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I didn’t want to derail another thread but a recent post by DarkJedi reminded me about this. I recently opened up more to my sister (have yet to tell anyone else) about where I stood when i was visiting her recently. A week or two later she sent me a text with a link to an article that she thought was relevant. I told her it didn’t answer anything for me. It seems very vague and blames problems on mormon culture but then doesn’t actually do anything to address what those issues might be. Here is the article. It’s pretty short.
https://www.lds.org/church/news/many-struggles-with-faith-are-based-on-mormon-culture-not-doctrine-professor-says?lang=eng Anyways, we talked about a lot of things but several of the issues I talked about of course were the polygamy, blacks not getting the priesthood, November Policy, multiple versions of the first vision, etc. I told her I had many other issues but if I were to only focus on actual problems that were addressed by lds essays and not things that could be considered speculation that it was still enough for me to push away and question where I stood.
I guess my question is, would you consider these cultural issues? I understand how others could see them as not being doctrinal issues perhaps but calling them cultural seems like a huge stretch to me.
I think a lot of people do get pushed away by the culture. That doesn’t mean everyone does, and I wouldn’t call the things that trouble you just culture. I don’t know why they’re threatening to push you away, but for me, they undercut trust in Church leaders, past and present. How could that be cultural? Here’s something that people who blame culture often don’t consider: in any organization, the leadership bears a great deal of responsibility for the culture. I don’t know how much, but I’d be very surprised if the answer isn’t “most.”
(I’d say the host culture is responsible for most of the rest, which is usually outside of leadership control. An example might be political conservatism in the Church in red states.)
My company’s CEO is currently overhauling our company culture. There were aspects of the culture and business practices that worked well enough in the past, but to be frank, eroded our customers’ trust. When a company’s goods and services move online, loss of trust kills it. The previous CEO couldn’t understand this, but the new one does. Every piece of employee training is now geared toward earning and maintaining trust. Every business practice has been reviewed, and some have been replaced entirely, to ensure that they’re in accordance with our aspirational values. We even have a motto.
It’s working after only a few short years, and it’s a glorious thing to behold.
The Q15 is doing some similar things. There have been changes to how ward councils are run, for example, to try to involve women more. What they’re too reticent to do, though, is change the doctrine. For example, as long as the idea that group X is somehow less than Y is supported by doctrine (e.g. many-to-one marriages and “fixing” homosexuals in the next life), then
regardless of anything else they do, group X will be less than Y in the Church. Yeah, people will be turned off by culture. But culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and in the end, leadership is responsible for it.
Quote:“Stage three faith I think opens you up to being the most vulnerable to a faith crisis because it establishes a set of expectations that are impossible to achieve,” Braithwaite said. “They live in a world that’s binary: it’s black and white, where the Church is all good and couldn’t possibly do anything not good, and the world is wicked and bad.”
This idea of perfectionism can be dangerous because “most faith traditions have certain elements of humanity attached to them,” according to Braithwaite.
Here the article mentions people in stage three being vulnerable to a faith crisis in terms of
doinggood or doingbad. I know many people that have found a comfortable living space within stage three by recognizing and embracing the role of human imperfections. We’ve probably all heard, “The church is perfect, the people are not.” Or maybe presented in a different wrapper, “You can choose to be on board or not, but the church will move on with or without you. If you’re not on board you will miss out.” Perhaps there are pitfalls that arise from when people see imperfections in people’s actions and pitfalls that arise from when people see imperfections in what is presented as the ideal. Culture vs. doctrine? Each concept has their ideal.
Quote:“I think many struggles with faith are struggles with cultural Mormonism,” Braithwaite said. “They’re not necessarily rooted in the canonized, theological doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
I can get behind that, specifically because he used the word “many.” The very fact that some are trying to draw a line between Mormon culture and Mormon doctrine shows that there’s some unrest.
I think the Mormon culture and Mormon doctrine have a symbiotic relationship. One feeds off the other. For example, in Oaks’ conference talk yesterday all of his references to the proclamation came across as though he viewed the proclamation as canonized, theological doctrine – but the proclamation hasn’t been presented to the body of the church as such. So we’re in a limbo with respect to the proclamation. Is it canonized, theological doctrine or not? For some members it is, for other’s it’s not. And that’s how I feel about the cultural vs. doctrinal debate, what some call culture others call doctrine and vice versa. It starts to feel like the real distinction between the two is that anything someone doesn’t like about the church is cultural and the things they do like are doctrinal, and it varies from person to person and even varies over time. Fair enough. Our culture-doctrine needs to evolve to a place where people can disagree with things and if that method is calling something “cultural,” I’m game.
This topic comes up fairly often here. A search of the words culture, tradition, and doctrine (In any combination or separately) will get tons of results. The thing is, what is my doctrine is someone else’s tradition and another one’s culture – and individual views can change over time. Add to that the questions of what exactly does the word doctrine mean and what makes something doctrine? Much of it depends on our own points of view. (Obi Wan Kenobi: “…many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” Dieter F. Uchtdorf: “The “truths” we cling to shape the quality of our societies as well as our individual characters. All too often these “truths” are based on incomplete and inaccurate evidence, and at times they serve very selfish motives.”) I agree that it’s hard to separate things sometimes, and perhaps some things fit into more than one category. For example, I now believe the sacrament is doctrine, but how we do the sacrament is tradition. Polygamy happened. Was it doctrine? It evolved into culture whether or not it was doctrine. I believe Joseph Smith had a profound spiritual experience near his home in NY and it may have been exactly as he described (that is a vision), yet he described it differently on different occasions and in reality rarely talked about it and didn’t like to talk about it. Does that make it less than doctrine and if so, what is it? And why are the stories different? From my point of view the priesthood ban was racist tradition, and I think that’s supported in the essay. But if you go back and read more orthodox forums at the time it was published you’ll see that there are people who (somehow) don’t get that at all from reading the essay (and quite frankly as a teacher I question their reading comprehension abilities, no offense intended
😯 ). In short, the only one who can answer whether something is doctrine, tradition, culture, or something else for you is you.Lastly, my favorite thread on the topic, although not directly addressing your questions is this one:
Doctrine vs Culture/TraditionI really dislike the idea that it’s the culture, not the doctrine (or “the church is perfect, the people are not.” Since when is the church perfect?!) It really feels like SLC is foisting blame for any and all problems right back into the membership. And that honestly doesn’t feel like fair play to me. Either, both, or a combination of the two. Old Timer wrote:
Either, both, or a combination of the two.
I was going to say the same — depends on the person. Since I believe no one can determine the absolute truth of any religion, I let the doctrinal stuff go. I give it a pass. The cultural stuff, that bothers me as it impacts what I must do, my happiness, etcetera. So for me it’s cultural and policy driven, not doctrinal. I also think you could add “leader driven”. They make such stupid decisions sometimes, these guys — I know they make a lot of great decisions too, but the insensitivity and egocentrism has been astounding to me, and represents a third category of stumblingblocks.
Yes, yes, yes. I, for one, definitely had unrealistic expectations that God would bless me and intervene in my life because of my covenant keeping/ honoring priesthood/ paying tithing. Great and painful was my fall.
Unfortunately, there is plenty of blame to go around on that particular topic. There are plenty of scriptures that seem to teach this concept both explicitly and through example. It is taught over the pulpit. Church magazines and publications teach it.
Where is the line between church doctrine and church teachings and church culture? How much church stuff do I have to discard as “cultural interpretations”? Maybe I go all the way back to the idea that God loves us and wants us to be “Excellent” to one another. That is my rock and my doctrine.
Roy wrote:
Where is the line between church doctrine and church teachings and church culture? How much church stuff do I have to discard as “cultural interpretations”? Maybe I go all the way back to the idea that God loves us and wants us to be “Excellent” to one another. That is my rock and my doctrine.
A guitar riff just played in my head. I hope you’re pleased with yourself.
The problems are both cultural and doctrinal. But remember what was once doctrine can be called cultural (and vice versa.) I think you could consider church history a third category. These days I try to make myself more comfortable with many perspectives, despite my proclivities for certain ones. There are some that I am less apt to have wiggle room on, however. To me, questions are more interesting than answers and it’s becoming more and more fun to see what comes out in the wash. Thanks for the comments everyone. Joni wrote:
I think you could consider church history a third category.
I think this is where I was torn. A lot of my issues are tied back into church history and so I can see how some could say that they aren’t doctrinal issues so I need to get over it but I can’t do the mental gymnastics necessary to fit them into the culture category.
Reuben wrote:The Q15 is doing some similar things. There have been changes to how ward councils are run, for example, to try to involve women more. What they’re too reticent to do, though, is change the doctrine. For example, as long as the idea that group X is somehow less than Y is supported by doctrine (e.g. many-to-one marriages and “fixing” homosexuals in the next life), then
regardless of anything else they do, group X will be less than Y in the Church. I understand the resistance to change anything as far as doctrine goes though. Once you start making changes I think it gives a much larger portion of the membership reason to really question things than there was before. I don’t see things going well if there are relatively big changes in the doctrine even if I support those changes.
That article was floating around not to long ago. Personally, it feels like a cheap cop out, a dishonest move to
1. Declare past doctrine “culture”, because you don’t agree with it
2. Declare failed prophecy “personal opinion”
It’s one of the biggest problems I’ve got with the Church. When you’re wrong, you should admit it; not make excuses or “reinterpret” to make it seem like you were right all along. I also don’t like it when TBMs try to come up with a reason for why I feel the way I do, that still fits within their religious paradigm.
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