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I’m seeing a lot of news articles now about the Mormon Church moving to ward more transparency about its foundations. There is an article floating around about how they are publishing pictures of the seer stone that JS used to translate…as well as statements that other documents will be released. On one hand, I’m pleased there is an attempt to be more open about who we are and where we came from. At least, then members have the facts in front of them — many of us felt betrayed when the internet revealed the truth.
At the same time, I feel this concern about it. Concern that their movement toward greater transparency than in the past is motivated simply due to circumstances — the fact that they can’t keep the internet quiet, so they might as well share their own version and evidence of the facts. The fact that they are probably losing membership as a result of all the secrecy or silence about objectionable parts of our religion. So, while the transparency is good, when it is perceived as reactionary, and self-serving, it does as much harm to me as remaining silent.
What really speaks volumes to me is when there are acts of kindness and softening of traditionally hard-nut leadership practices for no reason other than the goodness of the act. And I don’t see that motive in their current push toward transparency.
Thoughts?
Call me an optimist but I think the positives are outweighing the negatives at the moment. I saw a comment on another forum about this stuff being too little too late. While I agree it’s little, I don’t think it’s ever too late. Sometimes we need to demonstrate a little mercy and grace as well. SilentDawning wrote:At the same time, I feel this concern about it. Concern that their movement toward greater transparency than in the past is motivated simply due to circumstances — the fact that they can’t keep the internet quiet, so they might as well share their own version and evidence of the facts. The fact that they are probably losing membership as a result of all the secrecy or silence about objectionable parts of our religion. So, while the transparency is good, when it is perceived as reactionary, and self-serving, it does as much harm to me as remaining silent.
I agree.
At some point people in faith crisis/transition probably become disillusioned with leadership. Leaders are perceived less and less as people with special access to the divine and seen more and more as regular people. When we no longer consider leaders to have superpowers we might doubt their ability to speak for god but humanizing them also lets them have the same weaknesses that we all share.
I was initially taught the old stories. When I came across the new stories I didn’t believe them at first, in fact I defended the old stories. Accepting the new stories was a process. I suspect many leaders were (and are!) in the same boat.
When I accepted the new stories I was reluctant to share them with anyone, not to avoid an argument but because I was concerned that people might lose faith if they were exposed to the new information. The process was difficult for me, I didn’t want that harm to come on other people as the results of my actions. I suspect the leaders that accepted the new stories felt similar feelings.
I’m not saying that the delay is 100% attributable to this process, leaders being just like the average member trying to reconcile new information, but I believe at least some of the delay was the result of this.
I think you’re right though, releasing the information was largely reactionary. I get the impression that the church wouldn’t be releasing the information unless their hand was forced. It’s hard to say. Perhaps the people with the authority to release the information had faith in the older versions of the stories and didn’t trust the more truthful versions, just like you and I. Perhaps for them it took the groundswell facilitated by the internet to get them to question and ultimately accept.
I see it as a good thing. The bullet had to be bitten at some point.
Right now we’ve got members who have accepted the new narratives and members that consider the new narratives to be anti-mormon. I think we have to do even more if we are going to unite the saints. Transparency helps the process. I agree with DJ, better late than never.
I kind of feel like things are starting to unravel for the LDS church, regardless of the approach they take. I’m waiting for the day when the posthumously restore Fawn Brodie’s membership, once everything is out in the open.
SilentDawning wrote:…On one hand, I’m pleased there is an attempt to be more open about who we are and where we came from. At least, then members have the facts in front of them — many of us felt betrayed when the internet revealed the truth…At the same time, I feel this concern about it. Concern that
their movement toward greater transparency than in the past is motivated simply due to circumstances — the fact that they can’t keep the internet quiet, so they might as well share their own version and evidence of the facts.The fact that they are probably losing membership as a result of all the secrecy or silence about objectionable parts of our religion. So, while the transparency is good, when it is perceived as reactionary, and self-serving, it does as much harm to me as remaining silent…Thoughts? I’m glad that they have at least acknowledged some of these historical issues at all instead of mostly pretending they don’t exist the way they used to. However, I don’t see this as being about honesty or transparency as much as mostly intended inoculation and apologetics. It looks like the general idea is to get members used to the idea of some of this and encourage them to shrug it off as supposedly nothing to worry about instead of hearing it first from “anti-Mormon” sources and being completely shocked by it. For example, it looks like they have still intentionally left out important details of the story and obfuscated things and made excuses for some of the most troubling issues instead of really dealing with them head on in a clear and straightforward way.
To me all the historical essays I read basically sounded like, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” because they essentially tap-danced around or flat out denied what I see as the primary reason why some of these issues are so problematic for the Church to begin with, namely that they provide perfectly legitimate and understandable reasons for rank-and-file members to not trust Church leaders and scriptures nearly as much as they have traditionally been trusted in the Church up to this point. Personally I think a better reaction and long-term solution would simply be to de-mythologize the official teachings to some extent especially regarding a more realistic view of the overall reliability (or lack of reliability) of revelation and to try to morph into a kinder, gentler church that is less of a pain and hassle than it currently is for many average members.
This is what the church has going for it — the fact that it’s like a big, mechanistic freight train. People will continue to reinforce the old stories as many will not be aware of the articles and attempts at transparency. This will keep the old culture going, while the church can say it hid nothing because it made the truth public in various corners of the internet and lds.org…. I remember when we taught non-members, we would say our goal was to “become like God”. What we REALLY meant was “we can become gods”, but we didn’t say it openly. Then when investigators would come to us in dismay that they had heard we can become gods, we would say “we’ve been telling you that from the beginning”. Well, no, we weren’t — perhaps the words said it, but we disguised the meaning. I see this is a similar tactic, although in a different avenue….
I can’t help but view all this transparency as self-serving. I guess we should be glad they are doing it finally — people who have given up their retirement savings can at least give knowing the truth in the future (or decide not to give) — but in a way, this transparency move is reinforcing my perception that the church is egocentric. This is a defensive move, and in a world without the internet, they would be adopting the same policy of obfuscation and silence that had preserved the faith of members in decades past.
Nonetheless, I like the DJ’s comment about the need for showing mercy is a valid one. And ultimately, each of us are in control of how much we give to the church in terms of time, faith, commitment, etcetera. At least we will always have that — provided we are not subject to ostracization by family, divorce, job loss as a result.
I view the increased transparency as a net positive although as you point out there are shortcomings. Among many orthodox LDS there is a tendency to view scholarly research into deep and dogdy doctrine – even if it’s published by the church – as negative. The idea is stick to the scriptures, general conference talks, and church manuals, and you are on much safer ground. There’s almost a distrust among some orthodox members of the joseph smith papers and articles. I’ve heard several bishops in my stake say they won’t read them because they fear their faith isn’t strong enough. I’ve also experienced an interesting consequence of the articles the church publishes. Sometimes investigators know more about aspects of church history than 18 year old missionaries. Missionaries can come across as being ignorant or even purposefully misleading.
I still appreciate the efforts. I can read about difficult aspects of our history and have references that aren’t found on the seedy underbelly of the internet.
Here are Richard Bushmans thoughts on it. http://bycommonconsent.com/2015/08/05/on-seerstones/#more-57525 ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://bycommonconsent.com/2015/08/05/on-seerstones/#more-57525 Quote:Do we really want to be part of a religion that dredges up objects and symbols from folk magic? In doing so we join a battle that has waged for four centuries or more between magic and religion.
mom3 wrote:Here are Richard Bushmans thoughts on it.
http://bycommonconsent.com/2015/08/05/on-seerstones/#more-57525 ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://bycommonconsent.com/2015/08/05/on-seerstones/#more-57525 Quote:Do we really want to be part of a religion that dredges up objects and symbols from folk magic? In doing so we join a battle that has waged for four centuries or more between magic and religion.
mom3, thanks for posting that article. I enjoyed reading Bushman’s thoughts. I do want to point out that the quote you took out is not Bushman’s question, but rather it is his acknowledgment that some people might feel uneasy and have that question.The better section for showing Bushman’s thoughts is as follows:
Quote:Seerstones don’t trouble me. I rather like them. They are part of Mormon materiality. They suggest there is a technology of revelation, somewhat resembling ipads, that assist us in getting divine intelligence. I don’t subscribe to Protestant stuffiness about proper ways for God to act and disreputable ones. I am willing to go along with the ways of God even if they are unconventional by enlightenment standards.
I am also happy the church brought out this stone as part of the transparency policy. The Historical Department is willing to show everything, it appears, and let the chips fall.
Some thoughts. Even though the Church is slow to change, I think it’s worthwhile to recognize that the people in positions to effect the kind of change are different people than those who held cards close to the vest in the past. Sure, TSM has been an apostle since the Kennedy Administration, but who’s to say he’s not the one making it all happen now, having been junior to people in the past who had a different view? The rest of the Q12/FP are from the mid-80’s or later, so most of them have come in during a time that the Church has been exploring its own history and trying to wrap its collective brain around it.
To be fair, I don’t think that a lot of this was even known. My perception is that until the Church began the concerted effort of the JSPapers project, that leadership of the Church knew that much about it. The simplified and positive oral tradition had come down through the generations and was probably widely accepted. I can point to one pretty clear example: the priesthood ban. 20th Century leaders thought of it as doctrine… something that had been established as part of the restoration. Yet, now, it’s pretty clear that the Church, by its own research, has determined that it was a mere policy, and a pretty late one, at that, having been established some 25 years after the organization of the Church.
Additionally, some of the things that we now talk about like they are just being revealed, had been known openly in the past. I knew about the various First Vision accounts and even taught a SS lesson in which I talked about them, straight out of the Ensign, in the early 90’s when I was still a believer. Also around the same time, I heard a lesson where the guy talked about seer stones, including JS’s. I remember it, because it annoyed me that we were wasting time talking about that, instead of messages of the Gospel. In other words, it was out there, I knew about it, but was disinterested.
Another interesting case is that it was widely known and public in the late 19th century, that JS had multiple wives. Somewhere along the way, we lost the detail about it. I don’t actually see this as a conspiratorial cover-up. It’s pretty straight-forward to me. In the 19th century, trying to justify polygamy and at the same time combat the RLDS movement’s assertion that BY, not JS, started the practice, the Church was all too eager to declare that JS had been a polygamist, and to point to the people still in the Church who had been sealed to him. Yet in the post-manifesto world, it no longer had relevance. The Church was trying to put that behind them. Not out of hiding history, IMO, but out of focusing on the important parts of the narrative; it was no longer necessary to preach JS as polygamist, so they no longer did. The reason I don’t think it was a concerted effort to hide the truth is that at that time of transition, every person in the Church knew that JS had been a polygamist and every person in the world knew that Mormons had been polygamists. There could have been no way in that era to ‘hide’ those facts. They simply stopped talking about it, and eventually, the not talking about it came to be interpreted as hiding it. Yet, I knew that JS had multiple wives. I didn’t know the extent of it and I think it is fair to say that the leaders of the Church in the 20th century didn’t either, until research was able to stitch the list together.
Bottom line for me: I’m not really that interested in the ‘motives’ of other people. I care far more about their actions. For starters, it’s extremely subjective to talk about the motives of other people. We don’t really know. We can guess at it, like I’ve done above, but ultimately it’s not within our power to know. Therefore, I’m just grateful that the Church is being more forthcoming. I think this is a great time for the Church, and at least from the history standpoint, I think the Church is making great strides forward.
Roadrunner wrote:I’ve also experienced an interesting consequence of the articles the church publishes. Sometimes investigators know more about aspects of church history than 18 year old missionaries. Missionaries can come across as being ignorant or even purposefully misleading.
Bingo. that happened to me on the doorstep of a non-member where I learned about the Mountain Meadows Massacre for the first time.
Also — your comment about the BP that didnt’ want to read the JS papers because he felt his faith might not be strong enough. That makes me wink inside….I have long felt that as a church, we are in the “truth business” — it’s our mission to help people distinguish truth from error. Yet, when the pursuit of truth has the potential to hurt our membership, all of a sudden, it’s better not to read it, or explore it, because of how it might rock our life’s foundations. Not a great example of being in the truth business, in my view.
Every time I hear about the “truth” at church this thought comes to mind….
My biggest challenge with my religion is ego. Transparency won’t change that. Yes having all the details out might help, but what would have helped me more (and I think others) is our lack of boldness. If we had chosen as a faith a different idea than being the one and only true church we might have saved ourselves and the world a pile of agony. It was our bold truth claims that have put us in this bind. The effort to show ourselves as the monument religion has cost us a great deal in the arena of Christ-ness. If I could paint the perfect plan for the leadership, I would keep releasing stuff just to get it done, like cleaning out an old closet. Simultaneously I would throw a huge church focus change on being true children of God. By that I mean a spirit of friendliness, kindness, service, good works, smiling, warmth etc. Drop the political and religious fear mongering and being “His Hands” as President Uchtdorf has taught. Fill the world with giving from us, let the garbage out, then let it drift out to sea.
In my opinion, it’s always good. In general terms, members will either:
Have their testimonies strengthened.
Or, weakened.
Or, stay the same.
How we view this says much more about us than about the Church. I mean that completely. Our initial assumptions reflect us, not anyone else.
Thanks Ray – Quote:Our initial assumptions reflect us, not anyone else.
Now I’m an egomaniac.
Time to scrape another layer off.
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