, Mormonism, it would seem, is a belief system that has continued to produce would-be American monarchs. James Strang, leader of a Mormon schismatic group in the early post-Smith years, fashioned himself as the theocratic monarch of Beaver Island, Michigan. In more recent years, a Mormon convert from Greek Orthodox Christianity--Alex Joseph--began to practice polygyny and proclaimed himself a monarch in Southern Utah. These men did not remain members of the LDS Church, but they were inspired by the example of Joseph Smith.

Is it possible that some Mormons envy elements of Islamic theocracy? I would say yes, but I doubt that any prominent LDS person would openly espouse such views. Some Mormons believe that they will rescue the Constitution of the United States from grave danger, although, as in the case of many prophecies, they are short on specifics. Yet, one should not confuse their view of saving the US Constitution with upholding American government in its current form. Sure, some Mormons who put stock in this prophecy believe exactly that, but some also see the US Constitution as but a precursor to the millennial government by the sovereign Christ.

How do some of these Mormons envision their rescue the of Constitution and ushering in of God's kingdom? Simply put, their objective is to peacefully transform our country's laws and institutions to conform to their vision of the kingdom of God. In defensive terms, this means protecting our country from legalizing sin, and in an assertive fashion this means legislating against sin. It also means fighting the atheists and secularists who seem to them to want to take God out of government. Indeed, it means refashioning society through legal means to conform to a Christian-Mormon ideal.

Wouldn't you think that these folks have some plan in mind for forming their own government?

There are a few differences between a Mormon theocrat and an Islamic theocrat. The most important is that the Mormon theocrat will likely work within established institutions of government to achieve his ends. Violent Mormon revolution is unlikely. The second is that Mormons are such a small minority everywhere except in the population-challenged states of the West like Utah and Idaho that they pose a relatively small threat even in the unlikely event that they should get restive. Finally, Mormonism no longer advocates conflict and agitation the way it used to. Even in the days when Mormons battled with the 'Gentile' mobs, Mormon violence never reached the status of a general imperative.

Some Mormons do cooperate with likeminded right-wing Christians to achieve a more fundamentalist Christian nation. The LDS Chiurch itself has poured millions of dollars into fighting against the cause of women's rights and gay rights. Earlier than this, prominent Latter-day Saints (like former LDS Church president Ezra Taft Benson) were among the most fearful of the phantoms of communism in this country. They basically have an apocalytic world view in which they anticipate the end of the United States and their own role in saving the world. These beliefs make them very motivated to push their own political agenda now.

Update: Since Daniel Peterson brought up this post on FAIR, I decided to revisit it to clarify the language and remove certain unfelicitous imprecisions. Dan believes that I have accused him of being an "aspiring Mormon theocrat who finds inspiration in the Islamic Republic of Iran and in the former Taliban." I have no idea whether Dan is an "aspiring Mormon theocrat" or that he does find such inspiration in these groups. Neither did I accuse him of such.

"BYU is an Auschwitz of the mind." --D. Michael Quinn

2006-03-15T12:28:00.000-08:00

I spent far too many years at BYU, something which may partially explain my anger with the LDS Church. In my many years at BYU, I had some fine experiences, and a few that convinced me something is indeed rotten in Denmark. First, I was fortunate to have Hugh Nibley as a teacher. Regardless of what you may think of Dr. Nibley, the man was a genius. He may have been 'off' about many things, but he was off in that way that only the brilliant are capable of. We may disagree utterly with his methodology and conclusions, but we ought not to gainsay his intelligence.

Hugh Nibley described BYU best when he shared his vision of hell. "Hell is like Disneyland," he said, "filled with a bunch of nicely dressed Mormons telling you where to sit and when to laugh." I think that really sums up BYU nicely. BYU and Disneyland do have much in common. Both institutions are dedicated to the appearance of learning without the cultivation of critical thinking skills. Both strive to affect a sentimental emotional response that is carefully cultivated in the maintenance of an illusory image.

For BYU, it isn't just the dress code, or the Honor Code. The truth of the lie is located somewhere in the conjunction of many different restrictions and requirements that coalesce in the creation of an artificial Zion for public consumption. Where Disney offers an artificial utopia of mind-numbing entertainment, BYU offers the illusion of an educational Zion. In reality, Disney is devoted to a Brave New World of uncritical consumers, and BYU suffers from nearly the same malady, except in this case the institution equates unthinking obedience with true education. At BYU, integrity is the obligation of the individual and part of his or her sacrifice to the institution. The institution, on the other hand, takes no other commitment as more important than the insuring of students' continuing belief in the truth of Mormonism.

What makes such a pleasant place so odious?

1) Independent journalism has been harassed and effectively wiped from the community.

2) Academic freedom is not observed, or it is so severely limited as not to qualify for its own name.

3) Students have been required to write personal statements of loyalty to the university which smack of similar Nazi practices.

4) Students voluntarily police professors, holding them to a standard of adherence to Church commandments that curtails the professors' ability to cover their subject material in full.

5) Non-Mormons are not sought as permanent employees unless they are uniquely prestigious.

6) Mormon employees must qualify for a temple recommend to maintain their jobs, which also entails that they remit 10% of their income to the LDS Church.

7) The university acts as the intellectual attack dog and support for extreme conservative causes that promote inequality and the limitation of civil rights for certain groups.

8) The apologetic organization FARMS has been drawn under the BYU banner, thus compromising scholarly credibility for doctrinaire and polemical ends.

Lingering LDS racism: one example

2006-03-13T12:11:00.000-08:00

Some time ago a little web-essay entitled, "Who are the Signaturi", came to my attention. It is a delightful little piece (gag) that characterizes Mormon intellectuals in a very unflattering fashion. In the process of writing a piece for my blog, I revisited this thing.

In my re-reading of it I stumbled across an idea that offers one of the clearest examples of lingering racism in the LDS Church. Redelfs has a list of characteristics of people he calls the Signaturi. Number nine on that list is the one I want you to consider:

"9) Generally, they think the ban on blacks holding the Priesthood, which the Lord lifted in 1978, was the result not of God's law and revelation but culturally induced racial prejudice and bigotry on the part of the prophets and apostles."

There you have it, folks. In the enlightened view of Mr. Redelfs, the "Signaturi" erroneously attribute the ban on blacks holding the priesthood to the weakness of men, when it is clearly, at least clearly to Mr. Redelfs, the case that God was behind the whole thing. Case closed.

Never have I been more proud to be numbered among the Signaturi. I want no part in the company or sympathy of those who think that God is a respecter of persons, and that the gospel is not a free gift to all, "whether black or white."

Addendum: I have been informed that it was BYU professor and Mormon apologist William Hamblin who coined the term 'Signaturi'.

Gnostics: the Ancient Signaturi

2006-03-13T07:30:00.000-08:00

Most of today's closet LDS intellectuals have something in common with the ancient Gnostics. No, they don't generally share a dizzyingly complex cosmogony, write their own scriptures, or think of the OT God as an inferior being. Like the ancient Gnostics they exist within the LDS Church and find themselves at odds with it.

The ancient Gnostics were kind of arrogant about their self-perceived superiority. Or, at least, this is how the Church Fathers like to portray them. From a patristic perspective, these folks were looking down their noses at the average member of the Church, because these average types didn't possess the secret doctrines and interpretations of scripture that marked out the enlightened Gnostic.

Indeed, the some Gnostics (it can be dangerous to generalize too much) thought that they alone had the divine spark that marked them out as worthy of salvation. Most everyone else was simply not quite so bright. Now, I do think that the Signaturi (the Mormon intellectuals) of today can be arrogant. My modest knowledge of Church history and World history sometimes has me metaphorically clucking my tongue at some of the ignorance I encounter in Church.

If anything, however, modern Mormon intellectuals are haunted by that sinking feeling that they are out of step. After all, the leadership of the Church likes to make people who see things a little differently feel that way. The very act of picking up an unofficial Mormon magazine has been stigmatized over the pulpit by an apostle of the Church. Then one sees scholars being excommunicated or disfellowshiped because of their research. Someone like Michael Quinn, a historian who had a strong testimony and whose work explicitly avowed allegiance to the leaders of the Church, gets excommunicated as part of a small purge of Mormon scholars and intellectuals. Another apostle identifies intellectuals as one of the three great threats to the Church.

Since it is apparent that freedom of speech has little place in modern LDS Mormonism, I think it is necessary to do what many ancient Gnostics did in order to survive--go underground. What does this mean? It means that you essentially have to keep your mouth shut about your real thoughts to your fellow members and local leaders.

The early Church Fathers who wrote against the Gnostics were frustrated because they 'masqueraded' as regular Church members. Given the efforts of these Fathers to root out Gnostics and Gnostic teachings from the Church, one can understand why they needed the disguise. The situation for them was something like this. Others were defining with greater strictness what it Christianity should mean for everyone. These others were not the approved Church leaders in the LDS sense. They were self-appointed rhetorical bullies.

Unfortunately, such bullies exist in the LDS Church today, and a few of them were and are numbered among the Lord's servants. Here are some names: Elder Bruce R. McConkie, Elder Mark E. Peterson, Elder Boyd K. Packer, and, sadly, Elder Dallin H. Oaks. I say sadly on the last one because I generally really like Elder Oaks, but his positions on unofficial LDS publications and the historicity of the Book of Mormon are narrow and unforgiving. Still, I am not aware that he has personally initiated any disciplinary action against scholars like Elder Packer has.

With the power of the LDS Church arrayed against intellectuals (i.e. Signaturi), one can either get out or go 'Gnostic' (and I think of this in terms of being underground and in a sense adversarial). Now, the leaders of the Church paint those who differ in opinion with them as apostates, since they take 'authority' as the center of their Gospel creed. The important thing, in their minds, is not so much the independent truth value of an idea as its origin and function. If a truth does not 1) serve the purposes of the LDS Church as the leadership define it, 2) originate from them or one of their various organs, 3) serve to paint the Church and its claims in unmitigatedly rosy fashion, then it is not 'truth' by their definition.

Scholars who discover truths that are not convenient to the Church quickly learn that these truths are not very valuable in the minds of those who run it. The fact that Joseph Smith received the Mechezidek priesthood authority from God's voice and not at the hands of Peter, James, and John is one such inconvenient truth. After all, the idea of resurrected beings laying their physical hands on Joseph Smith's head to give him these keys and authority works well when the 'hands-on' method is the one employed today. Problem is, there is no real good evidence for the claim that hands were used until years after the events transpired.

Publishing or delivering a paper that delves into the actual historical development of priesthood authority and claims is the kind of thing that lands one in a disciplinary council very quickly. Grant Palmer was disfellowshiped for his book which contains a chapter on the subject.

So what is one to do? Publish and perish (in LDS terms) or be silent and perish (in psychological terms). Not the best options. But what are you going to do?

Mormon Newspeak

2006-03-12T15:14:00.000-08:00

Today my wife brought home the "2006 Outline for Sharing Time and the Children's Sacrament Meeting Presentation." Catchy title, huh? It is a fairly bland tribute to the principle that LDS people should not be allowed to think for themselves, since now even Sharing Time for Primary children demands a scripted outine.

And lest the children be led astray by all those ignorant adults with their false doctrines, this fun little booklet provides a doctrinal glossary that comes straight from Elder Packer's greatest hits. We all know what a fun-loving guy Elder Packer is. Here are the items we are not to be in confusion about. I add my comments in square brackets:

Accountability: Accepting responsibility for our actions [because the atonement just ain't gonna cover them].

Agency: The ability to choose and act for one's self. Use the term agency rather than free agency to describe our freedom to choose [because we don't want that freedom to sound too free]. Agency is the term used in the scriptures (see D&C 29:36; Moses 7:32).

Apostacy [one that every child can fully grasp]: A falling away from the gospel of Jesus Christ [as presently constituted in manuals such as this one].

Heavenly Father's Plan: Our Heavenly Father presented the plan of life and salvation in the Grand Council in Heaven. Only one [my emphasis] plan was presented. Jehovah (Jesus Christ) sustained the plan of our Heavenly Father [hopefully with a great deal more enthusiasm than that which I have when I 'sustain' items of business]. Lucifer (the devil, Satan, [el Diablo, ol' Scratch]) attempted to change the plan [damn him to hell anyway].

Jehovah: Jesus Christ, also known as Jehovah [in case you didn't get it the first time], is the God of the Old Testament [thanks to the wonders of non-LDS theology as imported into the LDS faith by James E. Talmage].

These items are marked with an asterisk (*) throughout this outline [whew!].

So there it is. No big deal, right? Sure. But I'll write a little about it for kicks and giggles.

First, free agency has been 'free' agency for some time now. The increasing discomfort of Elder Packer with the idea that anything could be free inspired him to remind his fellow GAs that the scriptures do not use the adjective free in connection with agency, which is more correctly called "moral agency" or simply "agency". Take a look at Brother Spencer J. Condie's article in the September '95 issue of the Ensign. Under the rather telling subtitle "The Price of Agency", Brother Spencer tells us how he was practically administered an Elder Packer smack-down so he would drop this hippie crap about 'free' agency. After all, so he continues and I paraphrase, the scriptures say we are "bought with a price" (1 Cor. 6:19-20). Brother Condie, and you have to love this, showed some real backbone and kept calling agency 'free agency' anyways.

It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside to consider how metaphors of slavery are so easily translated into metaphors of market capitalism in the Global Age. This works well now that we are no longer slaves to human masters, but the wage slaves of multi-national corporations, which simply exercise the rights of human individuals in a legal fiction of imposture that continually strengthens. But, I digress. You see, in Joseph Smith's day, agency was seen in the light of American constitutional democracy. 'Free' in this context had less to do with not being paid, and more to do with the freedoms associated with inalienable rights endowed by the Creator.

These days, however, in the new society of the Temple of Commerce, we are continually reminded by the Temple's moral wing--Commerce Christianity--, which supplies what little moral fiber the amoral system of Capitalism has (at least for the sake of keeping the masses docile), that we are bought and paid for by the Savior. What we are, even in the metaphysical sense, is not free. Agency comes with a high price-tag--complete submission to the right Master.

Sure, there is a certain truth in the metaphor. What bothers me is not the relative usefulness of it. It is instead the pervasiveness of the market metaphor and our inability to interrogate it that gets my dander up. Everyone just takes it for granted that their 'souls' are a commodity like anything else. In Mormon terms you have agency, but that agency is not free. If you exercise it incorrectly, you will lose your job (salvation). Let's face it, people were not calling agency free because they did not value it. They were calling it free because they associated it with freedom. So why change back? Simply to pull ourselves back in line with Joseph Smith's usage? Or is it that we are so stuck on market metaphors that we only associate free with money rather than human rights?

Moving on, I have a much bigger problem with all of this business about 'Our Heavenly Father's Plan.' One thing that continually bugs the living hell out of me is the obviously bogus statement the leaders of the Church make with regard to the primacy of the scriptures. They are wont to say, and I paraphrase, that their every teaching must square with the canon of scripture. This position is patently false, and nowhere more so than in the case of 'The Plan of Our Heavenly Father.'

Here's the deal folks: it ain't scriptural. If you go to Abraham 3:24-26, you read the following:

24 And there stood one among them that was like unto God, and he said unto those who were with him: We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell;

25 And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them;

26 And they who keep their first estate shall be added upon; and they who keep not their first estate shall not have glory in the same kingdom with those who keep their first estate; and they who keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever.

That's the plan. So here's the question: whose plan is it? One who is like unto God, which is, coincidentally, the equivalent of an English translation of the Hebrew name Michael. Setting that tidbit of info aside, what is the likelihood that the author of this passage intended us to read 'God' where he wrote "one who is like unto God. My guess is that he, whoever he is, did not.

Is this person Jesus? Well, Jesus certainly does appear later in the passage as "one...who is like unto the son of Man." Now, I would think that if the 'one who is like unto God' were the same person as the 'one who is like unto the son of Man', the author would not use two entirely different descriptions to refer to him, especially when the lack of names in the passage makes any descriptors crucial for properly differentiating separate identities.

So the first problem is that the plan is definitely not the plan of Heavenly Father. It is likely not even the plan of Jesus Christ. I think the best answer to the problem of the first speaker's identity is Michael. Son of Man is a New Testament title of Jesus. One who is like unto God is really a translation of the Hebrew Michael. Now, at this point the only way I can see that Michael's plan is Heavenly Father's is to side with Brigham Young on the identity of God, which would make God Adam (i.e. Michael). Something tells me the Brethren won't want to go there either.

Our Primary Glossary, the original spark for this blaze of ranting, was very specific about the number of plans presented: "only one plan was presented." Unfortunately for our trusty misreaders of latter-day scripture, the Book of Moses (chapter 4) seems to paint quite a different picture:

1 AND I, the Lord God, spake unto Moses, saying: That Satan, whom thou hast commanded in the name of mine Only Begotten, is the same which was from the beginning, and he came before me, saying—Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.

***

3 Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down;...

The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following among its definitions of plan: 3.a. A formulated or organized method according to which something is to be done; a scheme of action, project, design; the way in which it is proposed to carry out some proceeding. Also in weakened sense: Method, way of proceeding.

Now, I'm not saying that ol' Scratch had a Power-point presentation or a flowchart on a big dry-erase board, but it sounds like he had a plan to me. His plan, which is different from Michael's (sorry, I couldn't help myself), is that he will redeem humankind such that not one soul will be lost. In return, he wants God's honor. Evidently, the guarantee that all souls would 'make it' required that they not have agency, i.e. the ability to choose for themselves. Even if el Diablo's vision was essentially similar to Michael's except for these points: no agency, no loss, and 'all hail Satan!', it was certainly quite different in these few respects. In fact, I would say it was sufficiently different to qualify for the status of a separate plan entirely.

So why call Michael's plan Heavenly Father's Plan? Because it is the plan that God chose for his children, not the one he initiated. A relatively open dialogue seems to have been allowed in the first place to come up with a plan.

Now, if, in the spirit of Elder Packer, we want to be real sticklers about language, neither Moses nor Abraham use the word plan to describe Michael's proposal, Lucifer's tongue wagging, or Jesus' statement of allegiance. Moses uses the phrase plan of salvation to refer to the atonement (6:62). Abraham uses the word plan for the spiritual creation (4:21). The Book of Mormon refers to the "plan of redemption", the "plan of our God", the "plan of salvation", etc. If we want to preserve the context chronology of the scriptures, and not their production chronology, the plan became God's when he adopted it. From that point on it could be called "Heavenly Father's Plan" and not before.

By the way, here we have in the "Plan" narrative one of those many instances in mythology when some crafty character tries to deceive the head god, and pays dearly for it. Other examples include Prometheus, king Numa, and Loki. Satan falls in line with this tradition when he tries to slip the part about humans losing their agency past Hevenly Father. Heavenly Father is just too smart to fall for it. So he chooses Jesus as savior, who essentially says, "I'll have it your way, God." See, even here it is clear that Jesus has no plan. In fact, it seems that just about every major player except Jesus has one.

Why on earth are the Brethren so concerned that there only be one plan, and that that plan come from Heavenly Father? Well, my guess is that they want to reinforce the image of their own authority as emanating from the voice of the prophet alone. No one is to have a plan except the guy at the top, and everyone who knows what's good for him or her is to follow along. The actual scriptural stories present situations that are much less neat. A composite of Moses and Abraham shows that different figures are proposing different plans, and that God is the final decision maker.

Everyone is already exercising the eternal gift of agency in what they are doing (including employing their own initiative) in the Grand Council. Satan exercises his own agency in proposing his plan, but he hopes to rob everyone else of theirs thereby. This is where he goes wrong, not in suggesting something different. What is true, it seems, is that there wasn't anything like a vote. After God decided which plan he was going to adopt, people had the choice to exercise their agency by defecting to Satan or by assenting to the plan God had adopted.

The way I read between the lines of the Church's interpretation is that Satan was wrong in that he said anything and that that anything contradicted God's plan. You might say he was insubordinate. He didn't have a plan. He was just one of those annoying naysayers you see at any bad meeting who keeps anything substantive from getting done by carping at absolutely everything. Jesus had the right idea when he said, "What you said, Boss." This reading fits what we see in the LDS Church today.

There is a plan in Mormonism, and you didn't have any say in it. And guess what, you still don't have any say in it. Once the Gang of Fifteen has adopted it, and has sent it out to the stakes of Zion, your part is to say, "what you said, boss," and then proceed to do it. The worst thing you can do is to discuss openly any other idea for how things are or should be. Then you are consigned to that lowest circle of Mormon hell occupied by Sunstoners, Signaturi, and all other such apostates.

The deadly power of SILENCE

2006-03-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine has recently suggested that silence plays a largely unrecognized, but powerful, role in Mormonism. He hopes to devote future research and writing to the subject, but in the meantime I will share some of my thoughts on it.

Joseph Smith looked to the example of Jesus when he instructed others to hold special experiences close to their chests. The restoration of the Aaronic priesthood through the ministration of John the Baptist was largely unknown until 1835--six years after the event occurred. Why? Because Joseph Smith seems to have instructed Oliver Cowdery to keep quiet about it. Even David Whitmer, a close relative of Cowdery's by marriage, did not learn of the event until 1835. This silence led to doubts that the event ever happened.

Silence played a vital role in one of the most controversial aspects of early Mormon history--polygamy. Joseph Smith started engaging in polygynous relationships in 1832, i.e. only a couple of years after the Church was organized. Yet the fact that Joseph practiced polygamy was kept secret from so many, that even after his death many of the saints did not know. Those who formed the Reorganized Church were thus able to convince their members that Brigham Young was responsible for the practice and that Joseph had never engaged in it at all.

The endowment ritual was one means Joseph used to keep his polygamous relationships silent. Joseph endowed those people who knew about his plural wives, and these people were thereby placed under oaths of secrecy and loyalty to the kingdom of God, whose earthly head was Joseph Smith. I am not the first person to propose such a thing, and it is not proposed here for the purpose of darkening Joseph's reputation. I think Joseph did believe that he was religiously justified in his practice of plural marriage, and I think that the steps he took to protect himself and his close friends were religiously motivated as well.

The Reorganized Church, now the Community of Christ, is one of the most easily recognizable results of Joseph's use of silence. It is clear that until Brigham had solid control of his followers in the West very few people knew much of what was going on in the inner circles of the Mormon elite. Many remained unaware of some things thereafter too, and some do to this day (in spite of the availability of great historical material). I was accused of spouting "anti-Mormon garbage" when I informed someone on a discussion board that the early prophets of Mormonism had themselves crowned king of the kingdom of God on earth.

The Reorganized Church kept its own silence. As mentioned earlier, they conspired to keep their membership in the dark about Joseph's plural marriages. When one of Joseph's own sons, David, went out west to do missionary work among the 'Brighamites', the discovery that his mother and friends had lied to him about his father's marital practices may have been a contributing factor in his subsequent mental illness.

Silence in Mormonism has not only been a tool for exercising control and asserting privilege, it has also led to major doctrinal changes. It was the desire to keep certain doctrines hidden from the world that led to the abandonment of Adam-God and the belief that polygamy was a requirement for exaltation. The irony is that the men who kept silence on these matters believed them and held them sacred. Thinking it necessary to keep their silence about matters too sacred for general consumption, these men were responsible for the bulk of the Church and its leadership forgetting these teachings. Thus Bruce R. McConkie was able to deny their existence for years.

It was the temple ritual that spread the veil of silence ever broader among the rank and file members of the LDS Church. Through the temple initiation of thousands of Mormons, the injunction to keep quiet about certain things became a regular feature of LDS worship. It was also the means to creating a kind of spiritual class system that is largely unrecognized but surely present in the Church. Certain Church offices and responsibilities are only entrusted to those who share in the sacred temple ritual. The unitiated are eligible for lesser 'callings' and a lesser salvation. Only through initiation into ritual silence can one qualify for all of the privileges and blessings of the kingdom of God.

Since the leaders of Mormonism, even on the local level, are instructed in the ways of Mormon silence, the result is a society in which communication on many matters is conducted on a 'need to know' basis. And the truth is, very people are deemed to need to know. These few are usually restricted to the ward council and the presidencies of the priesthood quorums and various auxiliaries. There is nothing sinister about this limitation of communication, but by its very nature it leaves most ward members in the dark about much of what is happening in the local congregation.

One important reason for silence among the local leadership is that members share intimate personal information with these leaders. The Church advises or commands them to discuss personal sins with the bishop and his councilors. If the bishop were not enjoined to keep silence, such personal information would become common knowledge. Unfortunately, it sometimes still does. When this happens, sensitive personal information becomes part of a ward gossip underground that emanates from the ward council and auxiliary leaders. Understandably, silence is sometimes not maintained. Loose lips carry the information in the form of whispers through the social cliques that form in any ward.

On a 'macro' level, the top leaders of the Church use commandments of silence to keep certain matters out of general Church discussion and publication. To paraphrase President Hinckley's statment on Larry King, "the members can believe whatever they want, so long as they don't publish." A handful of LDS scholars and BYU professors have found themselves disciplined or fired because they did speak openly or publish views about sensitive issues regarding Church history and doctrine. These actions were coordinated from the top, and one of them at least involved the use of long past sexual transgressions as a means of excommunicating a scholar in the present (Simon Southerton). The power of silence is evident in how the Church treats scholars. They both enjoin scholars to avoid sensitive issues, and they discipline those who do not comply.

This enforced silence on doctrinal matters is one of the factors that has led to the stultification of discussion on the local level. Members are either increasingly ill informed about the history and doctrines of Mormonism, a fact that would not be surprising given the dismal state of Church educational materials, or they choose not to engage in discussions that go beyond the surface level, or worse, beyond the oversimplified and misleading spiritual propaganda that in Church educational materials substitutes for real information. People now say very little in an LDS chapel that even warrants a listen. It is usually the same pablum repeated ad nauseam in a liturgical fashion.

The word 'liturgical' brings to mind the temple again. The temple is a location of rich symbolism and mythological narrative. Yet over the years it has undergone a number of changes, one being the striking removal of ritual actions and words. The culture of silence in Mormonism prevents people from discussing the temple at any length in a public forum, or even a Church-only forum, since LDS folk generally believe that everything connected to the ritual is too sacred to discuss outside of the walls of the House of the Lord. In reality, the ritual injunctions against public speech or action related to the temple involve direct reference to the signs and tokens imparted to the initiate.

Unfortunately, silence on these few aspects of the ritual has expanded to cover almost all aspects of the endowment. Furthermore, there is really no mechanism for fostering discussion of the endowment within the temple either. There is no helpful literature in which aspects of the endowment are discussed. In a sense there is a distinct advantage to this. It allows the temple to be uniquely yours, and not subject to the tyranny of outside opinion. As Mormons are generally conditioned to look to authority figures for interpretations of scripture and guidance in practice, surely the temple would be defined by the General Authorities were it not for the fact that no one discusses it.

There are some real downsides to this silence, however. The first, and one of the most important, is that members are so poorly prepared for the temple that their first experience sometimes comes as a real unpleasant shock. In not a few cases a person's first experience with the temple is so jarring, that the person never returns to the temple, or may even leave the LDS Church over it. Another downside is that people never really mentally or emotionally engage in the temple ritual because they have almost no means of contextualizing it within the rest of their religious lives. Most references to the temple ritual in LDS literature are by allusion alone. If a person is not a keen student, and an avid, talented reader of Church literature, that person may miss out on the only discourse on the endowment in the LDS world.

The result is waning temple activity. The Church has tried to address this problem by building more temples, editing unpopular elements out of the endowment, and encouraging its members to attend on a regular basis. In my opinion all of these efforts were largely in vain. The real problem is silence. Without meaningful discussion and writing about the temple, the temple experience remains isolated from the rest of the Mormon worship experience. The symbols become empty, the drama becomes boring, and the initiates participate less and less. Only the few who serendipitously learn to engage in thoughtful, prayerful meditation in the temple continue to find it meaningful and enjoyable. In a society like ours, where meditation is almost unheard of, few people ever gain that kind of appreciation for temple service.

I have a couple of ideas that I think would improve the temple experience and increase temple attendance. 1) Talk about the temple more and in greater detail. One can maintain silence on the signs and tokens and still discuss much of what goes on in the temple. 2) Foster publications which discuss the temple. Do not place the imprimature of authority on the publications. Allow the writers wide berth to discuss and speculate so long as they do not reveal the elements that one covenants to keep secret. 3) Make space for libraries and lecture rooms in the temples. Allow members to go to special places within the temple where they can study and discuss their thoughts and insights. Sponsor lectures where people come to share their research on the temple. Provide libraries where books on sacred subjects are placed at the disposal of the endowed. 4) Offer temple preparation courses that provide substantive information about the temple experience. If people are sufficiently prepared, they will be less shocked when they participate in the actual ceremony.

The culture of silence has become so pervasive in Mormonism that it has choked out much substantive discourse and has alienated members from one another. Strong emphasis on elementary principles expressed in an attitude of strict orthodoxy increases the problem dramatically. The temple, althought one of the richest loci for symbolic expression in the LDS Church, is quarantined from the rest of the Mormon experience. The end result is that members are losing enthusiasm, leaving the Church in greater numbers, and abandoning temple service. The LDS Church could reverse these trends if it took a more open, and liberal stance toward discussion, scholarship, and temple cult.

Does President Hinckey really have a testimony?

2006-03-07T16:56:00.000-08:00

The question sounds ludicrous, I know. Recently I was listening to Tal Bachman's address to the annual meeting of the ExMormon Foundation, when I heard him relate the most unusual story from his former stake president. When Tal, in full heartbreak from his discoveries about the LDS Church, presented a letter of his issues to his stake president, the stake president replied by saying the President Hinckley had told a meeting of bishops that NO RELIGION COULD WITHSTAND HISTORICAL SCRUTINY, NOT EVEN OURS, but that the Church still makes us better husbands and fathers.

The chronological context of this statement is important to consider. It was made between the purchase of the Salamander Letter, and the discovery that it was a fraud. So perhaps Hinckley was feeling particularly downhearted about the Salamander business, or maybe he was finally being open about a problem he has known about for a long time, but has not previously been compelled to admit. Either way, the fact that the prophet of the LDS Church could say such a thing at all is astounding to me. Obviously he does consider it possible that the Church is not 'true' in the sense that your average TBM would.

I think it is altogether possible that Gordon B. Hinckley does not have a testimony by the usual definition. Consider also the relative ease with which he personally waffles on important LDS doctrines in public fora, and authorizes Church spokesmen to lie by omission about Church beliefs. You probably recall how President Hinckley fudged on the longstanding belief in the exaltation of the being we worship as God in Mormonism. I recall a Church spokesman waffling on our belief in visions on National Public Radio. I was astounded at how he evaded the question.

It should be a sobering thought to all of the extreme TBMs out there that the prophet may not be a member of their ranks. This is especially interesting given the fact that he has better access to the restricted documents possessed by the Church, and that he knows the leadership's inner workings most thoroughly. It is also the case that while many TBMs out there imagine face-to-face meetings taking place between the resurrected Lord and the prophet, they must accept the fact that President Hinckley openly stated that the days of open vision have passed.

So here we have it folks, a Mormon prophet who argues the truth of the Church based on its utility in making better men (a questionable claim to say the least, and one equally true for Freemasonry), whose stance is unclear regarding formerly precious doctrines, and claims that the days of such miracles as visions to the LDS prophets are over. I don't know whether to be relieved that my uber-conservative Mormon friends no longer have much of a position to protect, or to be sad that Mormonism's vitality is waning. In either case, I am left with little reason to think that the much vaunted Restoration was at all necessary.

Famous Mormon Vampires

2006-03-06T17:06:00.000-08:00

I found this fun website. Check it out for a chuckle or two.

Famous Mormon Vampires

FAIR: an oxymoronic acronym.

2006-03-06T15:46:00.000-08:00

'The' big cyber-hangout for Mormons and their critics these days is at FAIR (Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research. 'The' place used to be ZLMB, but nearly all of the apologists fled the scene, citing their frustration with constant attacks from Mormonism's critics. FAIR's discussion board was deliberately designed as a safe haven for apologists, particularly for its 'star' posters, BYU professors Dan Peterson and Bill Hamblin. The 'stars' get VIP treatment in the way the threads they post to are moderated. Often, when a discussion gets heated, the 'star' has more leeway to say what he wants in his post. The person on the other end of the argument gets especially close scrutiny.

Knowing as I do the excesses of some Mormon critics, I can understand how ZLMB imploded. Frankly, there are a number of critics, particularly of the Evangelical persuasion, whose facile criticisms of Mormonism could just as easily be turned back on Christianity. The problem is, Evangelicals never seem to want to admit that problem. Enter the secular critics of Mormonism. These critics often have no religious belief to be hypocritical about. Still some of them can be immoderate and insulting in their approach, and they are not immune from indulging in empty diatribes against Mormonism.

Still, it is from the secular camp that some of the best material comes. The secularists, instead of aiming to prove that Mormonism is not Christian (a pointless waste of time), often look to demonstrate that the Mormonism of the past is not as the Church of the present represents it. To a degree one can claim that this fact goes without saying. Churches change over time, and they move as society moves, responding to new challenges in an ever-morphing environment. It is the application of secular scholarly methods to the material, however, that is guaranteed to bring the most new insights. Take the new Bushman biography, for example. Without the insights of a Quinn, who used secular methods in spite of his believer status, I doubt Bushman would have ever included much of the material on Joseph's early years of religious experience. Men like Quinn and Vogel made such research and writing a must for even the more conservative Bushman.

When scholarly controversy can lead to such great benefits, it is perhaps ironic that both the LDS Church and its self-appointed defenders are intent upon killing the debate. Without disagreement and challenges, we would be mired in outdated books about LDS topics. The critics have done more to advance LDS scholarship on LDS topics than any other force. Without critics, we might be left with only masturbatory panegyric on how wonderful Joseph Smith was, etc. It was the hard work of the Tanners that re-historicized the revelations of the D&C. I generally don't even like the Tanners, but I have to admit that they have been really good for Mormon scholarship.

It is more than a shame, then, that FAIR is so unfair in its moderating. It has been my belief for some time that the rhetoric of FARMS reviews was damaging to the Church for the same reason that missionaries claim that anti-Mormonism is a boon for missionary work. If you have to play nasty, there must be something wrong with your position. At the very least it will appear that something is wrong. Grant Palmer was ridiculed by Davis Bitton for claiming to be an 'insider'. Yes, clearly Grant did not understand that the only insiders in the Church are the fifteen men who sit at the pinnacle of its leadership structure. Can we honestly blame Grant, as a lifelong professional employee of the LDS Church, for claiming he was an insider?

FAIR is the 30-second commercial to FARMS Review's sitcom. FAIR's discussion board is superior inasmuch as it allows some response to the apologists. The forum, however, is so tightly controlled that responses to apologists are curbed before they get dangerous. The 'stars' come out to shine by ridiculing the critics (both critics of the Church and critics of apologists like me) and then they hide behind a suitable moderator avatar to fix the odds. Dunamis is at least 3 or 4 different people, who have variously praised and pilloried my contributions to the discussion, depending on who had the helm at that moment. So FAIR moderating looks schizophrenic at best and like some bizarre form of rhetorical terrorism at its worst.

My days at FAIR have probably reached their end. I was put on their queue (a poster on the queue will have their posts reviewed and (dis)approved) for using the expression 'cutesy-poo' in an exchange with Dan Peterson on the Hedgeses' farcical review of Vogel's Smith biography. I note with some frustration that Dan Peterson had earlier used that phrase to dismiss one of my posts on another thread. But, as I was reminded, I had earlier used the forbidden phrase 'rhetorical diarrhea' to describe one of Brant Gardner's encyclopedic posts. Clearly I have a potty mouth and must be disciplined. When the quality of moderating at a board is this bad, they deserve the vapid content they get. Their vapid content is exactly what I described earlier: auto-erotic panegyric. Any kooky theory that supports the 'right' conclusion gets accolades.

Robert Kirby's 13 Particles of Faith

2006-03-03T19:13:00.000-08:00

MY 13 PARTICLES OF FAITH

I believe in God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, and in mankind's innate inability to tell the difference between them and, oh, a giant ball of fire or even an extremely intolerant political party.

I believe that men will be punished for their own transgressions, including stuff we did completely by accident or because of testosterone. Women will probably just get probation.

I believe that through the atonement of Christ, everyone will one day be able to tell annoying church authorities where to get off.

I believe that the first principles and ordinances of the church are: boring speakers, meetings that last forever, music that sounds like someone giving a whale a sonogram, food storage gone bad, and idiotic bickering over caffeine and movie ratings.

I believe that a man must be called by God, by prophecy, and by the laying on of hands, by those who are in authority, and that only regular long distance rates will apply. Meanwhile, women answer only to a biological clock.

I believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive Church, viz.: deacons, teachers, centurions, lepers, thieves, virgins, lunatics, mustard seeds, and demonically possessed swine.

I believe in the gift of tongues and would die a happy man if, just once, some smart-ass would have the guts to try it when I was around.

I believe the Bible and the Book of Mormon to be the word of God as far as I personally can translate them correctly, which I try not to do much because it scares me.

I believe all that God has revealed, all that he does now reveal, and I believe he will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the colossal foolishness of the entire human race.

I believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes, most of whom will work for Microsoft; that Zion will be built on this (the United States) continent by undocumented migrant labor, and that Christ will eventually rain personality on the church.

I claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to it being none of your damn business, and allow all men the same privilege, except for Pat Robertson, Louis Farrakhan, and most cannibals.

I believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers and magis. . . . wait, no I don't.

I believe in being honest to a point, true to myself, chased by the police, benevolent to deserving people, virtuous on the
Internet, and in doing whatever my wife tells me to do; indeed, I may say that I follow the admonition of Paul in believing, hoping and enduring-and that all of this damn well better be worth it in the end.

Let's get wacky!

2006-03-03T18:17:00.000-08:00

I got sidetracked in my last post because I was so intense about describing the problem. And, I think I am still preoccupied with the defintion of the 'problem'. In short, the problem is that Mormonism is becoming dead dull in all of the wrong ways. Some of my acquaintances are happy to see doctrinal speculation go the way of the dodo. For them all of the crazy doctrine was irrational, and at the root of a lot of contention. What they longed for was a rational faith. I have real sympathy for their feelings and thoughts on the subject.

The problem is that a large part of me thinks that their vision of the Mormonism of the future is ill conceived. The direction that LDS doctrine has gone since the passing of Brigham Young has been increasingly Protestant. Brigham's theology was about as far from normative Christian as Gnostic cosmology is from the Gospel of Matthew. Gnostic cosmology and the teachings of Brigham Young on the nature of Deity also share the dubious honor of succumbing to Christianity. The truth is, Christianity is easier for the average person to grasp, and these other systems seem needlessly complicated.

My view of Brigham's "theology" is that he taught a plurality of gods in an endless genealogical chain. Humanity has its origins in Adam and Eve, two deified beings, which made their home on this planet after they, with other gods, created it. They ate the fruits of this lower sphere and became mortal so that they could provide bodies for human spirits. Brigham seems to have had a funny hierarchy of gods that started with Elohim, either the highest ranking of the gods pertinent to this creation, or the council of deities. Next in line came Jehovah, whose son Michael became Adam. Jehovah and Michael created the earth together. Jehovah is not Jesus. Jesus is actually the son of the divine Michael. All beings human and divine are continually progressing as they acquire knowledge and intelligence. Elohim was once a regular human, who progressed to become Elohim. One day some human beings will be gods just as Elohim is God today. Yes, it is confusing and highly heterodox by Christian standards.

Since Brigham's death LDS theology has become increasingly Christian in that 1) Jehovah has been equated with Jesus, 2) Michael has been made subordinate to Jesus, since Jesus is Jehovah, 3) Michael is not a god, but a noble human spirit, 4) the Trinity of Father (Elohim)/Son (Jehovah)/Holy Spirit (?) is preserved. The big Mormon distinction in number 4 is that the philosophical doctrine of Trinity as worked out in the authoritative creeds of Christianity is not accepted. God has a body like man's, but perfect. Man is truly made in the image of God as he is God's offspring. One of the most recent developments is the abandonment of the notion that God is a perfected man. Now certain people are leaning to the idea that the current God has always been God and that He is supreme. He is the origin of all creation.

In short, having deviated from Protestant Christianity pretty radically, Mormonism is being pulled back in. It is somewhat predictable. Protestants may be converted to the idea that God called a modern prophet (Joseph Smith). They are less likely to accept that God was not God at some long past time. As heterodox within my own faith tradition as I am, and as much as I think of myself being functionally agnostic most of the time, I have a problem with our drift to normative Christianity. In my opinion, Mormonism is succumbing to cultural imperialism. It may not be conscious, but all the same, Mormonism is selling out its unique identity for success in spreading itself. Again, this is probably inevitable, and the ultimate results are not determined, but I would guess they involve further sacrifice of much of the Mormonism many thought we knew.

My suggestion is that everyone spontaneously engage in wild theological speculation, quote liberally from the Journal of Discourses, and then simply say, "of course, this isn't doctrine, it's just my opinion." If you have an unusual spiritual experience, by all means, share it at Church! If you feel uncomfortable doing it, don't, but if you want to, be my guest! Tell us how the Three Nephites saved your dog from the neighborhood kids. Don't be shy about your investment in the Dream Mine. If your wife used your priesthood to save the family cat while you were away, testify! Tell us all who the Holy Ghost is! If you are really gutsy, you will speculate in great detail about the details of Mother in Heaven's role in your personal salvation. Here you are on shaky ground, but if you get into trouble, you can always promise your bishop that you will refrain from sharing your Heavenly Mother theology in the future.

Believe it or not, I am not being facetious in the least. If you don't share your idiosyncratic doctrinal views and personal experiences with the rest of us, you are robbing us. You are contributing to the apostacy of your fellow saints. You see, right now people are more likely to leave because they are bored out of their minds than because you are completely insane and the bishop can't seem to catch you in time to stop you. Did I call you insane? Yeah, I did. But hey, I am insane too. What is sane, after all? Was Bruce R. McConkie the least bit sane? Would you want to be sane if that's what sane is about?

Think about it. Time is running short. Act now.

Not crazy enough.

2006-03-02T06:33:00.000-08:00

It used to be that one could sit in an LDS ward and be regaled with speculations about the location of the Lost Ten Tribes or hear the latest mundane duties of the Three Nephites (jump-starting cars, etc.). If there is one thing we can thank (?) Christian anti-Mormons for, its the complete desiccation of the Mormon mythological imagination. Sure, they aren't the only culprits.

There are plenty of people in every ward who have little tolerance for anything that smacks of imagination or creativity. These people, like most Mormons, have not figured out that Joseph Smith was a mythographer par excellence. Instead they prefer the parched diatribes of a pompous Bruce R. McConkie, who seems to have honestly believed there was such a thing as Mormon doctrine, and who took it upon himself to define that for everyone else.

It used to be, however, that Mormon doctrine had more to do with which General Authority happened to have written that year's priesthood manual than anything else. As a result you got B.H. Roberts' Seventies Course in Theology or Widstoe's Rational Theology, both of which make contemporary LDS manuals look like the ingredients to a bar of soap. Since the definition of Mormon theology was so fluid, people seemed to understand that there was an element of personal interpretation to it. Therefore, they unabashedly engaged in public speculations right in the ward house.

Sadly, Correlation put an end to interesting manuals and more unforunately yet, Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine was the final book by a GA to claim to explicate doctrine. Without another Widstoe or Roberts to follow, the book that should never have been (the prophet, David McKay, told BRM not to publish it) evolved into the armchair theologian's guide to putting everyone else in their place. This led to the oft-heard refrain "well, McConkie said . . ." that rang in LDS meetinghouses across the land for decades.

The other option was,"well, Nibley said . . ." which was heard far less often, and for very good reasons: 1) hardly anyone could understand what Nibley was saying, 2) Nibley was not a GA, and 3) to anyone who cared to listen and could understand, it was clear that Nibley was really a Brigham Young Marxist. Still, one might hear the Nibley name, if only in reference to trouncing anti-Mormons somehow (the anti-Mormons are still puzzled by his responses too).

As this was all happening, the Church was flooded with new converts, who came from a predominantly Protestant background. These people came with a hard-won testimony of Joseph Smith's prophetic calling and the the truth of the Book of Mormon as a witness of Christ. What they did not bargain for was odd tales about how the Three Nephites mowed the lawn just in time for the ward picnic or some such.

The more vocal among them started registering their complaints. They joined forces with the retreating McConkieites with the exclamation, "THAT'S NOT DOCTRINE!," which for them was in reality, "if that's anything close to what we're about, I'm outta here!" For these folks it was necessary to quote C.S. Lewis liberally as a mediation between the Christianity they formerly believed in, and the Christianity avec Smith that they had now embraced. By processing it all through Lewis, the wonkie bits were thankfully shaved off.

The coup de grace, however, came from the multi-pronged attack of the Church, the BYU Religion Department, and FARMS. The Church made its contribution through the production of utterly vacuous, white-washed "prophet" manuals, and statements on the primacy of Mormon canon in the establishment of doctrine. Between these two moves it became clear that Mormon doctrine was now a matter of plausible deniability. Since no one can afford, or really wants to wade through the vast, murky swamp of the Journal of Discourses, the fact that Brigham Young had much more colorful things to say than "Jesus is the Savior" is lost on most people. Brigham is so much easier to deal with when you can edit him down to stuff like that.

Some of the faculty at BYU's Religion Department have decided that the time has come to make overtures to the rest of the Christian world. They have invited Evangelicals to speak on BYU campus. They have written books about Jesus that help others understand how truly Christian we are. Stephen Robinson co-authored a book entitled, How Wide the Divide which seemed to me to be an exercise in defining Mormonism as narrowly as possible so as not to appear un-Christian in any way. In reality the divide is much wider than Robinson let on.

The chimaerical beast called FARMS makes its contributions too. Plausibility is the first and last word in FARMS apologetics. At FARMS it is not what one can prove, but that one can make a case for the inability of others to disprove Mormon claims that is really the important thing. FARMS is about so many things, all of them much more dreadfully tedious than Three Nephite and Danite tales. If you drop by the nasty, younger-sibling version of FARMS called FAIR, you will be treated to their chant, "You Can't Prove It!" Oddly, the things we can't prove are the Mormonism that most of us got to know through our ancestors and Church history. Now that this version is too explosive for the masses, it is apparently necessary to pretend that it either never existed or was horribly misconstrued.

All of these forces have contributed to the rendering of ward meetings into a sure-fire cure for insomnia. Everyone sits around either avoiding dangerous (read "interesting") statements or trying to make answers like "prayer," "the Spirit," and "obedience" sound fresh for the billionth time. The new refrain at Church is, "we are repeating simple things because we still haven't learned how to live them." Behind every instance of that statement lies the sad realization that church is destined to be a mind-numbing waste of too much time for the rest of our short lives.

Dr. Nolove or: How I learned to stop worrying and tolerate apologists.

2006-02-24T19:33:00.000-08:00

I once read a very eloquent letter that described how LDS apologists had destroyed a man's testimony. The man wrote that as he read their writings he was led to think that many of the things he had been taught to place faith in were not so at all. They had been argued into oblivion by the defenders of Mormonism. A nice example is the Whole Hemisphere Theory of Book of Mormon peoples. Many leaders of the Church traditionally taught that the peoples of the Book of Mormon were the "principal ancestors" of Native Americans.

As time has worn on, and little has evidence has been found to support that view, the apologists have adopted the convenient strategy of cultivating the LGT (Limited Geography Theory). According to the LGT, descendants of the Lehi party were absorbed into much larger native populations as soon as they landed in the New World. Thus, we are told, one should not expect them to have left ANY FOOTPRINT in their new environment. So, in other words, all attempts to find the Nephites and Lamanites can cease, and any pretension to having found anything connected to them can thankfully be abandoned.

Now that the lack of any linguistic, archaeological, or DNA evidence has been defined as a virtue for the book, the LDS Church has, through its website, jumped on board and linked to such dumbfounding numbskullery as an answer to its prayers. In short, we can now have faith in the Book of Mormon again because we will never find any hard evidence of these past peoples we believe actually existed. Once the requirement for any evidence has flown out the window, one can believe practically anything. Have you been abducted by aliens? Are you sure? Thanks be to the rhetorical wizards at FARMS and FAIR, who have taken Hugh Nibley's suggestion that one should work from the assumption the Book of Mormon is ancient to its logical extreme, the assumption is now the only thing that matters.

So our disillusioned friend had problems with this and numerous other nuggets of LDS apologetic revisionism, which generally works on the principle of plausible deniability (whereas secular anti-Mormonism works on the principle of denied plausibility). Can we blame him? No, now PR firms have schooled official spokesmen for the Church. They have taken a page from the apologetic playbook and decided that anything wonkie should be smoothed over with vacuous and misleading statements. Eternal progression is now a positive belief in the value of a good continuing education, for example. So, long-time Mormons are getting uneasy to see the faith of their ancestors erode before their eyes at an unprecedented pace.

The new bogeyman in the apologetics/polemics war has been identified as the "secular anti-Mormon." We could bring to apologists' attention the thinking liberal Mormon, but to many of them there is no distinction. Thus our disillusioned friend is left with no option other than leaving the Church, a result some would perhaps chalk up to a step in that person's repentance process. In his eyes the thinking liberal Mormon is just the secular anti-Mormon working up the courage to be honest with him- or herself. If one does not agree with the current position of the Church (or its apologists), so the thinking here goes, one is an enemy of it. Well, one almost can't blame these guys. After all, he is only applying an extreme version of the Churchs position in a practical, everyday fashion as they fight the forces of 'evil' at FAIR and other places.

But I think I am being too hard on these apologists. In reality, part of their job is to keep Mormons from being snookered by all the liberals, ex-Mos, and anti-Mos into believing things that may turn them into liberal Mormons, who are, for all intents and purposes, not Mormons by the Church's definition, except nominally and therefore statistically.

Fourteen Articles of Faith!

2006-02-24T12:23:00.000-08:00

It turns out that a few of printings of the LDS Articles of Faith had 14 articles instead of 13. One of the fourteen-article versions was in a book entitled The Mormons, or Latter-day Saints, in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, & Co., 1852) written by a government cartographer named John W. Gunnison. Another was printed in an LDS newspaper called the Frontier Guardian edited by Orson Hyde.

Most interesting is the difference in Article 8:

"We believe in the word of God contained in the Bible, we also believe the word of God recorded in the Book of Mormon, and in all other good books."

Of this version Lew Wallace writes, "Using this version, the admonition to 'study the scriptures' takes on new meaning, for careful evaluation is mandatory as we dig out the things which qualify as the 'word' of God (i.e., of divine origin), not only in the Bible and Book of Mormon, but in other good books-- even those without Church imprimatur."

Taken from Lew Wallace's A New View of Our Scriptures in the March 2001 issue of By Commmon Consent.

Spies everywhere?

2006-02-23T20:30:00.000-08:00

It may surprise you, but the LDS Church does keep up on its members' activities. There is an organization within the Church called the Committee for Strengthening the Members, which keeps files on members the Church considers potentially or actually subversive in some way. When Mormon intellectuals end up in an ecclesiastical court, euphemistically and alternatively entitled, 'Courts of Love,' they are sometimes surprised to find thick files on the table sitting next to their judges. You see, back in the day, the Lord revealed to his people that he wanted them to keep track of all of the nasty lies told about His Church.

His Church took Him seriously. The only problem is that many of the things they collected were not actually lies. Some of them were simply unflattering truths. When Joseph Smith ordered that the Nauvoo Expositor be destroyed, it was because the Expositor was going to print the unflattering truths that Joseph Smith was marrying many women, some of whom were already married, and that he had had himself anointed king of the Kingdom of God on earth. It was all true, but only a few people were supposed to know it, and they were sworn to secrecy on pain of death. Fortunately, poor William Law only suffered the loss of his press. It was Joseph Smith who lost his life when a mob murdered him at Carthage jail while he vainly emptied the chambers of a small derringer into the stairwell leading up to his second-story holding place.

Today unflattering truths continue to be a problem for the Lord's kingdom, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that unflattering versions of the truth are. When historian Michael Quinn discovered that the LDS Relief Society had been modelled on the male priesthood, and that women essentially were given the priesthood in the temple ritual, this unflattering version of the truth got him ex-communicated. Here I should simply say the truth, because it simply is true. I could multiply examples of this problem, but you get the idea.

The key thing for us Mormons is to remain silent about things that might diminish the good image of the LDS Church. President Hinckley has generously told us on Larry King that we can believe anything we like, so long as we don't publish it. Thank God Utah joined the United States.

Well, as I said above, the Church takes all of this very seriously. They have a divine mandate to do so, evidently. So in order to keep the spring pure, or keep the wolves out of the flock (choose your metaphor), the Church spies on its own members. This has been going on from at least good old Nauvoo, when Joseph enlisted the help of two young men to infiltrate the reformed version of the LDS Church started by William Law. It continued much more egregiously in the Church's cooperation with the federal government to turn in secret polygamists in the mid twentieth century. It flourished especially on the BYU campus, where Ernest L. Wilkinson (otherwise known as Ernie the attorney) placed spies in the classroom to make sure the twin pillars of modern paganism (from a conservative perspective) evolution and communism, were not being taught in the Lord's university.

It also continued in the entrapment of gay Mormons on BYU campus. Gay sting operations were used to weed out homosexuals from the university and the flock. Bizarre experiments using electro-shock and aversion therapy were used for a while to make gay men straight. Oddly they were largely unsuccessful. Now days they simply deny that there is such a thing as a homosexual person. Homosexual behavior is simply a sin like any other, which can be changed through repentance. I guess some people believe it.

Now is the great day of spying on intellectuals and liberals. By the way, the real trick to disparaging the Church's so-called enemies is to put the qualifier 'so-called' before any reference to them. So the intellectuals who disagree with the Church are not really intellectuals, they are only "so-called intellectuals." Gays and lesbians are "so-called gays and lesbians" because the Church refuses to acknowledge their self-proclaimed identity. To the leaders of the LDS Church, there is no such thing as a homosexual person. You see, when you have the only true church on the earth, you also have the authority to arrogantly deny people their own identity. But I digress.

The habit of spying on members to weed out people who think differently is so very deeply entrenched, that now the student body at BYU does it without any explicit encouragement. They are so 'righteous' that they take it upon themselves to report their professors to higher authorities for such cardinal sins as making them read books with curse words in them and the like. Did I say that I feel really glad to be an American citizen? Well, some of these poor professors end up losing their jobs over the accusations of students. A couple have been fired or threatened because of material in the very books that won them their jobs. It's kind of like China during the Cultural Revolution, when you make the whole nation judge, jury, and executioner, no one, and I mean no one, is really safe.

Simon Southerton wrote a book about Amerindian DNA providing no indication that there were Hebrews here, contrary to the teachings of the Book of Mormon. While the people at FARMS and FAIR were scrambling to find a way to make this not matter in the least, the Church initiated a 'Court of Love' for Simon Southerton on the grounds that he slept with another woman some years ago when he was separated from his wife. Don't worry, I don't buy their pretext either. By the way, just where did they dig this up? Was spying involved perhaps?

Back to the spying. I hang out at one of these Yahoo! groups where liberal Mormons vent because being liberal in the LDS Church is frankly miserable. Life as a liberal is really swell in an organization where being a Democrat has been half jokingly considered grounds to deny people privileges of full-faith membership, where people regularly praise conservative presidents and their policies as divinely inspired, and where any strangley non-conservative-sounding thoughts are greeted with deafening silence. You feel loved.

Anyway, some of the people on this group got the crazy idea of sending flowers to President Hinckley on behalf of all the gay people who felt excluded by the Church's explicit support for all efforts (legal and semi-legal) to stop gay marriage from happening. The nice thing about moral certainty is that you feel you can impose your personal values on absolutely everyone else. Well, the folks who were planning this wanted to advertize their efforts on a website. Funny thing is, as soon as they discussed a possible domain name for it, the domain name was bought up by someone else. Well, it turned out that a Mormon apologist was spying on discussion groups to gather intelligence on such efforts.

Imagine it. In a Church that claims (albeit somewhat erroneously) to be 12 million strong, a zealous defender spied on the activities of a few discussion boards and to frustrate them where possible. Was he commanded by higher powers? We'll probably never know. Did he need to be? I doubt it. When a mentally ill Cody Judy held a fake bomb to the head of one of the LDS Church's top leaders, the students in attendance at the meeting started singing 'We thank thee, O God, for a prophet." The young perpetrator, thinking they were singing to him, was caught off guard. Suddenly a bunch of college-age Mormon men jumped on him. Some were kicking him and saying, "Don't mess with the elders of Israel." Just think. They didn't know whether the kid had a real bomb or not. That didn't stop them. Now who's crazy?

Epinoia

2006-02-20T07:27:00.000-08:00

I have never been able to decide exactly how I feel about Gnosticism. In college I was on a Gnostic kick. I even took a Coptic course in which we read nearly a third of the Gospel of Thomas in Coptic. I read a couple of books on the subject, and numerous scholarly articles. To this day I feel like I hardly have any idea what Gnosticism is about. Much Gnostic literature is difficult reading. It is filled with tedious cosmogonies built on the genealogical relationships between all of these abstract ideas that have been deified and only barely personified. After reading this stuff a while I feel utterly lost in the world.

This past weekend I listened to Elaine Pagel's "Beyond Belief." I was hestitant to get it, but I had just finished Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus," and was looking for something else as basic and enjoyable. "Beyond Belief" had the clear virtue of being available as an audio book, so I could listen to it while I watched our daughter. Even though I am somewhat skeptical of Elaine Pagel's work (I found her work on Satan to be dubious at best), I had seen her at the SBL meeting a couple of years ago, and had been intrigued at least by what she was saying about the Gospel of Thomas.

"Beyond Belief" is essentially Pagel's brief history of the development of orthodoxy. I had hoped there would be a lot more about the Gospel of Thomas, which is what I was listening for, but the book offers an interesting reading of early Christianity. It posits the pivotal role played by Irenaeus in promoting the Gospel of John to emphasize Christ's divinity, which is, according to this Gospel, uniquely his among humans. Here is where the Gospel of Thomas comes in. Pagels sees this Gospel promoting a different view in which all human beings have the divine light or spark. As a Mormon this view appeals to me more. Mormons see humans as belonging to the same species as God, and thus being essentially the same in nature. While not the same, this is closer to the 'Thomas' view of a shared divine nature.

My favorite part of "BB" was Pagel's discussion of epinoia, which strikes me as a kind of creative revelatory experience. Among Gnostics this creative revelation was central. By meditating on the truth, Gnostics were ever discovering new truths and committing them to text. Hence the plethora of Gnostic scriptures of which we only possess a fraction. Men like Irenaeus hated this, because they were promoting a unified, universal (catholic) truth. Aside from a successful opposition, Gnostics also had other problems. They tended to be elitist in their attitude toward non-Gnostic Christians, whose Christianity was deemed by them to be a primary school variety of truth.

I love the concept of epinoia as Pagels described it. This creative, revelatory exercise matches my own view of what all scripture essentially is. Scripture is an act of mythography. Only by applying authority to certain texts at the exclusion of others after the fact does one come to a concept of authoritative 'canon.' One can legitimately ask, however, what the necessary value of Paul's witness, Luke's witness, or 'John's' witness is over any Gnostic text. None of these people personally saw Jesus, and thus one trusts, rather blindly IMO, their 'revelation' over others largely because of the somewhat arbitrary authority a certain group of Christians gave them many hundreds of years ago.

Here is where Mormonism comes in. Joseph Smith's scriptural writings offer us a glimpse of a post-canonical, latter-day epinoia. Interestingly they assume the authority of the canon, but it is an authority that is besieged by problems and doubt. The revelations of Smith, his meditations on Christianity, come to the rescue. They comprise a new voice to prop up the old. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you view these matters), Smith viewed himself as one bearing unique authority from God to do this latter-day epinoia. Others who claimed revelation, like Hiram Page (ahem), were muscled out of the picture. This has not prevented numerous Smith copycats from surfacing over the years, beginning with James Strang who claimed to have found another ancient American record called the 'Voree Record'. Even today there are schismatic Mormons writing addendums to Smith's mythos. The mythmaking continues unabated.

Favorites

2006-02-19T17:10:00.000-08:00

My wife is not big into favorites. She likes so many things for so many different reasons that she finds the concept of favorites too limiting. I run roughshod over such niceties as the exclusivity of the term favorite, so I have many favorites in the very same category. I have been giving some thought to the issue of my favorites in the cyber-Mormon world. Unlike many, I include anti- and ex-Mormon stuff under the general rubric of cyber-Mormon. I don't include Evangelical stuff for the simple reason that they drive me insane. It is therefore difficult for me to imagine having a favorite among them, but rather a least unfavorite.

Here we go with some of Hiram's cyber-Mormon favorites:

In the category of ex- or anti-Mormon I have three current favorites.

1) Tal Bachman: Tal is at #1 right now, partly because I just discovered him, and partly because he is just so cool. He has written a number of excellent posts on Recovery from Mormonism that have been compiled at The Mormon Curtain blog.

2) Bob McCue: Bob is a Canadian attorney whose exodus from Mormonism created a good deal of local publicity. Bob has a website where he has made his writings documenting his exodus from Mormonism available to others. Some of them are quite long, but they are well worth the effort.

3) Richard Packham: Richard is the godfather of the ex-Mormon movement. He started the Ex-Mormon Foundation. Richard is the best guest that The Church Is Not True's podcast has ever had, with Bob McCue taking a close second.

In the category of Mormon apologists I have two favorites:

1) Kerry Shirts: half the time I can't tell exactly where Kerry is coming from, but this is a good thing. Most apologists are so predictable. The truth is that Kerry is a mystic. Since discovering mysticism, Kerry has opened up to different views.

2) Kevin Graham: Kevin also thinks outside of the box. It is a joy to watch him get into fights with other LDS apologists, especially Dan Peterson.

3) Benjamin McGuire: Ben has a very interesting approach to scriptures. He is very tolerant of those who think the Book of Mormon is inspired fiction.

In the category of favorite Mormon podcasts:

1) Mormon Stories: John Dehlin has managed to get some great guests and he regularly addresses interesting topics. His aim seems to be to help thinking Mormons stay in the Church. It's a tall order.

2) Sunstone's two podcasts: usually the new podcasts are the better of the two, but the Jan Shipps podcast is one you shouldn't miss.

3) The Church Is Not True: a couple of their shows are amazing, mostly because of the guests. In my opinion these guys are a little strident in their criticisms and loose with their facts. The child testifying to the falseness of Mormonism is wearing thin.

Why ask why?

2006-02-18T18:53:00.000-08:00

There are certain issues that will never be resolved. In spite of that truth, I can't help digging into those issues. Take Mormon apologetics, for example. The attempt to convince others that Mormonism is plausible or not by use of academic tools really bothers me. Still, I find myself hanging out at FAIR. Will someone come to my rescue, please?

It dawned on me, way too late to claim I am really an intelligent guy when all is said and done, that Mormon apologists are not interested in discovering the truth. "They are not committed to the truth?", you disingenuously ask. Certainly they are committed to the truth they believe they already know. They are committed to proctecting the LDS Church from challenges to its truth claims, which they take very personally as their own. What they are not interested in is discovering any truth that might contradict the truth as the LDS Church presents it. Since the LDS Church ideally defines their worldview and perception of the truth, one might say that it is almost impossible for them to entertain the idea that there might be another way of looking at things. So deep is their conviction.

If you go over to FAIR, you will see quite of bit of cheering for any rhetorical maneuvre or 'discovery' that bolsters people's belief in what they already accept as true. I can recall a handful of occasions when I brought up facts that were not consistent with some people's visions of Mormonism. I was pounced upon as though I were the mythical 'underhanded, deceitful and nasty' anti-Mormon. On one occasion, I brought up the fact that early presidents of the LDS Church from Joseph Smith to John Taylor were made kings. Immediately someone asked me from which anti-Mormon book I had gotten that information. Sigh.

Familiarity and comfort are the new standards of truth at FAIR. Bring up anything that is unfamiliar and that makes the faithful uncomfortable, and wham! you are accused of being an anti-Mormon or asked to write the equivalent of an academic article with complete bibliography to back up your pesky contentions. Raise any goofy theory that tickles the ears of the faithful, and you have a real hit.

Once an apologist claimed that in the Zeezrom trial Amulek was citing a scripture from Nephi when he spoke about no unclean thing entering the kingdom of God. I argued that Alma, as the author of the book, was likely the one who either taught Amulek this or put it into Amulek's mouth. You see, as a priest Alma had his own reasons to be concerned with the issue of clean and unclean, and he mentioned how unclean things cannot enter heaven four times in his own book. The apologist's response? Silence. When I asked him directly if he would address the issues I had raised, silence again.

Yes, I am bragging. But hey, I am rarely so clever that I even feel like I can brag.

Darron Smith fired from BYU

2006-02-17T12:22:00.000-08:00

I *just* found out about this. BYU cancelled a class taught by Darron Smith, black scholar on race and Mormonism, without warning. They also terminated his employment as an adjunct at BYU. According to Darron, he was told by a representative of BYU's administration that some of the Brethren were 'uncomfortable' with issues he was raising.

Brother Smith maintains a firm belief in Mormonism in spite of this decision. He has been advocating that the Church clarify its theological position on blacks. Formerly, Mormons were taught that blacks had been non-committal in the great conflict between God and Satan in the premortal existence. For this reason their lineage was denied the priesthood. Of course, Joseph Smith observed no such restriction. African Americans were ordained to the priesthood under his leadership. It was later that men like Heber C. Kimball (who was a racist) claimed that Joseph Smith imparted the historically dubious teaching about blacks as premortal 'fence-sitters.'

This news is upsetting. If Darron's representation of the circumstances of his termination are accurate, then the Church has made a poor decision in firing him, and on grounds that had nothing to do with academics. Now more people will be encouraged to think of BYU as a place where academic freedom is not respected and racism is an institutional problem.

Just the way I want it

2006-02-16T21:51:00.000-08:00

Being an active Mormon doesn't usually include being frank about Mormonism. What you like or don't like about your Church. Since the assumption is that the whole thing is God's one and only true Church, guided by a prophet who receives revelation from God, very few people criticize the Church in the open. Obviously, I am no exception. What I offer is one person's view and opinion. Not an 'Insider's' view. The Mopologists (Mormon apologists) had a field day with Grant Palmer for claiming to offer that. It is simply my view. You may find it illuminating and you may hate it. You may have any number of reactions depending on who you are, what you believe, and whether you like your mattress or not. It is here for you to read if you so choose.

So what kind of Mormon am I? My ancestors joined the Mormon Church as far back as the mid' 1830s. Several of them were in the infamous Martin handcart company that got caught in extreme winter conditions, costing the lives of many who sought to join the saints in Deseret (Utah plus). I served a mission in California, married a wonderful woman in the temple, and graduated from BYU. Over the course of my time in Provo, I became increasingly weary of Happy Valley, its wards, and the school that dominates both landscape and culture: BYU. I also started to question the whys and wherefores of the Mormon faith. I remain an active member to this day, but I won't kid you. I am nowhere close to happy with the LDS Church.

So what I am doing here is telling you how I see it, regardless of outside influences. I doubt many will agree with everything I have to say, whether they be anti-Mormon, TBM (true blue or true believing Mormon), liberal Mormon, ex-Mormon, or what have you. Some of this is a riff on things that I have read on one of the big Mormon discussion boards like ZLMB or FAIR. My intention is not to pick on individual participants from these boards. It's true that I often disagree with them. My aim instead is to have a place where what I say will not be moderated. I rarely said anything that the average person would find offensive, but I regularly found my posts edited by moderators at FAIR. You should see the moderating on FAIR. The rationale behind it, if you can call it that, escapes interpretation. Anyway, if I do this thing right, and represent my views as they actually are, nobody should be perfectly happy. That's just the way I want it.