Sometimes people in power in states and organizations can make members and citizens do, say, and even believe silly things. The most recent example is Donald Trump declaring that the Gulf of Mexico is no longer the Gulf of Mexico, it is now the Gulf of America. Tech oligarchs are going along with this silliness, which you can verify on Google maps. The AP is resisting and has now been banned from White House official events. It’s good for us to know that Big Journo has a better grip on reality than Big Tech. I’ll bet no one, not a single person in the United States, is going to refer to that big body of water south of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi as “the Gulf of America” in casual conversation. But most government agencies and Big Tech are on board with the charade. Thus we see the ability of states and organizations to spin and enforce false narratives.
A more nefarious example is the ongoing attempt of Donald Trump and associated political thugs to rewrite the January 6 narrative so that the good guys (law enforcement) are really the bad guys and the bad guys (rioters who broke into the capitol building, beat and injured many police officers and other law enforcement, ransacked and damaged offices, and threatened to kill the Vice President) are really the good guys. Again, I’m not sure that many people really believe the false narrative Trump is pushing, but lots of people pretend to believe it. I wonder how the eventual Trump Presidential Library is going to portray the events of January 6? I think that library is going to be a temple of phony facts and false narratives, about as kooky as the Creation Museum.
I could go on. I’m sure you can come up with your own list of good examples. Let’s move on to the LDS Church. Like any other organization, it spins out false narratives, some of which people/members accept and believe, others that most people/members only pretend to believe.
Here’s one: “Prophets, Seers, and Revelators.” This descriptive title is used fairly often in official discourse to describe LDS apostles, the Big 15 (collectively, the members of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve). It is even in the LDS Temple Recommend questions that many LDS members and some of you readers subscribe to once every two years. The Big 15 wisely don’t prophesize anything. The don’t reveal anything. They don’t see anything (in the biblical sense of using a crystal ball or some other spiritual/mystical/religious device or practice to peer into the divine unknown and share it with the rest of us). They don’t prophesy, see, or reveal anything, yet they are (in the eyes of the organization) Prophets, Seers, and Revelators. It often repeated in official discourse and most Mormons believe or pretend to believe it.
Here is a smaller scale example: the Ward List. It has three or four or five or six hundred entries. The system absolutely refuses to permit local units to tag any entry as fully active, partly active, mostly inactive, or completely 100% inactive. There are names on the Ward List of people who moved to a different state or country years ago. There are names on the Ward List who in no sense still consider themselves LDS. There are probably dead people on your Ward List.
It is almost impossible to “clean up” the Ward List. You can “forward the record” of a few names to another LDS unit, which might be where they now reside and the name stays there, or they might say “Nope, never heard of him/her,” and send it back. From time to time central headquarters (some department in the COB, what a great job) sends a few or a few dozen names/records to the ward, which then pop up on the official Ward List. It is simply impossible to make the official Ward List correspond to “people actually living in our ward boundaries who, in any way, consider themselves LDS.” It’s like Sisyphus pushing that rock up a hill. You can never “clean up” the Ward List.
Strange system, you might say. The official Ward List provides a wildly inflated sense of how many people there are in a given LDS ward, which is of course one of the purposes of the LDS Ward List False Narrative. It encourages local leaders from time to time to do a “let’s get these people active” initiative where a few unwilling volunteers (the Ward Council plus a few) make phone calls and go knock on doors in the vain hope that one or two families might “come back to church.” Yes, from time to time inactive families or individuals do “come back to church,” but honestly I know of not a single example where “coming back to church” resulted from a local effort to contact and invite these phantom names on the Ward List to “come back to church.” Really, these local efforts are just an effort to “clean up the ward list” so activity stats look a little better. It is an attempt to improve the sacrament meeting attendance percentage by decreasing the denominator. It never seems to have any effect on the numerator (living bodies attending sacrament meeting).
The official Ward List is, of course, the local version of the official Big List of all the names of people who are or ever were “officially” a Mormon by birth in a Mormon family, baptism at age 8, or baptism at any time thereafter. The Big List, with something like 15 million names on it, is about four times larger than the actual number of living Mormons who attend church at least once a month and probably twice as large as the number of living people who at present consider themselves LDS in any sense.
Here’s something you might not have realized. Apart from the official Ward List, propounded and supported by the Church, there is a Secret Ward List. It is never written down. The names on the Secret Ward List are known only to those who are fully active in a ward and have been for at least a few years. The Secret Ward List is composed of names of members who come to church every week they are in town and accept most callings. You can’t get a copy of the Secret Ward List. The only people who know more or less who is on the Secret Ward List are the people who are themselves on the Secret Ward List. The Secret Ward List has maybe twenty or thirty families on it. It’s not a list of LDS superstars in your ward, it’s just people who come to church every week.
So let’s hear from the readers.
- Have you ever and will you ever refer to the body of water known as “the Gulf of Mexico” as “the Gulf of America”?
- Do you think the J6 rioters and felons were the good guys on January 6th and law enforcement and the FBI were the bad guys? Do you know anyone who believes this? Do you know anyone who pretends to believe this?
- Do you think LDS apostles are Prophets, Seers, and Revelators in the sense that they have some mystical or divinely granted power (to prophesize, see, or reveal) that you or I or your local stake president doesn’t have?
- Are you on the Secret Ward List? Do you want to be?
- How do you get off the Secret Ward List? There’s the hard way (stop attending completely for at least twelve months, at which point those on the Secret Ward List will update their mental roster) and the easy way (go to the podium on Fast Sunday and go a little crazy for five minutes).
- Apart from my examples, what is your favorite LDS False Narrative?
Wheat & Tares 
I like to ask my Republican (I used to be one) friends whose side they are on re the Jan 6 narrative:
Trump, or the Republican secretaries of state and Republican governors who refused to either find more R votes or not certify 2020 election results in their states (Az / Ga)?
Trump, or members of the DOJ in his administration who threatened to resign if they were forced to coordinate with the alternate electors schemes in various states?
Trump, or Mike Pence who refused to NOT certify the election results on Jan 6?
I don’t even have to talk about Democrats in this case. And yet my MAGA friends buy into the historical revisionism Trump is pushing. I’m actually excited to see how Trump spins this in his presidential library. It’s going to be a full-on George Orwell 1984 scenario.
side note: be grateful that Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of American and not the Gulf of Musk.
There may be a scriptural instruction that we are choosing to ignore. D&C 20:84 tells us that members moving into a new ward may get a letter from the old ward stating that they are regular members in good standing. Admittedly this instruction was given before computers, but the Lord knew that computers were coming. There’s a lesson here. Records are maintained locally, and people are really not members of the general church: we are members of wards and stakes, and that is why leaders of ward and stakes can expel members. In the past, a person who moved from an area was no longer a part of his ward, and he was then not part of any new ward until he presented himself with his certificate. That was the scriptural pattern. The new ward could then receive him onto the ward rolls. I suppose that if a person left without a certificate, he could tell his new bishop and the new bishop could ask for his records to be transferred, but notice the commonality: he must present himself to the new ward and seek membership there.
Membership records were local, and members had to present themselves at a new ward, and until they presented themselves they were not members of that new ward. I think that we should do the same today, and this appears to be the scriptural pattern. People should be allowed to disappear and to leave–and to return on their schedule. Jesus didn’t keep track of members who left him after the bread of life discourse. He let them go, and he asked his disciples if they would also leave him. We should stop the practice of transferring records of people who do not request that their records be transferred. When a person moves and neither gets a certificate (and presents it to a new ward) nor presents himself and requests a records transfer, those records should be sent to SLC and held, until the member has a change of heart. Even if the SLC office that manages these records knows where a person is, they should not transfer his records. They could reach out to the person by mail, tell him that his records are in a lost record file at SLC, and invite him to present himself to his new bishop. They can even give the member, in the letter, the name and phone number of the new bishop, but they should not simply transfer records without a member’s knowledge, nor should they added to a ward list without the member so requesting.
(1) There is a difference between a bad idea and a false narrative. “Gulf of America” is a bad idea, not a false narrative. There is no objective fact that the body of water is the “Gulf of Mexico.” That’s just what we called it for a long time. We called the tallest mountain in North America “Mt. McKinley” for a while, then “Denali”, now we’re supposed to go back to “Mt. McKinley.” They’re just names. You can assign narratives to those names, but although some of those narrative may be distasteful, they are neither objectively true nor false.
The same is not true of the January 6 rioters. They were not peaceful. They did not respect the Constitution. Saying otherwise is not a “bad idea,” it is a false narrative.
(2) As for “prophets, seers, and revelators”, it’s a mixed bag. According to Revelation 19:10 “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy”. That covers the GA’s and a lot of other people too (which I have heard emphasized in a nontrivial number of Church meetings.). You can make a case for revelators as well. Explicit revelations may be infrequent, but they are not altogether absent. And I think individual GAs do receive revelations, they just don’t all get the same one at the same time so the revelations don’t get canonized.
Seer, however, is a bridge too far. In Mosiah 8:17, Ammon states that “a seer can know of things which are past, and also of things which are to come.” But we can’t even get a straight answer on why the Priesthood restriction was put in place (past) much less learn where our current constitutional crisis may be heading (to come). Old Testament and Book of Mormon prophets seem to have been better at that.
(3) As for the “secret ward list”, I attend pretty much every week, but I am not on the list. I am on a tithing strike (meaning that my 10% goes to entities other than the tithing fund), which my stake president is aware of, and have thereby removed myself from the list. I have no callings and my ministering assignment consists of accompanying the 1st counselor in the bishopric to visit the 1st counselor in the stake presidency. Or maybe they are just giving me a break because I can’t fill any calling and simultaneously give adequate supervision to my handicapped son. But either way, I am off the list (finally).
First, the whole “Gulf of America” nonsense reminds me of the post-9/11 push to use the terms “freedom fries” and “freedom toast”. It lasted a hot minute, we laughed at the absurdity, then moved on, reverting back to the original names.
I have an extended family member who is very much bought into the false versions of Jan. 6 being promoted, along with very glowing assessments of the Trump 2.0 admin and Musk’s destructive meddling in governmental operations. At his core, this family member is an otherwise decent human being, which makes it that much more disturbing to watch him go down this path of willful ignorance. But he owes a lot in back taxes, so I can understand that he has a personal stake in having the IRS dismantled and his debt somehow cleared. People like him all over America are having their fears and insecurities exploited by such propaganda. It’s very sad.
As for the “secret ward list”, if it exists, I probably dropped off of it a long time ago. My current bishop is a nice guy and genuinely cares about me and my family, but he never reaches out to offer me callings or invite me to speak in sacrament meeting anymore. Probably because I’ve said no to him one too many times. I didn’t always say no, but only when I had a legitimate schedule conflict, family priority, or other time constraint (I occasionally work on Sundays). One of the unwritten rules of being a good Latter-day Saint is that you are expected to enthusiastically say yes to your bishop every time he calls, even if you lack the time, ability or willingness. If he has a calling or assignment to fill, rather than take the 50/50 chance of me saying no, he likely skips over my name and moves on to the next ward member who he knows is more inclined to say yes every time. This is related to the phenomenon of most adult men in the Church being eventually relegated to invisibility if they aren’t on the leadership ladder, or otherwise in the ward’s inner circle of proven yes-men. Not to mention women also being invisible in this Church just for being women, but I digress.
At the ward level, the LDS Church absolutely depends on members with poor or nonexistent personal boundaries in order to function. So if you want to be taken off the secret ward list, simply assert healthy personal boundaries every now and then with a confident-but-polite “no, thank you”, and your bishop will eventually leave you alone.
First, the whole “Gulf of America” nonsense reminds me of the post-9/11 push to use the terms “freedom fries” and “freedom toast”. It lasted a hot minute, we laughed at the absurdity, then moved on, reverting back to the original names.
I have an extended family member who is very much bought into the false versions of Jan. 6 being promoted, along with very glowing assessments of the Trump 2.0 admin and Musk’s destructive meddling in governmental operations. At his core, this family member is an otherwise decent human being, which makes it that much more disturbing to watch him go down this path of willful ignorance. But he owes a lot in back taxes, so I can understand that he has a personal stake in having the IRS dismantled and his debt somehow cleared. People like him all over America are having their fears and insecurities exploited by such propaganda. It’s very sad.
As for the “secret ward list”, if it exists, I probably dropped off of it a long time ago. My current bishop is a nice guy and genuinely cares about me and my family, but he never reaches out to offer me callings or invite me to speak in sacrament meeting anymore. Probably because I’ve said no to him one too many times. I didn’t always say no, but only when I had a legitimate schedule conflict, family priority, or other time constraint (I occasionally work on Sundays). One of the unwritten rules of being a good Latter-day Saint is that you are expected to enthusiastically say yes to your bishop every time he calls, even if you lack the time, ability or willingness. If he has a calling or assignment to fill, rather than take the 50/50 chance of me saying no, he likely skips over my name and moves on to the next ward member who he knows is more inclined to say yes every time. This is related to the phenomenon of most adult men in the Church being eventually relegated to invisibility if they aren’t on the leadership ladder, or otherwise in the ward’s inner circle of proven yes-men. Not to mention women also being invisible in this Church just for being women, but I digress.
At the ward level, the LDS Church absolutely depends on members with poor or nonexistent personal boundaries in order to function. So if you want to be taken off the secret ward list, simply assert healthy personal boundaries every now and then with a confident-but-polite “no, thank you”, and your bishop will eventually leave you alone.
FWIW, Maquest still uses Gulf of Mexico. I have deleted the other apps off my phone and installed Maquest, which feels like I’ve stepped back in time to simpler days when we used to print directions to places! =)
Re Jan 6, the consensus was that Trump orchestrated the rioters. Trump said no, he did not, the rioters were ANTIFA. Now fast forward four years. Trump just pardoned ANTIFA? Make it make sense.
Re prophets prophesying, isn’t President Nelson on record saying God did not give him a heads up about the global pandemic? With seers like these…
For a hot minute around 2016-2018 I was on the unofficial list and was so excited to have made it! For me, the unofficial list did not live up to the hype. It’s a lot of meetings, and it’s a lot of being asked your opinion but if you know how to read the room your opinion is always to support the boss. I dropped off the list in 2019 and could not be happier.
Favorite LDS false narrative is that humans can compel the second coming. I’ve heard that ignoring global warming and allowing for corrupt leaders will compel God to come save us sooner. I’ve heard these things before and also heard them this past week.
Thanks for the inside info on the Ward List. I never knew about it let alone that you couldn’t really change it. Is the Ward List a sort of denial of the reality if inactives? Is it a sort of hopium of all these people coming back?
On the Gulf of Mexico, it has been called that for over 400 years. I’m sure many Trump supporters will passionately refer to it as the “Gulf of America.” There is another gulf that has a disputed name: the Persian Gulf, which Arabs call the Arabian Gulf. Of course, I had never heard anyone call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America until Trump just a couple of weeks ago. What am egomaniac.
As for my favorite false LDS narrative: the Relief Society is the largest women’s organization in the world. Please stop saying that. You can’t just count the women at church and say that they are part of a separate organization. Women at church can barely do anything without the men present. So much as have the keys to the church. Also related, the false narrative that the Relief Society is just so serviceable because they have meal sign-up sheets for people who are sick, etc. That’s all they seen to do. Do they have sign-up sheets for soup kitchens? Homeless shelters? Refugee aid? No they don’t. It is only, someone had a baby, let’s make them dinner, which is serviceable, of course. But don’t tell me that they outdo all other service organizations. Honestly the spirit of service is not that great in the church and it could be significantly better. I look at other churches and see them much more engaged in helping the poor and needy (honestly, many conservative LDS white people love to criticize the poor and needy and worthless sorry saps who need to get their act together). The LDS Church defines a bunch of seemingly unserviceable activities as service: missionary service and temple service. Who exactly is being served by the temple? Dead people. Come on. Not real service in the way Jesus served in the NT.
I think I fell off the secret ward list a couple of years ago, when the bishopric foolishly asked me to speak on obeying the prophet and in my talk I listed everything the prophet had encouraged us to do in the past 12 months. Two of those things involved masks and vaccines (quite controversial in my ultraconservative small town), the bishop visibly squirmed up on the stand, and I haven’t been asked to do much of anything since then.
As a missionary, I’d had some success on going through the ward list and tracking down less active members (it was certainly better than tracting) and so when I got called as an EQP in a big city ward many years ago, I decided to do the same with our mess of a ward list. I’d take another member of the presidency and the missionaries, and we’d go to a different neighborhood each Sunday afternoon to try to track people down. When I discovered someone had moved, I’d alert the ward clerk, and he’d update the records. We did this with a LOT of names. It was almost entirely unproductive, but at one ward council meeting we went over ward goals and the bishop exclaimed “How in the world did we exceed our goal for percentage of the ward in church every Sunday?” Cleaning up the ward list was certainly not the best thing for an EQP to be doing with his time and I do have regrets.
To me the term “prophet, seer, and revelator” is a throwback to the early days of the church, and an example of Joseph’s penchant for grandiosity. I don’t think it reflects any special powers. It seems quaint that we’re still using them. The job of first presidency and apostles have evolved to be much more administrative in nature over time, and I think it would do everyone a service to use titles appropriate to that. President is fine, and I don’t even mind using the term apostle for the others, but “prophet, seer, and revelator” is unnecessary and contributes to putting them on a a pedestal that isn’t helping anyone. While we’re at it, maybe let’s drop all of the middle initials. There’s far too much pretentiousness in how we speak of them.
“Do you think LDS apostles are Prophets, Seers, and Revelators in the sense that they have some mystical or divinely granted power (to prophesize, see, or reveal) that you or I or your local stake president doesn’t have?”
Yes. The apostles are prophets, seers, and revelators to the church as a whole. That said, individuals may receive revelation as per their own stewardships. And every individual may learn the wonders of eternity as fast as he or she is ready to receive them and be trusted with them.
Thanks for the comments, everyone.
Georgis, that’s a very interesting take. I used to say someone should stand out in the parking lot with a pen and clipboard, and write down the names of everyone who attended church. Do that for a month of Sunday. That should be your ward list. Stop pretending someone who hasn’t been to church for three years is part of the congregation. Stop thinking “percentage of people on the official Ward List who attend sacrament meeting” is a statistic with any meaningful value whatsoever. If you want a statistic, just count bodies in the building on Sunday and see if it goes up or down over the long term.
Jack Hughes, I actually thought of “Freedom Fries.” Let’s see how long the Gulf of America thing lasts. Probably until Trump is impeached and removed from office in early 2027, after the midterm elections.
I guess my Secret Ward List is designed to answer the question, Who is a fully participating member of the ward? Visitors and come-once-a-quarter people are not. Some non-members who say accompany a spouse on most Sundays and come to activities and service projects might be on it. A young missionary who is in another state or country and hasn’t been to church for a year might be on it. It’s just odd that with all the emphasis on statistics, the LDS machine does not appear terribly interested in knowing how many fully participating members there are in a given ward. I suppose you could argue that counting TR holders or substantial tithe payers in a ward gets at that concept — but not quite the same thing. The Church likes those statistics because LDS leaders love temples and money (tithing). Fellowship and full participation in the ward is something rather different.
Years ago, a friend was moving across the country. She had a desire to be off the official Ward list and stated that she intended to be “reliably unreliable”. That would get you off the list. Sadly, her personality wouldn’t allow that and she ended up teaching early morning seminary. She should have stuck to her plan!
So, I just got my temple recommend renewed. I sustained Nelson as a prophet, seer and revelator and the only person authorized to exercise all the keys. Then I sustain all the other GA’s as prophets, seers and revelators. I wanted to ask “What’s the difference?”
That’s an old line in post-Mo spaces: prophets who don’t prophesy, seers who don’t see, and revelators who don’t reveal. It’s kind of silly. I guess you could go the same route with the priesthood, or at least according to several scientific studies, priesthood doesn’t really perform the miracles purported. It’s mostly administrative.
I understand that there is some dissatisfaction among Koreans with the name of the so-called Sea of Japan. (My suggestion that it be called the “Sea of Korea AND Japan” was not well received.) And you may have noticed the controversy of the Persian Gulf / Arabian Gulf.
On Jan. 6–well, do you think the Sons of Liberty were the good guys or the bad guys when they organized the Boston Tea Party? The USA was founded by people who were, objectively speaking, traitors and terrorists.
Some informative quotes regarding how “prophets, seers, and revelators” are functioning right now…
Gordon Hinckley:
Gordon Hinckley:
Dallin Oaks:
I suppose one could argue that prophesying, seeing, and revealing can still happen in the ways described by Hinckley and Oaks above, but it’s a completely different model than is almost universally taught in lessons and from the pulpit week in and week out in Mormon chapels, General Conferences, etc. We do have support for “minor prophets” in the scriptures who apparently didn’t really do or teach anything very noteable.
Then, we have to consider the results, but unfortunately, it’s not looking so hot: polygamy, priesthood/temple racial ban, Adam-God, blood atonement, lack of transparency regarding sensitive Church history topics, birth control, women and careers, praying the gay away, the POX, etc., are but just a few examples that prophets, seers and revelators got wrong. I suppose that the Church can still label these men as “prophets, seers, and revelators” if we accept that these people can get things wrong a lot of the time, but again, that is a completely different model than the infallible “prophet can’t lead the Church astray” model that is almost universally taught in lessons and from the pulpit week in and week out in Mormon chapels, General Conferences, etc.
“Modern prophets” is supposedly one of the most important differentiators of our Church from other churches. A lot of people would leave the Church if the Church abruptly backed away from this teaching. On the other hand, a lot of members have noticed that the way “modern prophets” is taught is a lot different from reality, and that is causing a lot of members to leave right now. It’s a Catch-22 for the Church. If the goal is to be more truthful *and* to minimize defectors, then perhaps the smart approach would be to back away from the “prophets, seers, and revelators” claim slowly enough that the more orthodox members don’t get too shaken up while the members who have already (or who will soon) seen through prophetic infallibility are heartened that things are at least moving in the right direction.
I dropped off the Secret Ward List (1 only ever achieved its fringes anyway) when I learned that magic word, No. That was a good day.
I agree wholeheartedly with Brad D about the false narrative
of the Relief Society being a women’s organization. It’s a women’s organization the same way the Celestial Kingdom is heaven: Both are designed by men for the service of men.
And the Gulf of Mexico/Gulf of America nonsense bears a remarkable similarity to the Mormon/CoJCoLdS nonsense.
Both are the results of giant bees in the bonnets of men with
giant egos.
Lily,
Here’s a good source, IMO:
https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Terms_prophets,_seers,_revelators
I sustain the president of the church as president, as well as prophet, seer, and revelator, but I think an argument can be made that Joseph Smith was/is the prophet of the restoration, and all those who have come after him serve much more as president than they do as prophet, seer, and revelator. That takes nothing away from their high office, and I honor those people in those positions. But just as I can wear multiple hats, I usually only function in one at a time. At work, I am a worker. In Sunday School, I am a pupil. At home, I am sometimes a husband, and sometimes a father. We all wear many hats, and some hats we wear frequently and some hats we wear infrequently, but even those infrequently used hats are ours and hang on our hat rack. I think that President Nelson wears his hat of church president frequently, but much less frequently that of prophet, seer, and revelator. This takes nothing away from him. See the parable at D&C 88:51-61, and those who have ears to hear may hear. I remember seeing an interview of President Hinckley on television, with Mike Wallace, I think. Mr Wallace asked President Hinckley if he was God’s prophet. Pres Hinckley responded, “The members of the church sustain me as such,” or words close to that effect. We do sustain the president of the church as prophet, seer, and revelator, but he only functions as a prophet, seer, or revelator when God has something to reveal. 99% or more of the chief administrator’s time is spent in administering the church, and that is no small or insignificant task.
Zla’od, I tried commenting on that yesterday, but it appears my comment vanished into the ether.
The Koreans say East Sea, rather then Sea of Japan / Japan Sea, or even Korean East Sea.
You can be sure that the French and Germans don’t use English Channel, but their language equivalent of Sleeve / Sleeve Channel.
It is not unreasonable that any national designation of international water will have several names varying with the nation talking about it.
I live in a small town in Utah. There is one ward, one ward directory with all its problems of who’s here and not here. But, I don’t know if there’s a secret list. There is a Second Ward though which contains all those that would be on the secret list. If you’re good, you’re in the ward but if you not, you’re in the second ward.
True to form, Mormons love to have subsets of subsets of lists. As a newly installed bishop, I was introduced to what was referred to as the “list of second class citizens who should know better”. It included all ward members who were classified as “Endowed, Inactive”. The Stake President emphasized that, in addition to leading the youth, shortening this list was to be the focus of my tenure. Despite some initial success, the list eventually grew by about 21% during my 5.7 years.
Reactivation efforts are typically a negative sum game. My SP insisted I provide doubters with a copy of one of the worst books ever written: Shaken Faith Syndrome – by Michael Ash. Fortunately, guilt shaming and poorly researched books do more harm than good. There is too much scholarly information available that portrays church history and doctrines in an objective manner. Evidence supports the hypothesis that the “Endowed, Inactive” lists are growing churchwide.
De Novo,
I imagine that there were many fine Christians and wonderful people on that “second class citizens” list. It certainly isn’t the duty of anyone other than God to draw lines between people, which is what lists do. In hindsight, perhaps one could have printed a directory of the stake and ward leadership and added a title page of “Sinners called to leadership positions” in bold and in a very large font… Then highlighted his name and left it on his desk.
Three Nephites
Great suggestion! You are correct – there were and continue to be many fine people on the Endowed, Not Active list. Unfortunately, they are marginalized and set aside – a practice in which Mormons excel.