Kristine Haglund on CSPAN

[Anonymous]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTxmGiXl9CU” class=”bbcode_url”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTxmGiXl9CU Some of you will be familiar with Kristine Haglund who is a historian. She is sometimes asked questions about Mormonism, and I think she’s a terrific moderate voice of reason in the church. Faithful, but also rational and respectful of opposing viewpoints. This link isn’t the full CSPAN interview she did, but someone cut snippets out of that and called it her criticizing the church (I disagree, but you can judge for yourselves).

One thing she talks about is the tension between believing in personal revelation, that we are all entitled to, and an authoritative church with keys where revelation comes top down. In any case, she does a good job providing a balanced perspective. Hopefully you will enjoy it – the snippets are very short.

[Anonymous]

I like Kristine a lot. She’s really thoughtful, and is able to bridge that faith gap in a good way. I get to talk to her every couple of months when she is in the Wash DC area, usually visiting for Dialogue magazine business.

[Anonymous]

hawkgrrrl wrote:

She is sometimes asked questions about Mormonism, and I think she’s a terrific moderate voice of reason in the church. Faithful, but also rational and respectful of opposing viewpoints. This link isn’t the full CSPAN interview she did, but someone cut snippets out of that and called it her criticizing the church (I disagree, but you can judge for yourselves).

News organizations seek the controversial and taking things out of context often is a good way of doing that. Youtube is not exception — something will have more power if it expresses a strong position of opposition. Kristine’s position is more nuanced than the video shows — yet what she says seems quite true and not critical when placed in the non-snippeted context.

hawkgrrrl wrote:

One thing she talks about is the tension between believing in personal revelation, that we are all entitled to, and an authoritative church with keys where revelation comes top down. In any case, she does a good job providing a balanced perspective.

indeed this is the most important thing she said. She says, correctly, that there has been an increased domination of the top-down perspective since the 60s, peaking in the late 80s and 90s with the excommunication of a number of dissidents. Since then, she says, it has become more open, but I’m not so sure. It seems like there is some attempt to open things up, but then there are talks upon talks slamming the door shut.

I was reading some of Steve Benson’s material. He was, of course, one of those who were on the wrong side of the September Six, and had his name removed shortly thereafter. He notes the influence of Reed Benson and Reed’s wife in the declining years of ETB’s life, that they actually authored, for example, the 14F and other notorious sermons happening during that period. As ETB (and his handlers, since he was pretty much unable to physicall lead after around 86) and BKP held a firm grip during the 85-94 period of Benson’s tenure as Prophet, hostility towards openness and hence excommunications of those who disagreed peaked in the church. Kristine mentioned Hinckley in the snippets, it is clear that he dominated another point of view — a softer public image that mitigated the hard-line stance the benson family and BKP took.

I think this is a very interesting historical moment. The interview was driven by Romney’s nomination, and the world is becoming very apparent of an interesting plurality of thinking in a Church that was otherwise thought of as being singularly inflexible in its beliefs. Many of us here live in that nexus, and there are no easy answers out. For many in the church, perhaps a majority, the middle-way constitutes a material threat, and many seem to be hardening the stance — I hear references to ‘follow-the-prophet’ and ‘no middle way’ every week. Perhaps I am attuned to it and it’s always been there — but such hard-line stance seems both defensive and unuseful for meaningful dialog.

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