Much has been said about the possibility that a large number of people are leaving The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That might be true, although it hasn’t been proven with certainty. A lot of what is happening now occurred in the 90s with high profile excommunications. The membership survived and actually for a time thrived. Even if the numbers are falling, there are areas of the world where it is growing. Culture and politics are as influential in determining the destinies of communities as truth claims and criticisms. Much of the apologetic work is not helping the situation, reacting rather than getting at the root of the problems.

There are two apologetic approaches that represent a majority of the attempts at recovering those who are losing faith. One of them is a more literal (for the most part) group that tries to explain history and doctrine with evidence that traditional narratives are generally true. Many orthodox members, if they know of them at all, appreciates these efforts with some reservations. Another group tries to embrace the skepticism of those who have left, coming up with reasons for them to stay despite questions and doubts. It would come as no surprise that orthodox members are mostly not impressed. Of course, there are degrees of apologetics that fall anywhere between the two. To put it bluntly, they are minimal effective tools used to help keep people from losing faith. Continue reading →

April’s Ensign includes the following note at the end of the First Presidency message:

Monthly First Presidency Message to Be Discontinued
This message will be the last First Presidency Message published in the Ensign on a monthly basis. In the future, the First Presidency will share important messages as needed through the Church’s various channels, including Church magazines and LDS.org.

Thoughts?

Here is a chapter I’ve added to the draft of the 2018 version of Reluctant Polygamist, to help explain why the current narrative about Joseph Smith is what it is. Feel free to critique as you see fit.
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In 1962 noted philosopher Abraham Kaplan addressed the American Educational Research Association at UCLA. Kaplan urged scientists to exercise good judgment in the selection of appropriate methods for their research. To illustrate how inappropriate the instrument at hand could be for a job, Kaplan joked, “Give a boy a hammer and everything he meets has to be pounded.” [1]

Kaplan called this “The Law of the Instrument,” and it has also been known as a Birmingham screwdriver, Maslow’s hammer, or the golden hammer. Whatever the name, over-reliance on a familiar tool is considered a cognitive bias, a systematic pattern of irrational judgment.

When it comes to judging the actions of Joseph Smith, historians outside of the Church hierarchy have relied over-much on explaining “polygamy” as arising from Joseph Smith’s personal sexual obsession.

Meanwhile, both detractors and defenders of Joseph Smith have fallen into the trap of inattentional blindness, the inability to perceive conspicuous truths that are unexpected. [2] This blindness accounts for the fraught interactions between historians and the LDS Church in recent decades. Continue reading →

This is a guest post by Michael Davidson, who is a not-quite-so-young man living in Highland, Utah with his wife and kids.

At the tender age of 14, Joseph Smith went into a grove of trees near his home in New York in order to seek knowledge from the Lord. In the vision that followed, Joseph was told by the Lord not to join any churches then extant, for “they were all wrong” and that “all their creeds were an abomination in His sight” and that the preachers of these religions and creeds were “all corrupt.” It was in this First Vision that the Lord introduced Joseph, along with the rest of us, to the need for a restoration of the Gospel. The Lord makes clear that a simple reformation of existing christianity would be insufficient, driving the point home with strong language as was and is His prerogative.

In a recently published excerpt from “The Crucible of Doubt,” Terryl and Fiona Givens note that this account causes “many readers” to “feel the sting of a wide-net rebuke” in this narrative. And yet the Givens don’t seem to believe that such a rebuke was warranted. They introduce the First Vision narrative with a disclaimer that “[t]he language of Mormon culture … is fraught with contradictions” and that the “wisest and best men and women can say uninspired, ridiculous, and even reprehensible things.”

The Givens then observe that the First Vision narrative is “harsh to modern ears,” but seeks to excuse “Smith’s language” by saying it “fits right into his cultural milieu.” Further driving home their point, the Givens later bemoan the “colorful language of condemnation” in the canonized First Vision account because of its supposed “tragic influence on Mormon thinking,” including the “notion that Mormonism has a monopoly on the truth, that other churches and traditions have nothing of value to contribute, and that the centuries between the death of the apostles and the events of 1820 were utterly blighted and devoid of truth.”

Even further, the Givens argue that at least some “Mormons claim a monopoly on salvation” as well. But to them, “it grows increasingly difficult to imagine that a body of a few million, in a world of seven billion, can really be God’s only chosen people and heirs of salvation.”

It is with these two “myths” in mind, myths of Mormon monopolies on truth and salvation, that the Givens began their attack on the canonized First Vision narrative. They fault this narrative, which they claim sets the stage for the flourishing of these myths.

What purpose is being served by this attack by the Givens? Continue reading →