A book of essays on the Gospel Topics Essays quietly hit the shelves last year: The LDS Gospel Topics Series: A Scholarly Engagement (Signature Books, 2020), edited by Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst. There is an introductory chapter on how the Essays came to be, then a chapter on each of the Essays by a scholar equipped to have a serious discussion on that particular topic. I plan on doing a few posts covering selected chapters. In this post, let’s talk more generally about the Essays. And there are lots of general questions to kick around.
Is This What Inoculation Looks Like?
In the early days of the Bloggernacle (like fifteen years ago), there was a lot of talk about Inoculation. This was the idea that rather than running a correlated LDS curriculum that carefully avoided any discussion of difficult issues (which is how the Church always did things), maybe it would be wise to bring up those difficult issues in Seminary or Sunday School lessons so kids (and adults) don’t get blindsided by Evangelical classmates or Facebook friends on this or that issue or problem. The assumption here is that the difficult issues were not, by themselves, fatal to LDS faith claims more generally, but that avoiding them in the curriculum increasingly sets up mainstream Mormons for a Big Surprise when they stumble into the wrong discussion with friends or on the Internet. It was really the Internet that was forcing the issue.
So eventually the Gospel Topics Essays came out (first published from 2013 to 2015). This was a bold new initiative for the Church, which had carefully avoided doing “official” apologetics up until this point. FARMS and FAIR offered unofficial LDS apologetics, and that was apparently enough for awhile. But it’s not really clear that the Essays were intended to fill the Inoculation slot. In other words, a committee of apostles sits around a table and says, “So it looks like lots of members are having questions about the translation of the Book of Mormon. What are we going to do to help them?” It’s not at all clear their response is or was, “Let’s write a lengthy essay on the topic and post it at LDS.org and tell everyone to read it. That will solve the problem.” My sense is the Essays are something, but they are not Inoculation.
What Do We Do With This Shiny New Tool?
Let me quickly note that I’m not summarizing the introductory chapter in the book, I’m just thinking out loud about the Essays before engaging with the book in future posts. It’s clear the Essays are not intended to fill the Inoculation slot, because: (1) The Essays weren’t announced or publicized as they were published, and were for several years tough to find at the LDS.org site. If you didn’t know they were there, you probably wouldn’t find them. (2) The Essays have not been matriculated into the LDS curriculum, and probably won’t be. Inoculation was discussed as a broad program. The Essays seem to be viewed as a narrow solution. Frankly, I have no clear idea what the LDS leadership thinks about the Essays.
Here’s the problem. Imagine an apostle at General Conference giving a talk along these lines: We have come to understand lots of members have serious questions about tricky doctrinal and historical issues. These are valid questions. We have published the Essays to respond to those questions and provide members with some official and faithful responses drafted by various LDS scholars, then edited, endorsed, and published by the senior leaders of the Church. Well, you can see why that won’t happen. The last thing the leadership wants to do is acknowledge that doubts are valid or well founded. And they can’t say there are bunch of trivial and silly questions that members now have, and we put out these long, detailed, serious Essays to address those trivial issues. First, most people sense the issues aren’t trivial, and second, you don’t spend a lot of time and money producing and publishing a bunch of Essays responding to trivial questions. You only respond to serious issues. So there really isn’t a productive (as opposed to counterproductive) approach to publicly explain and endorse the Essays. So they pretty much haven’t.
So what we have in the Essays is a shiny new tool that is somehow useful in an apologetic way as a response to doctrinal or historical questions that some members have. But the leadership isn’t quite sure how to use it. And the initial reaction of many members to the Essays when they come across them is more like, “Wow, this sounds like anti-Mormon discussions I have heard about,” not “It’s really nice to have these helpful official responses on these troubling issues.” The bottom line: For many mainstream Mormons, the Essays were troubling more than they were helpful. I think the leadership was a little surprised at that development. I suspect that some of the apostles think the Essays were a bad idea, at least in retrospect. I wouldn’t be surprised if they disappear from LDS.org at some point.
There’s Still Time to Change the Road You’re On
As I hinted at in the first section, drafting and editing and publishing a long essay is not the only way to deal with this or that topic that troubles the membership enough to warrant some sort of response. You could drop apologetic discussions into LDS lesson material. You could post articles on various topics at LDS.org or in the Ensign (now the Liahona). You could attempt to address this or that topic in Conference talks. You could do it in firesides addressed to particular demographics, LDS Youth or Young Adults or Missionaries. You could use books like the Saints volumes rather than topical essays. Or, of course, you could just do nothing and decide to not address the issues at all.
In case you haven’t noticed — most of those options are now being used. There is more open discussion of the problems and issues, and more direct attempts to address those questions, than ever before. The term “faith crisis” or some similar description appears in talks and articles. My sense from just casual observation (I haven’t gone looking in the Ensign or Conference talks, or done a Ziff-like tabulation) is that these discussions don’t often refer to the Essays. The Essays are the shiny new tool they don’t want to use.
It’s a Tool That Does Something, But What Does It Do?
So if it’s not really clear what the Essays were supposed to do, let’s ask what they are actually doing. I’m going to assume that you Readers of the Blog are aware of the Essays and have read most of them. Did they do anything for you? Did they answer any questions or just make you shake your head? Did you recommend them to a family members or to a local leader? And how did those people respond? Were they Essays helpful to them, or troubling? Did your Bishop say thanks for the link? Or did he say you ask too many questions and read too many books and don’t send me any more links?
If we’re really lucky, some Reader of the Blog had a conversation with Uncle GA and can give us some inside information about what senior leaders expected from the Essays and what, after the fact, they now think about the project. But everyone gets to share their two cents worth.
So:
- What did you think of the Essays when you first read them?
- What do you think of them now?
Wheat & Tares 
Reading the essays for the first time felt a bit like reading a tabloid newspaper. All these things about Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, polygamy, and the temple that I only really had the merest inkling about turned out to be even worse (or at least different) than expected. And to have official confirmation from a Church source that these were accurate! I was an every-Sunday and every-Wednesday Mormon who graduated early morning Seminary and Institute and served a full-time mission and it’s hard to recall a time when some of these topics were mentioned let alone explained (and there was never a discussion on them). I think the closest I ever got was reading the Institute manual, Church History in the Fullness of Times, and listening to Truman Madsen’s lecture series on Joseph Smith. The best analogy I can think of is that this is a bit like one of those stories you used to hear of where a person finds out that their older sister is actually their birth mother and their parents are actually their grandparents. Raising a person to believe a fiction like that isn’t good, but when the true story is much, much more complicated (at best), you can start to understand why people resort to such fictions. And is it the person’s fault for assuming that their parents are in fact their parents? Why shouldn’t they believe the people they have loved and trusted literally their whole lives?
I haven’t read all the essays, but I’ve enjoyed most of what I have read. I find it refreshing to get more than the Primary level answers from official sources and welcome the shift to “allow” critical analysis of events and doctrines. History is messy. People are contradictory and always fall short of perfection. It’s dangerous to lionize leaders or historical figures without acknowledging their faults.
I’ve really enjoyed the Come Follow Me curriculum this year. Specifically, I’ve enjoyed the supplemental material and essays that are linked to each week’s lesson. I find reading the Doctrine and Covenants generally dry and hard to read continuously. The supplements are fascinating, though. I love getting to see the foibles and conflicts these early saints had. I realize that they were all making it up as they went and had no template to build the kingdom with. I’m amazed at the huge swings of events that occurred in such a short time and these essays and supplements fill that void.
History is messy and it’s good that we can acknowledge it.
I bought Harris and Bringhurst book for the Introduction. Highly recommended. It details the background leading up to the publication of the Essays and is worth the price alone. Remember President Uchtdorf’s “Mistake’s were made talk”? – it’s part of the background. The first Essays were published shortly after.
The Essays have difficulty threading the needle. The one on the Book of Abraham severed any belief my wife had in the Church’s truth claims. You’ll find a lot of ex-Mormons started with the Essays in order to keep the counsel of the church to stick with “reliable sources”
The Essays, however, are still apologetics, and not a completely honest accounting. The Harris/Bringhurst monograph helps provide more accurate context.
This post makes some excellent points. It leads to the central question: why are the Essays under ceaseless attack? The answer is that people don’t like the Essays because the Essays require difficult, challenging thought.
In this day and age when getting a hot dog requires no more effort than clicking a tab on a website and having it delivered, people are not used to doing things that take effort. This goes for religion. People want to sit around and have to doctrine spoon fed to them in an easy to digest manner.
People should read the Essays and put time and effort into understanding them. Real Religion takes more work than most of the masses are willing to give.
Life is about more than lounging about in sweatpants and crocs watching cat videos on YouTube. It is about constantly learning and challenging one’s ideas by reading things like the Essays. Everyone should make the effort to do so.
The most problematic aspect of the essays is not necessarily what they say specifically, though that is often highly problematic, e.g., several months shy of her fifteenth birthday. The question the church will probably never answer is why the essays were necessary. In other words, why did you, church leaders, feel that church members could not handle the unvarnished truth about church history? And what else have you varnished? They don’t want to have that conversation.
The purpose of the essays was for church to respond to critics’ common refrain that the church was not open or honest about its history with them. Church leaders wanted to be able to say that ex-Mormons and critics were simply too lazy and hadn’t read or studied what the church had available for them.
The OP is absolutely right that the intent of the essays wasn’t inoculation. The content of the essays hasn’t been featured in conference talks, lesson manuals, or any other platforms where members commonly inform themselves about the church and its teachings. The essays are buried away in the Gospel Topics section of its website, which few appear to read, and the church knows this, for they are able to see how many visit various pages in their website.
I remember reading a news story a few years ago about a Gospel Doctrine teacher been released from his calling and reprimanded by the bishop for using the Race and the Priesthood essay to teach his class.
I’ve heard many stories from ex-Mormon forums about bishops and leaders, when asked, being clueless about the essays’ existence.
I remember finding out about the essays not through my ward, or any of the church leaders. Rather it was through national and local Utah press, and through John Dehlin and ex-Mormon blogs. I’ve heard dozens of personal stories on ex-Mormon sites about persons beginning their exit from Mormonism because of reading the essays and finding out that many things that they were under the impression were lies were actually true.
As for how the essays are written, poorly and are full of disingenuous apologetic-speak. But they are the best that the church has ever released on a range of sensitive topics.
I agree with Mr. Charity that people (i.e., members) should read the essays and put the time and effort into them to really understand them. But how far are you willing to go in order to do that? Will you look at and research the footnotes? Will you then seek out other supporting material? Because if you do that, you’re likely to discover all kinds of things that you never knew about the Church even if you attended Sunday School, YM/YW, Seminary, served a mission, attended BYU (and took the required religion classes), served in various callings as an adult including Gospel Doctrine teacher. Does this sound like some kind of hypothetical or are you getting that I just described myself?
And the question is, what do you do with all this new information? How does it affect your testimony? How does it affect your trust in the Brethren? I’m warning anyone reading this that if you actually study the essays (not just read but study which means accessing the footnotes and researching other sources of info) you can’t un-see what you see. And I doubt your testimony / trust won’t be altered by the experience.
I was already pretty deep in a faith crisis when the essays came out. At that time I had already read about most of the issues in “anti” books and websites. For me, the essays were validating because they represented a formal acknowledgement of the problematic issues by the Church; that the controversial things I had been reading about could no longer be dismissed as “anti-Mormon lies” because, it turns out, they were mostly true and the Church says so. Also, they gave me more freedom to bring up these issues in Church lessons and with local leaders, without worrying about being put on the bishop’s secret apostate watch list, as long as I cite the official Church source. Topically, they are a mile wide and an inch deep, and kind of shifty in how they are written, but are far better than what we had before from the Church (nothing). In a way, the essays helped me choose to stay. But I can understand why some Church members who read them are more inclined to leave; that feeling of betrayal never fully goes away.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that when the essays were first published, Elder Packer (“Some things that are true are not very useful”) was opposed to them, but conceded to allow them on the condition that they be made hard to find, buried in a corner of the Church site so that someone determined enough may find them, but a casual member would never run across them by accident. Also, the Brethren may have understood “inoculation” to mean the very existence of the essays (not the content) is what gives the Church deniability. So if an inquisitive seminary student mentions that he heard something about polyandry or peepstones, the teacher can say something like, “Yes the Prophet and Apostles already know about it. There is a boring essay about it on the Church website explaining the history, and it’s not that big of a deal and doesn’t affect your salvation. Moving on! Open up your scriptures to….”. For some, just saying that the Church is already aware of the problem and that resources exist is enough to shut down further inquiry. While I don’t believe this is an honest way to teach, it is still a lot more honest than what I grew up with, when there was complete denial or refusal to address the thorny issues at all.
From the Come, Follow Me—For Sunday School Doctrine and Covenants 2021:
“In Gospel Topics (topics.ChurchofJesusChrist.org) you can find basic information about a variety of gospel topics, along with links to helpful resources, such as related general conference messages, articles, scriptures, and videos. You can also find Gospel Topics Essays, which offer in-depth answers to doctrinal and historical questions.”
Also: “Numerous articles about the people, artifacts, geography, and events of Church history can be found at ChurchofJesusChrist.org/study/history/topics.”
While some efforts to get the essays out there are being made, they were not made initially. That may say something about purpose, but also may say something about tenuous, fragile agreement among the Brethren. I think both Marlin Jensen and Steven Snow have spoken about purpose — or at least implied purpose.
I remember a bishop trying to get the HP Group and EQ at least to include the essays in their discussions. They wouldn’t — whether by decision or default, I don’t know.
(1) agree with the comments above that the purpose seems to be plausible deniability – “we aren’t hiding anything! Look at this right here on the church website!”
(2) they are helpful when a member is claiming Joseph Smith didn’t practice polygamy, or giving reasons for the priesthood and temple ban. Pointing to an official church publication is pretty much they only way to deal with that. I don’t think they’ve actually been helpful to people in faith crisis.
(3) agree they remain misleading. A few months shy of 15 – gross. Omitting some key info about the context of the priesthood ban. Etc.
Ultimately the essays are insufficient because they still will not go so far as to say “prophets and and do make a lot of mistakes.” That’s the elephant in the room that the Q15 will not allow to be addressed but is the key to unlocking the mess. Leaves the Church in a very different place, though, because the leaders will lose their tight grip.
I agree with JCS and Josh H that really studying and contemplating the essays takes effort that most members are not willing to make. They may suspect that they will find things they don’t want to find.
I also agree with Elisa that the essays are written in a way that is vague and avoids responsibility. Someone really has to read between the lines to get an accurate understanding of what is being admitted.
Every issue addressed by the multiple essays could have been addressed in a single essay. An essay that said 1) no church leader is perfect 2) church leaders make mistakes 3) church leaders made mistakes by not disclosing known facts and 4) current church leaders are deeply sorry and apologize that these facts were not disclosed.
In many cases, the cover up is worse than the initial error. We may or maybe not agree that this is the case here, but I think we would all agree that the failure to acknowledge mistakes and the failure to apologize is causing harm.
I think the key to inoculation efforts is to both present the information in digestible doses and to teach the audience the conclusions that they should reach as a result of the new information.
This is an extremely small sample size, but every time that the essays have been brought up during lessons in my ward (twice in all these years) the bulk of the dialogue didn’t center around the information itself, we skipped over that part as quickly as possible. The dialogue focused on the correlated, approved conclusions that should be reached in light of the information.
When I read the Polygamy in Nauvoo essay, it was the one time in my life when I was standing up and was then really, really glad that I had a chair nearby to sit down on, because otherwise I probably would have hit the ground. It was a profound shock. Two days later I read the Blacks and the Priesthood essay and that made matters even more painful. I am still an active member, but there is a chasm between Before the essays and After the essays that is enormous.
I have never recommended these essays to anyone because I think they are most likely to cause serious doubts where there used to be an ignorance is bliss mentality.
Part of me thinks that the Church was legally obligated to put the essays on the website. I’m not trying to be cynical, just wondering what else they are used for. Does anyone know of people who’s faith was strengthened by the essays? I myself turned to them in a desperate hope that what I had been hearing from other sources was not true. When those fears were confirmed, and more things opened to me (Helen Mar Kimball, anyone?), it was tremendously distressing.
Can we get an essay on why the Church is holding on so tightly to over 100 billion dollars in assets and what they plan to do with it.?
Wondering, thanks for pointing out that the new D&C manual directed people to the essays. A step in the right direction. Still, I doubt that this will lead too many members to read the essays. I imagine that more members read the manuals than the content on the Gospel Topics section of the church’s website. But I doubt that many of them go searching the sources that footnotes in the manual are pointing them to. It still seems like an updated form of plausible deniability in response to critics who say that the church is not featuring these topics and that they’re essentially buried in web pages that few visit. “Well, we’ve directed members to read them in the footnotes in our church manuals” is what they’re saying. OK, why not feature these topics in your manuals? I doubt that the church is going to go that far. For the very reason that many are claiming (such as Dave C. about his wife) that the essays were the first stepping stone toward disbelief in the church’s teachings.
When I was a student at BYU my roommate and I were fortunate enough to take both semesters of Church History from a phenomenal religion professor who dumped the approved textbook and used original source materials (diaries, letters, newspapers, minutes of meetings, etc.) instead to teach us. On day one of both semesters he warned us that his class was not for the faint of heart and that if anyone was not willing to see the church and its members at their best and at their very worst they were welcome to drop the class. Such a way to teach church history made it vital, real and sometimes extremely maddening and perplexing. My roommate and I would often talk late into the night as we had to wrestle with facts such as BY decreeing that even the very poorest church members living in the State of Deseret had to shop and do business only at the local ZCMI co-ops where prices were often higher (sometimes much higher) than at businesses run by “Gentiles” or else face automatic excommunication. This was tame stuff compared to what we learned regarding the Kirtland, Missouri and Nauvoo periods. Was I shaken at times? Definitely. But as our professor often reminded us would we have done much better than these people had done if we’d been in their place without the valuable blessing of hindsight?
How my professor got away with teaching Church History raw and unvarnished continues to be a mystery to my friend and me today. BYU would certainly NOT allow such a class to be taught now. What a shame! I feel that our church has a serious problem with all but deifying our leaders past and present and with mythologizing our history in order to tell ourselves that all of the persecutions and problems in the past happened because we were God’s chosen people just like the Jews were in the Bible and that “the world and Satan” were out to destroy us. The truth, which is much messier and less glorious, is that even when the fullness Christ’s gospel is restored it must be taught by imperfect and flawed (sometimes very flawed) human beings. We’ve hidden our history because we have craved the adulation and acceptance of the wider world and of our own members rather than to take the course of openness and complete honesty. Because the church unfortunately chose the former course rather than the latter members now feel duped and betrayed. This is just one more example of why honesty IS always the best policy.
I am having a hard time recalling the exact timeline and circumstance of my introduction to the Essays, but I remember that the Race & The Priesthood essay came into my life just as I was shriveling up inside from the cognitive dissonance being so loud, at least five years ago. It was perfect timing because I felt my mental health and my sanity slipping, very painfully and dramatically, and that essay was what “cured” me. I understand the Essays can be read by different people with different lenses who will pick up different messages, and they may have been quietly edited along the way, but the message I got from that essay originally was more or less “prophets are flawed human beings, influenced by biases, cultural norms, and other shortcomings, and they may lead you astray; take what they say with a grain of salt.” That was exactly what I needed to feel like I was not going crazy. After that, I was able to weigh my own personal wisdom and life experience at par with the words of church leaders and stop feeling gas-lighted ALL THE &%#@! TIME. It was the best medicine ever, getting that message from an official church source.
But the result of that medicine (and many other ‘medicines’ that I have allowed into my life since then, in pursuit of mental health and sanity) is that I no longer feel broken, and I no longer need the church to fix me. I give it as much attention as I want to at any given time, and that’s usually not very much. Thank you, Race & The Priesthood essay!
I was a church history nerd as a young woman, so I was fairly well ‘inoculated’ already, having read some Fawn Brodie in 8th grade (although I was convinced it was all lies), having visited Mountain Meadows itself, etc. Thus I can’t speak much to the shock that some people feel at church history issues themselves. (Although there were a couple things I uncovered that did make my jaw drop as I did other research mid-faith crisis.)
Interesting story: about 2017, in the middle of my “faith crisis”, I was Relief Society President and was somehow introduced to the Shoulder To The Wheel website (dead and gone last time I checked – a real pity). It was created, as I recall, to educate people about the church’s issues with race and try to put an end to the racism in the church. It provided lesson materials, links, all sorts of resources, and asked people to commit to somehow starting or encouraging conversations in their wards and branches about racism being doctrinally unsupported, with an eye to doing so in alignment with the 40th anniversary of the 1978 revelation on race. I signed my name to the commitment and fretted about it for months, not sure what I could or should do.
Well, summer of 2018 I ended up volunteering to teach a 5th Sunday RS/PH lesson about the 40th anniversary, etc. I had tons of resources from the aforementioned website, but my primary material was the Race & The Priesthood essay. I had printed copies for everyone in attendance, and my cover sheet was a list of all the Essays by subject and where they could be found. I am not sure if I hadn’t really grasped or didn’t really care about the damage to testimonies those Essays could cause. My main point was to prove to people that the Race & The Priesthood essay was legitimately produced by the church and available on the church’s website and if they were interested about other issues, they would know where to look.
Turns out we had a HUGE tourist turnout in our tiny little branch that weekend! We filled our chapel completely. So I introduced dozens of people from around the country to the Essays that might not have otherwise encountered them! Ha! No other branch or stake leaders were in attendance at the meeting (after starting the meeting and “passing the time over to our Relief Society President” the branch presidency member who was there left the room), so I never got any push-back!
I agree with others that I think the Essays exist for plausible deniability. In other words, the gaslighting can continue. “The Church is very transparent about these issues you think are so thorny! See, look – we have all the information right here on the website (undated and unauthored, but whatever)! We don’t hide anything!” Plus, the wording is very “slippery” – can’t think of another word that describes it better. But I don’t expect anything different and I am very grateful for the mental and emotional and spiritual freedom I gained by reading them. Being a fully devout member of a church that acts like it is perfect and speaks directly for god REALLY STINKS, to put it nicely.
“ Life is about more than lounging about in sweatpants and crocs watching cat videos on YouTube.”
Yeah? Well, you know, that’s just like uh, your opinion, man.
“ Life is about more than lounging about in sweatpants and crocs watching cat videos on YouTube.”
Yeah? Well, you know, that’s just like uh, your opinion, man.
Some responses to the various comments above:
1. I taught GD for about 4 years. Every time where it would make sense to do so, I referenced the Gospel Topics and mentioned difficult aspects therein. No one in my ward batted an eye. Sometimes I think the average member knows more than we think. (Other times I’m not so sure.)
2. No one has mentioned Ballard’s injunction to CES to make the GTs their “walk and talk.” I can’t speak to whether that was actually implemented, since I don’t live in that world much, but it seems highly relevant to the analysis about inoculation.
3. I think it’s misleading to say that the GTs largely affirm “anti-Mormon” sites. Perhaps there is a narrowing of the gap regarding whether certain facts are true, but for the most part, most “anti” sites engage in the same behavior as they decry in the Church: focusing on certain facts out of context, presenting them in a misleading fashion, falsely suggesting they were emphasized than more they were at the time, etc. They trade in the Church’s black-and-white portrayal for their own white-and-black portrayal. It’s no more nuanced than the Church’s Sunday School curriculum.
4. Relatedly, nuance is the whole game in history–not just Church history, per se, but history generally. Or, to put it another way, all history is messy. And I just don’t think very many of us as humans (not just Church members) want or like that kind of nuance in whatever history we ascribe to. It gets in the way of good stories and useful narratives. So while I think the context here is germane to church members, we’re really just engaging in problems with historical approaches generally.
I read the essays as they came out while I was serving as a bishop. I was well aware of the issues and troubled by them. I was still naive, thinking that when the essays came out the leaders of the church would deal with the issues in a responsible, ethical way. They had taken so long to address the issues, surely they would do it right. So many of us were wating for them to provide leadership.
But lawyerly evasion is not leadership. I was heartbroken at the time to see that as a group the FP and apostles are not capable of dealing with facts like reasonable adults, and cannot deal with evidence of past mistakes, dishonesty, and wrongdoing with humility and a straightforward commitment to fix things and to stop propagating wrong history and disproven doctrine. They are also not capable of treating members like the adults that they are. In the scriptures that they are supposed to be the custodians of, we mere mortals are supposed to be gods one day and don’t need to be protected from facts.. Writing that takes members into a haze of defensive spin does no good at all.
My biggest beef is that the essays are not signed or dated.
I was also completely frustrated with the Book of Mormon and DNA essay. They were just grasping at any possible theoretical exercise to explain how DNA can vanish. But that’s just not scientific.
I was appreciative of the Priesthood Ban essay specifically calling out past racism for what it is.
My overall take here is that the Church has decided that honesty is not the best policy but just an ok policy. Publishing these was an attempt to be a certain kind of honest. We can and should expect better.
I remember not being terribly surprised when they came out. My dad had introduced me to a lot of the issues when I was growing up. I thought it was weird when a counselor to the mission president asked everyone to read them in a stake conference talk. I was naive about the ignorance that people had about those topics. I assumed that since I had heard them growing up that they were more commonly known.
I don’t really like the term “faith crisis” for the issues caused by the revelation that we weren’t told the whole truth. I think “trust crisis”is more accurate. It’s a feeling of betrayal that the people you trusted to tell you “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” did not. They hid the parts away that are messy or tried to obfuscate them. I’m glad they are at least discussing the issues now. That’s one step in the right direction, but I think we need a few more steps in the directions of openness, transparency, and nuance to get us to the state we need to be in.
josh h: “…if you actually study the essays … you can’t un-see what you see.”
It’s not just, for instance, seeing Joseph Smith’s polygamy. It’s seeing it defended in doctrine and practice. *That* is what I can’t un-see. My disappointment with those essays led me to read more and trust less across the board.
We need to be careful about our use of the word “inoculation.”
Inoculation is a great thing in the proper context.
But if we are using the word to describe the process of making young members think bad things are good, then what we really are describing is brainwashing.
I’d have an easier time with the inoculation argument if we were being completely open and straightforward about mistakes of the past, working actively to repair the damage that resulted (and continues to result), and putting safeguards in place to prevent future problems.
I grew up with a ho hum attitude about the mountain meadows massacre. I should have been shocked and horrified. But I was “inoculated.”
I wonder whether the harm caused by the Gospel Topic Essays is equal to the harm caused by the CES Letter. Ironic.
Chadwick pointed out lack of authorship–an indicator of institutionalizing dogma.
The danger of these essays is they set up beliefs and belief systems; the GT Essays do not illuminate, reveal, unfold, or expound anything. There is no Spirit in the work.
The ethos behind the GT Essays feels more like an institutional confession than an accepting of responsibility. Leadership doesn’t seem to know the difference.
My own response to the Gospel Topics essays was mixed. I already knew that stuff, but had also been burned by mentioning these things, in a faithful but historically accurate way, in RS lessons. I was literally released for discussing things in a more honest way than the lesson manuals (and some of those manuals were literally straight up wrong in what they were saying about historical events). Regardless, I was glad the Church was being more honest about its warts, but my disappointment was triggered repeatedly by the way some of these things were written, including the nauseating reference to “several months shy of her fifteenth birthday” which was so completely disingenuous and deliberatly designed to downplay the predatory nature of that “proposal.” Ultimately, I think it would be very hard to write a satisfying essay for many of these topics. Here’s a more honest account:
Race & PH Ban: Early church leaders were racist, some more than others, and they deliberately coded this into the Mormon system of governance. They were terrified (like a lot of other white settlers) of having to compete sexually with men from other races, and so they created the highest penalties they could get away with against it, execution being one, but the one that lasted longest was not allowing the men to hold the priesthood and preventing couples of other races from going to the temple.
Heavenly Mother: We believe she exists, but a whole lot of Church leaders are hoping like hell that they get to have multiple wives in the eternities, and so do you really want them speculating about HM? I didn’t think so. Also, quite a few church leaders find women in power threatening, so they don’t want anyone talking about HM or worshiping her or praying to her. Again, do you really think they could possibly say anything valuable about HM? Absolutely not.
JS & Polygamy: He did some very questionable things that aren’t explained by him directly and appear to be an abuse of his power and sexual predation, sometimes on disturbingly young women. This trend began when he was discovered having an affair with a teenage servant, and basically this is the worst cover story for adultery in history, that just kept getting worse and worse over time, spreading like a cancer throughout early Mormonism. Because it was widespread, even today Mormons, some of whom are descendants of polygamists, feel compelled to defend the practice. Not everyone practiced it (practice makes perfect); it was really just a perk for leaders because their blood was considered more “believing” and special, as if one could transmit a testimony genetically (which is actually consistent with what people thought in early protestant settlements in Massachussetts, so go figure). It was pure elitism, and an ironic twist on the term “unpaid lay clergy.”
We can all see why nobody asked me to write these.
Thanks for the comments, everyone. Some quick responses:
squidloverfat: “I find it refreshing to get more than the Primary level answers from official sources and welcome the shift to “allow” critical analysis of events and doctrines. History is messy.” It is certainly true that the Essays provide deeper discussion of the covered topics than is found in any manual or any “official” publication. I suspect they did not go through Correlation.
John Charity Spong: “People should read the Essays and put time and effort into understanding them.” Yes, they should. But the leadership has done little to highlight the Essays to the general membership or recommend they be read by the general membership. I suspect the official view is something like: Generally, people should *not* read the Essays, unless directed to do so by a local or senior leader.
John W: “I’ve heard many stories from ex-Mormon forums about bishops and leaders, when asked, being clueless about the essays’ existence.” Yes, and this is so puzzling. They at least ought to put a paragraph or two into the Handbook making all local leaders aware of the Essays and suggesting they read them, so they’ll know when to advise a troubled member who comes to them that this or that Essay would be helpful to them.
Wondering: “I remember a bishop trying to get the HP Group and EQ at least to include the essays in their discussions. They wouldn’t — whether by decision or default, I don’t know.” It’s almost like the average member just isn’t interested in LDS doctrine or history.
Everyone else: Thanks for the great comments.
“History is messy.”
Yes, history is complicated, complex, difficult to understand, and full of extraordinary circumstances. The study of it may also reveal unsavory aspects about people or events that you may hold in high esteem. Yet, I only hear the description of history as “messy” in the context of Mormon history and only by believers. For two reasons, it seems. 1) To downplay the magnitude of the moral mistakes made by Joseph Smith and other earlier leaders. 2) To trivialize the mistakes as to say, “yes, Joseph Smith made mistakes, but all historical heroes we revere were imperfect and the more we study about them the more mistakes we see, history is by nature messy.” Suffice it to say, “messy” is not a word that I choose to describe history.
“because their [leaders’] blood was considered more “believing” and special, as if one could transmit a testimony ”
“blood was considered more ‘believing'”
This is still being taught in private unrecorded talks by general authorities in small group meetings. Some day we will see this as a ‘folk doctrine’ but right now it is being actively taught to young adult groups and missionaries The concept of believing blood could be an entire post. I, personally, find it deeply problematic and reject it entirely. But it’s going to be a long time before (if) it is ever rooted from our ideology.
^ Source? That sounds like an urban legend to me. I’ve certainly never heard anyone actually preach that.
mww, Pontius,
“Believing blood” has been a concept in Mormonism from JS to at least Apostle Ballard in 2011. I haven’t located anyplace where it was taught that church leaders or polygamous men had more believing blood than others, though it was commonly taught that most of those who join the Church are literal descendants of Abraham. There were very different elements in BY’s Mormonism that contributed to acceptance and practice of polygamy. Maybe “believing blood” is less public now that the Church has more rampant growth in Africa than in Europe. (Incidentally, the notion that British and Scandinavians where the Church had early success were of Israelitish blood was not started by or unique to JS and Mormonism.)
For a start, here’s what Joseph R. Stuart wrote:
“Six months after his January 1839 escape from incarceration in Liberty, Missouri, Joseph Smith preached to a group of Latter-day Saints “on the doctrine of election.” Willard Richards, a portly thirty-five-year-old physician, took copious notes of Smith’s sermon, in which the Mormon prophet expounded his views on the nature and mission of the Holy Ghost. Smith declared that two “comforters” existed. The first was the same given at Pentecost that expanded the intellect and enlightened any “man who is of the literal seed of Abraham.” Those with Abrahamic lineage would physically feel the Holy Spirit wash over their souls at conversion. For those not born with Israelite blood (“Gentiles”), the Holy Ghost functioned as a racial cleansing agent, which would purge “out the old blood and make him actually the seed of Abraham.” Smith persevered in this vein, declaring that those without “the blood of Abraham (naturally) must have a new creation by the Holy Ghost” through baptism. For those born outside the Abrahamic covenant and the bloodline of Israel who converted to Mormonism, there would “be more of a powerful effect upon the body” and an effect “visible to the eye.”
Citing: “History, 1838–1856, volume C–1 (2 November 1838–31 July 1842),” The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed June 10, 2017, http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-c-1-2-november-1838-31-july-1842/543.
There was also:
“What then is believing blood? It is the blood that flows in the veins of those who are the literal seed of Abraham–not that the blood itself believes, but that those born in that lineage have both the right and a special spiritual capacity to recognize, receive, and believe the truth. The term is simply a beautiful, a poetic, and a symbolic way of referring to the seed of Abraham to whom the promises were made. It identifies those who developed in pre-existence the talent to recognize the truth and to desire righteousness.” Bruce R. McConkie, A New Witness for the Articles of Faith, pp. 38-39.
President Faust’s 2005 reference to the idea is reported here: https://www.thechurchnews.com/archives/2005-05-28/rock-solid-in-faith-91316
Elder Ballard’s 2011 reference is reported here: https://www.thechurchnews.com/archives/2011-02-19/tapestry-of-gods-hand-is-evidenced-in-life-of-joseph-smith-59831
I don’t know whether there are later references, but a number of scholars including, but not limited to, Joseph Stuart and Armand Mauss have dealt with the subject.
I think it would be very difficult for the Church to disavow the idea without simultaneously emphasizing how wrong JS, BY, WW, and others could be about the subject. Ignoring inconvenient teachings of earlier Church prophets seems to be the way they get changed in contemporary Mormon culture. But it merely leaves them out of the consciousness of those who don’t study Church doctrine and history beyond Church manuals and what they hear at Church. They never really go away without official rejection — some of which has happened with respect to the temple/priesthood ban. And, of course, the Proclamation on the Family did it with respect to Joseph Fielding Smith’s TK Smoothie opinion. 🙂 Cheers.
Pontius Python, I tried to post a possible response to your source question with some historical info — both early (JS) and relatively recently (Elder Ballard 2011), but it may be hung up in quarantine. It probably included too many internet source addresses. In any event, my response doesn’t support either the first use of “believing blood” in this OP and comment chain or the current, private teaching comment. I know nothing of the latter. The 2011 Ballard talk referring to it is the latest I know of.
The early teaching included the literal descendants of Abraham being more likely to accept the gospel than others and that most Church members were literal descendants of Abraham. The latter, of course, may be a problem for some if extrapolated to the current day and the Church in Africa. The report of JS’ sermon included the idea that for those not born with Israelite blood (“Gentiles”), the Holy Ghost functioned as a racial cleansing agent, which would purge “out the old blood and make him actually the seed of Abraham.”
I expect the idea is mostly ignored in ignorance or in hope that it will go away.
(@Jessica–thank you for the reminder of the Shoulder to the Wheel dot org website that used to exist. It would be awesome if the webmaster would put that information somewhere accessible. This op-ed linked to the website and discusses issues about racism we need to be addressing: https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2017/08/17/commentary-putting-our-shoulders-to-the-wheel-to-end-racism-and-white-supremacy-in-mormonismbr/. We have a lot of work to do to make up for past wrongs.)
@Pontious Python are you asking for a source about teaching believing blood? I hadn’t heard of it, either, until my adulthood despite a thorough gospel upbringing with multiple generations in the church. Turns out it’s taught quietly in many places. Google “believing blood” with with quotation marks around the words and you’ll find a lot of references come up. Here is a recent one: https://m.facebook.com/TheChurchNews/videos/738547970375908/
Mormonmatters dot org has a few posts (including one that’s been taken down) that reference believing blood in either the post or the comments. https://www.mormonmatters.org/nepotism-in-the-church/
A YSA mentioned in my presence that they were in a meeting where a general authority mentioned it and it was somewhat uncomfortable as there were first generation convert YSA’s in the audience who presumably did not come from “believing blood” lines. The YSA felt very uncomfortable hearing it discussed the way it was.
I wish it were an urban legend and hope it will someday be placed with other “folk doctrines” that we no longer teach. I don’t think the idea is going to resonate well with younger members who are growing up with different ideologies.
mww, you’re 100% correct that blood belief has been and continues to be taught. However, having been a member all my life, this isn’t a teaching that I could have ever been sure was actually a teaching if someone were to ask me, and I think most members are the same. To me it seems to be on par with the teachings that Jesus is Satan’s brother or we all get our own planets if we go to the celestial kingdom. These have been taught (Jesus being Satan’s brother has been taught directly and getting our own planets can be derived from other teachings), but they seem to be peripheral teachings and not highly emphasized ones. These are teachings that are believed and promoted by more orthodox members, downplayed and pushed to the margins by mainstream members, and rejected by liberal members who may or may not acknowledge that they’ve been taught and if acknowledged met with expressions of, “well I don’t exactly believe that or that’s not how I would express it.”
These teachings tend to be highlighted by evangelical critics in order to portray Mormonism as weird and out-of-touch with mainstream Trinitarian teachings and therefore not Christian. But if you ask your average LDS person if these are true, especially if you’re an evangelical, they might tend to see this as a loaded question and an attack. These aren’t teachings that many LDS folks are too prone to own and take pride in.
Regarding believing blood:
Yeah? Well, you know, that’s just like uh, your opinion, man.
The easiest way to see the lie in the idea of “believing blood” is that nobody who thinks it’s a thing is applying it to other people. It’s always that they have it. To me, that puts it in the realm of my weight on my driver’s license: self-serving fiction.
Thanks for the comments, everyone.
As for “believing blood,” a great discussion of the general topic is in Armand Mauss, “All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage” (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003). He traces the original Protestant ideas about lineage, referred to as “British Israelism,” and discusses how it got incorporated into Mormon thinking about lineage. Within modern Mormonism, there are echoes of this lineage thinking in patriarchal blessings, where one’s lineage is somehow declared. Mauss talks about this, too. In 25 words or less: Stake patriarchs give a wide range of answers when asked about what the lineage declaration is all about. They think they know what they are doing but, in the larger picture, it’s all handwaving and confabulation.
Once a dumb idea starts circulating in Mormonism, it’s almost impossible to kill. Even worse, there is sort of a Gresham’s Law of Doctrine at work. Bad doctrine drives out good doctrine. Anyone who has learned anything about genetics knows the whole “blood” concept is misguided. In the long run (a dozen generations, not millions of years) we all draw from the same human gene pool. All are pretty much alike unto God. I wish the “all are alike unto God” doctrine, bolstered by genetics, would displace all the believing blood nonsense. Don’t hold your breath.
I’m with Dave B. on his wish, but also not holding my breath.
There’s also a rather thorough historical review to be read in “Gathering and Election: Israelite Descent and Universalism in Mormon Discourse” Arnold H. Green, Journal of Mormon History, Vol 25, No.1 (Spring 1999). Green found that: ““Measured quantitatively, Joseph Smith stressed Israelite descent and universalism about equally. … After Smith’s assassination in 1844, Orson Pratt and Brigham Young worked out alternative solutions, the former emphasizing universalism and the latter stressing lineage.” Because of BY’s position there were a number of church leaders who followed him in stressing lineage. Per Green, these included Wilford Woodruff, George Q. Cannon, Charles W. Penrose, Orson F. Whitney, George Reynolds, Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce R. McConkie, and James Henry Anderson.
But I don’t think its true “that nobody who thinks [believing blood is] a thing is applying it to other people.” Despite certain persons’ “humble” gratitude that they had “believing blood” from their early Mormon ancestry, a number of these leaders and others applied the concept to almost all who join the Church, i.e. “other people,” — I suppose in addition to “other” descendants of Abraham.
“The clear teaching of the prophets is that few persons not of the blood of Abraham have become members of the Church in this dispensation; the terms “adopted into the house of Israel” or “assigned to a tribe of Israel” pertain only to those relatively few members….From what the prophets have said, then, most members of the Church come from Gentile nations, but they have some Israelite ancestors in their lineage. Therefore, they are not “assigned to” or “adopted into” the house of Israel. They are legal heirs of the covenant, and the lineage proclaimed in their patriarchal blessings identifies the blood line that ties them back to Abraham.”
“Of the House of Israel” by Daniel H. Ludlow, Ensign, January 1991
Perhaps that’s a way into more thorough-going universalism, what with the Church growing much more in Africa than in Europe.
Ludlow evidenced a great deal more faith in patriarchal blessings identifying blood lines than I am able to muster. While the Anglo-Israelite and Scandinavian-Israelite theory might suit my primarily Scandinavian and English ancestry, I think it’s at best a hypothetical possibility and probably a crock. Whatever could Ludlow make of the patriarchal blessings of my childhood friends with an American Indian father? One was declared of the tribe of Manasseh; the other with identical parentage of the tribe of Ephraim.
Initially, the GT Essays were a little hard to find on (then) lds.org – you either had to know they existed and go hunting or just get lucky and stumble on them. Elder Snow said that the Q15 did not want them publicized because they were afraid people would leave the church over them – it turns out they were justified in their thinking.
I was pleasantly surprised to find they were added to the Gospel Library app a couple of years ago. So there seems to be an apatite for keeping them around.
Race and the Priesthood was my first GTE. Having a black child, I was delighted at the disavowals and asked the EQ Pres if I could give a lesson on it. Several members were not eager to let go of their favorite theories for the ban – but that can be hard for anyone. Having already studied the topic deeply – the spin given to the narrative was glaring and there were a few outright errors (falsehoods?).
The polygamy essays were the beginning of the end for my wife.
Frankly, a thorough study of any of the topics reveal what I find hard to characterize as anything but deception in the essays. That precipitated a trust crisis. I can handle the history itself – but the incomplete/inaccurate/these aren’t the droids you seek flavor to the narratives in the essays was too much for me.
The beginning of the end.
Regarding the thought that literal descendants of Abraham have an inborn right and capacity to know and believe in the Gospel:
“If you go back far enough in the history of a human population, you reach a point in time when all the individuals who have any descendants among living people are ancestors of all living people….Everyone alive [in Europe] a thousand years ago who has any descendants today is an ancestor of every living person of European descent…Everyone who was alive five thousand years ago who has any living descendants is an ancestor of everyone alive today.”
pp. 189-190
https://carlzimmer.com/books/she-has-her-mothers-laugh/
I just remembered a “believing blood” story. We adopted a 6 year old boy from Korea. When we were sealed, the officiator told us that his blood was literally changed so that he was now genetically the same as our naturally born children.
I recognized this line of thinking from those of his generation, but had always taken lineage as conceptual or figurative in terms of a right to receive the blessings of the Abrahamic covenant, rather than literal. I categorized it as something someone born in the 1920’s would say. My wife, a convert, was deeply affected and moved by the literalness of his proclamation and has mentioned it several times since and has found it comforting.
Side note: I have kept my opinion on the matter to myself.
DNA testing can find traces of ancient Neanderthal and Denisovan [new to me] ancestry. Both became extinct about 40,000 years ago. https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/dtcgenetictesting/neanderthaldna/
It recognizes more recent DNA lines, which would include Israeli lines.
The main purpose of a patriarchal blessing is to declare which son of Israel a member of the church is descended from. Like many others, mine states that I have within my veins the blood of Israel flowing through the loins of Ephraim.
How often does genetic testing reveal Israeli DNA in members of the church who are primarily of European descent? Ever?
Can those of us whose ancestors hail from Britain and Scandinavia apply the findings of Simon Southerton to ourselves?
Leadership’s belief in “believing blood” may have a broad and deep effect on the entire lds church.
I once ran across the blog of a man whose mission president is a current apostle. The apostle answered somebody’s question about why there are a lot of interrelationships in top church leadership. He answered that it is because they have believing blood.
Apparently at least some in top leadership believe that the believing blood of their close relatives is more believing than the believing blood of regular members of the church.
This results in the cris-crossing webs of related GAs.
I’ve noticed that even when it’s not high church callings, it’s also evidenced in leadership in profitable church-owned businesses. I would suppose that they compensate them well.
So much for meritocracy.