Brooks continues: Her challenge, after all, is not that young Mormon people didn’t know that Joseph Smith was a polygamist. Of course, they already knew. Her problem is in helping young Mormon people come to terms with the way Joseph Smith was presented by Church curriculum as a virtually unflawed human being... Was he? Im not sure I have any recollection of that? Anyone here? and the larger problem of how the LDS Church has tried to deny or manage our faith’s human problems and flaws. And these are, of course: Of course, it’s not that Mormonism is the only religion to have such problems and flaws. It’s just the most recent, with the shortest elapsed time between its powerfully fabulous faith-commanding nineteenth-century origins and the critical examination of those original truth claims in light of competing historical and scientific evidences. Only Mormonism has had its human flaws captured so openly and thoroughly in the historical record. Whether the Church has had its human flaws (by which Brooks means, of course, not just flaws in the human beings who lead it but in its fundamental doctrines and truth claims) well exposed in the historical record, is, of course, not a fact of objective anthropological reality but a belief claim made by Brooks based upon a body of historical revisionist research done by other primarily apostate critics and opponents of the Church and its truth claims that are composed, overwhelmingly (as is most history) of interpretation, conjecture, theory, bias, and, when the facts and actual empirical or unambiguous documentary evidence come to an end, outright wish fantasy when necessary, all of which has been competently and successfully challenged and brought into question by serious LDS scholarship. Brooks speaks of the Churchs problems with airs of fact-like certainty that the discipline of history itself can rarely muster and which the cult of academic anti-Mormon revisionist history can only dream of apprehending. There is another religion, one must add, that admits of many and deep problems and flaws, and that is Brooks personal religion, the religion of leftism or secular progressivism, in which human beings themselves are god, or gods, and the rest of mankind their footstool. One of Brooks primary academic (I use this term provisionally in this sense) interests is womens studies, a pivotal cult within the larger cultus of Critical Theory and its many mutant children, the studies departments and fields so prominent throughout modern academia. In turn, this defensive posture found official support in the LDS Church’s twentieth-century implementation of “Priesthood Correlation,” a bureaucratic initiative that institutionalized Mormon history and theology in a predictable, consistent, and systematic way, giving it the appearance of essential coherence, timelessness, and inerrancy. Correlation is nothing more than the attempt to insure that all LDS, everywhere, on the same Sunday, regardless of where one is in the world, is studying the same lessons in Elders Quorum, Relief Society, Gospel Principles class, and other venues, and that all are indeed, studying the SAME SETTLED, ESTABLISHED DOCTRINE. All gospel doctrine is, indeed, coherent, timeless (being eternal), and inerrant (it is true, or, in other words, representative of things as they really are). Correlation was never meant as an attempt to evade or dodge issues in church history or doctrine that so exercise the NOM mind, but to focus the minds and hearts of all the saints in their various meetings on the doctrines and standards of the Kingdom - upon spiritual nourishment - not upon difficult, vague, and subtle historical data or events or upon the human foibles of key actors on the gospel stage (the scriptures are full of that in any case), or upon the intellectual egos of would-be debunkers, but on the care for the life of the soul, to quote Elder Maxwell. After correlation, there was virtually no room in institutional Mormonism to deal with the wrongness of historic and current Mormon teachings and practices—for example, the exclusion of men and women of Black African descent from priesthood ordination and full participation in LDS temple rites. The claim that these things are/were wrong is a value-judgement and a core truth claim derived from Joannas own religion, the religion of Leftism and its own Zion known as a better world. Whos better world, I wonder?
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 07:32:35 +0000
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