Falling in love with Uncle Sam

So the recently concluded Fourth of July celebrations led me to wonder why in the world Mormons* have become such a hyperpatriotic people. I mean, this is the country that tried to litigate us out of existence less than a century and a half ago, and that we had to leave to survive less than two centuries ago.

Anybody got any explanations?

* In the United States, at least. I don’t know what the situation is like in other countries.

What happens when the world isn’t as bad as we say?

One thing that y’all may have missed in the excitement of Thanksgiving weekend and Xmas shopping was the news that the teen pregnancy rate in the United States declined last year. And when i say it declined, i mean it declined—it dropped to a record low rate for the entire time records have been kept (70 years!), and this isn’t just a little blip downwards, but a continuation of a long-term trend.*

And yes, some of this is due to an increased use of contraception, but the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s analysis (which is only available in PDF format, and i don’t like linking to PDFs, so no link here, but it’s googlable) finds that a lot of it is also due to teens simply choosing not to have sex.** Kind of runs counter to the common Mormon meme that the world is busily going to hell in a handbasket, and that we need to aggressively shelter our kids from whatever the rest of the world is doing, since everybody else is getting more and more evil.***

So i’ll just say that what i became very thankful for this past Thanksgiving weekend was that my children are growing up in a world that seems to be getting more and more moral in some very important ways, whether we care to notice that or not.

* I recognize that the unwed teen pregnancy rate is a more interesting statistic for this entry than simply the teen pregnancy rate, but those statistics turn out to be really hard to come by—or, at least, reliable ones are hard to find. Part of the problem is that the best numbers for my purposes would be teen pregnancies in which conception (not just birth) occurred outside of marriage, and that doesn’t seem to be well-tracked by anybody.

**And before anybody decides to pull out the abortion card, i’ll simply note that the teen abortion rate has been steadily falling over the past several decades, and that the stats i’m talking about are pregnancy rates, anyway, not birth rates.

*** As does the fact that the peak year for the teen pregnancy rate (in the United States) was 1957. You mean teen pregnancies have been lower than that for more than 50 years, and we still haven’t realized that maybe the world isn’t all that more evil a place for our kids to grow up than it was when we were kids?

The evils of not having money

I was going through some old notes from church meetings, and i discovered a reference to a speaker saying that the early (as in late 1830s) Mormons were “evicted from Missouri”.

Evicted? Wow. I’d never known that the early Mormons had been that far behind on their rent, but Jeanne and i have been reading through the Documentary History of the Church, and the church and its leaders certainly had their share of cashflow problems, so i guess that makes sense as the reason all the unpleasantness of the time happened. Right?

On honoring and sustaining the law

Can we give up on the meme that one of the things that marks Mormonism as the true church of God is that we as a church always obey the law?

I mean, i guess it might be the case that Mormons always obey the law, except that i didn't realize that John Taylor was saying to obey the laws on polygyny when he died while in hiding from the federal government...

(Similarly, yeah, the people of Alma didn't pray out loud when it was illegal for them to do so—but Daniel did pray, and vocally, when it was illegal.)

An attempt at crowdsourcing

So i’m looking for old (i.e., 1940 through 1970) general conference transcripts for research purposes. I used to be able to find them for free through LDSLibrary.com (don’t bother clicking on it, it hasn’t worked any time i’ve tried it during the past couple months), and LDS.org’s general conference archive only goes back to 1974.

So, a question for anyone who reads this: Do you know of a free online source for still-in-copyright pre-1974 general conference transcripts (like there used to be), or do i have to break down and shell out some cash? (I mean, for all i know, LDSLibrary.com was violating copyright, but it looked legit at the time.)

And a secondary question: Why does the church make it relatively difficult to access old general conference proceedings?

The memes of my youth

One last thought from my trip to Oregon a few weeks ago:

So, upon finding out we were going to be singing the song “They, the Builders of the Nation”, what with being faced with the refrain “Blessed, honored Pioneer!” while being in Oregon, of all places—well, all i’m trying to say is that i couldn’t have been the only one whose brain kept looping the phrase “You have died of dysentery”.

That’s all.

Just call me Brother David, then

You know, Mormons used to call each other by Brother or Sister + first name, even to the point of Brother Joseph and Brother Brigham for the people that the church’s style guide tells us should always be referred to as President Smith and President Young.

The shift seems rather a shame, to me at least.

More ways to talk about the priesthood

My last post got me thinking more about priesthood and terminology, particularly something Jeanne and i have been wondering about as we’ve been reading some old church history stuff:

Why don’t we use the term lesser priesthood (for what we nearly consistently call the Aaronic priesthood) anymore?

It seems a completely serviceable term, and it also seems to have been the preferred one a century and a half ago (not to mention that it has solid basis in canon), so why has it fallen out of fashion so thoroughly?

Bad science! No biscuit!

So my wife and i had a snarf-the-beverage-of-your-choice moment the other day, when we ran across this gem from the current year’s young women manual* (ch. 25, p. 91):

Explain that one of the primary aims of science is to discover additional laws. When scientists discover these higher laws and obey them, marvelous things can happen. The successful landing of men on the moon is an example of the importance of obedience. Men spent years concentrating on discovering and obeying the natural laws that governed gravity, jet propulsion, and other things. Their obedience resulted in the successful landing of a man on the moon.***

Um, no.

Or, for emphasis: NO!!

That’s not the way scientific laws work. Folks didn’t make it to the moon because they obeyed natural laws—those laws were going to be obeyed whether they wanted to or not. (Gravity doesn’t really care if you believe in it, after all.) Now, the successful application of their understanding, yeah, that was necessary. But choosing obedience? No, that had nothing—really, nothing—to do with it.

I mean, seriously—who vets these things?

* Why are the young women manuals so out of date? It’s like the church decided that all the rest of the manuals would have an up-to-date feel, but the young women could make do with a manual with a copyright date of 1994, but content that feels so, so much older.**

** Like the clearly made-up (i.e., not based on true events) stories that start “A girl and her friend were invited to a party…” that the church has (happily!) moved away from in its other materials.

*** And i’m not even getting into the fact that humans making it to the moon isn’t just before the girls-being-taught’s time, it’s before my time. Apparently, scientists haven’t done anything lesson-manual-worthy during my life.

Apparently David B hates America

I realize that this is borderline heresy, especially in July (when all USAmericans, and especially USAmerican Mormons, are xpected to be nothing but hyperpatriotic),* but can we stop hearing that the United States Constitution is divinely inspired—or at least can we stop saying that over the pulpit?

I mean, even if it is,** there’s no real evidence for that claim in canon,*** and so it shouldn’t be presented as if there were.

(I only hope that we don’t get such jingoism among Mormons in other countries, ’cause it’d just be totally sad if we do.)

* Not only do we get Independence Day on 4 July, but 24 July brings us Pioneer Day, when those of us with no real connection to the Mormon pioneers are expected to get up early for breakfast and salute the flag on their behalf anyway.

** And i would argue it clearly isn’t—i mean, slavery being legal? Women having no say in government? Hello? Anyone willing to admit there might be some uninspired bits in there?

*** The book of Doctrine and Covenants states that God allowed the United States Constitution to be established, and that those who wrote it were raised up for the purpose of establishing it. There really is a big difference between that and saying the document irself is divinely inspired. (See, for example, the previous footnote.)

Temporary eternities

Multiple times, i’ve heard people say that everybody should wear clothing that covers the outlines of the temple garment, whether one wears the garment or not, because what the temple garment covers is “the Lord’s eternal standard of modesty” (to use one particularly memorable phrasing).

Um, yeah. You know, anyone who’s going to claim that the lines of the temple garment have anything to do with eternal principles should be more aware of the ways that the design of the garment has changed over the years.

Couldn’t get an extension

So i heard a sacrament meeting speaker recently say that the Mormons were “evicted” from Missouri in the 1840s. Wow, thought i—i hadn’t realized that they hadn’t paid their rent on time. Well, such are the evils of cashflow problems.

The importance of place

I’ve heard people in church say—and often!—that the Restoration had to occur where it did geographically so that the Book of Mormon could come along as part of it. Was the timeline as it occurred really so necessary, though? Could the Restoration have occurred in, say, China with the Book of Mormon coming forth later (or maybe with the Restoration in China being accompanied by a record we don’t have yet)?

Really, i think it’s fun to imagine an alternate present in which Mormons bear testimonies about how blessed they are to live in China, the only place where the Restoration could have taken place, rather than in a less blesséd place like, say, the United States of America.

Doing wrong things (or, perhaps, doing things wrong)

As i read the Bible (and to a lesser extent the Book of Mormon), i sometimes think the entire reason the historical bits were included was to remind us that even God’s chosen can have flaws. I mean, Noah self-medicated with alcohol, Abraham lied when he was scared, David cheated on his wives, Peter doubted…

Interestingly, although you get hints of this even in the book of Doctrine and Covenants,* we don’t talk much about how God’s chosen have flaws these days. I mean, discussion of the personal flaws of, say, Brigham Young or Joseph Fielding Smith is pretty much out of bounds in Sunday school classes in ways that the personal flaws of David and Peter aren’t. I still can’t figure out why.

* I say “even” in that book because it doesn’t really contain much in the way of stories, and so one would naturally expect less of it there.

More than a stonecutter

The story of John R. Moyle is amazing. It’s incredible. It’s inspiring. It’s mind-blowing, in all the positive senses of that word.

And yet as it develops into a mainstream bit of Mormon folklore it runs the risk, i fear, of becoming as bleached of nuance and detail in favor of sappiness and simplicity as the story of the Willie and Martin handcart companies became before it.

Sometimes we do our stories a grave injustice as we tell them.

Looking at the calendar

Can we stop it already with the repeated claim (over the pulpit sometimes, even!) that we’re special because Doctrine & Covenants 20:1 tells us that Jesus was born on 6 April, 1 bc?

I mean, especially since it appears to be simply not true, what with the reference to the year most likely being just a hyper-flowery way of saying ad 1830? (Not to mention the issues of mapping a solar calendar to a lunar one, and the fact that each solar year isn’t always the same length anyway, and…) Also, it seems especially impolite to make such unsupported-by-scriptural-text statements right around Xmas itself.

Yeah, i know, we won’t (stop, that is). A boy can dream, though, can’t he?

Knocking doors

So i heard about a friend of mine who’s really, really annoyed at the Mormon church because a pair of our missionaries rang her doorbell, not just invading her space but also waking up her son, who had just unwillingly gone down for a very, very much-needed nap.

It’s not just the Mormons her ire is directed against, though—it’s all groups or businesses or whatever that intrude on her privacy* by coming to her door without permission.

There’s got to be a better way. In fact, if you read church history, knocking on doors isn’t mentioned—it seems that the preferred methods were along the lines of street preaching or renting a hall and preaching.** And yeah, i know the whole thing about member referrals, but i’m talking about finding through missionary efforts here—isn’t there some worthwhile way for missionaries in the United States to use their finding time that doesn't involve bothering people who are relaxing at home?

* As she perceives it, at least. Of course, having—like her—grown up in the urbanized part of the eastern United States, i completely understand and actually feel pretty much the same way.

** What ever happened to renting a hall for preaching? Was it the victim of social changes? It’s not like it was an ineffective method back when it was used.

Excluding folks from heaven

The very early Mormons (before what people often mean by “the early Mormons”—i’m talking about the late 1820s and early 1830s) tended to believe pretty firmly in a very inclusive, almost universal heaven. What happened to push us away from that?

(Couldn’t be a need to feel better than others, i’m sure. Right?)

The Law of Socialism…errm, Consecration

A serious note, because i think it’s something we need to be reminded of occasionally: The Law of Consecration≠the United Order. The United Order was a method of living the Law of Consecration, but we can live that law without the benefit of such an order being set up.

(Not that i’m doing it myself, of course, but it’s worth keeping in mind anyway.)

Silencing Brigham Young

Every once in a while you get a sacrament meeting address or class discussion where we hear the meme about how it’s the calling of women to be good mothers. Odd how you don’t hear a lot about Brigham Young’s declaration about it being the calling of women to use their talents in whatever way uses those talents best, including in a number of occupations that can only be done outside the home.*

Quite seriously, i wonder why.

* For those of you who might not know it, here’s my favorite Brigham Young quote on the subject:

We think the sisters ought to have the privilege to study various branches of knowledge that they may develop the powers with which they are endowed. Women are useful, not only to sweep houses, wash dishes, make beds, and raise babies, but they may also stand behind the counter, study law and physic, or become good bookkeepers, and all this to enlarge their sphere or usefulness for the benefit of society at large. In following these things they but answer the design of their creation.