I’m not really good at this

So what’s up with Mormons and this compulsive need we have to apologize for our speaking abilities when we get up and deliver a sacrament meeting address?

This suddenly became quite a bit more real (and not just annoying) to me since my oldest was asked to speak in sacrament meeting tomorrow. She practiced her speech in front of Jeanne and me this evening, and it was good and we told her so, except that we asked her to eliminate the sentence she opened with where she said she was nervous and downplayed expectations for the whole thing.

She objected to our request, saying—seriously!—that one has to start a sacrament meeting address that way.

I mean, kudos to her for such astute cultural observation skills, but is it really a good thing to tell people at the outset that you’re no good at what you’re doing? After all, such a claim is either wasted time since we’re all about to become painfully aware of it whether you say it or not, or it’s false modesty. Either way, not good.

(And it’s not just girls, or even just girls and women—men and boys do it too. Do similar things happen in other faith traditions where congregants regularly speak in services?)

p.s. She finally conceded our point after a couple minutes of back and forth on the issue. Score one for basic rhetorical competence.

Trying to have it both ways on children

So with general conference coming up, i’ve been thinking about the last general conference—and what with birth control having been in the news here in the US during the past few months, it’s gotten me to think about Neil L. Anderson’s latest general conference address.

I’ve thought a lot about that address, and the comments i made during my semi-liveblog of that conference session still hold true, i think—basically, i think his message was rather muddled, and that he wasn’t successful at explaining whatever it is he wanted to say. This may be why i’ve heard and read his address used by Mormons to support claims that the leadership of the church wants its members to have as many children as physically possible (and perhaps not even stop there), and also that the leadership is cool with its members having however few children they want.

Consider the following lines (not next to each other, as it appears here) from the address:

When to have a child and how many children to have are private decisions to be made between a husband and wife and the Lord. These are sacred decisions—decisions that should be made with sincere prayer and acted on with great faith.

Many voices in the world today marginalize the importance of having children or suggest delaying or limiting children in a family…[Quotes from others went here, including a statement that “a biblical perspective on motherhood” requires having children]…As the world increasingly asks, “Are these all yours?” we thank you for creating within the Church a sanctuary for families, where we honor and help mothers with children.

(That last one was followed by stories of folks having children despite, e.g., still being in school—and this is all presented as a Good Thing.)

Sorry, but this just seems a bit of trying to have one’s rhetorical cake and eating it, too—everybody gets to make a private decision, but in the context that decision is always going to be to have lots of kids starting pretty much right away.

Y’all’s thoughts?

Prioritizing needs

Here's a meme i’d like to see us lose: “What people need most is a knowledge of the gospel.”

No, what people need most is oxygen. Once they’ve got that, well, that’s when we can start preaching the gospel to them, i figure.

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?

Sometimes it’s just so easy

You know, i have to admit that i actually like the occasional fire-and-brimstone, one-moral-slip-and-you-lose sacrament (and conference) address—’cause it logically follows that since i’ve already slipped, i’ve already lost, and so i don’t need to try any more.

Thanks for the free pass, folks who think you’re trying to get me to be righteous!

Hopes and dreams

One day—and i’m hoping it’s in my lifetime—someone will deliver a general conference address about how cultural traditions are good, but that they may need to be laid aside to conform with church principles.

Well, we actually already get those now and again. What i’m hoping to see, though, is one that goes just a little bit further and explicitly points out that some jello-belt traditions are among those that will need to be laid aside. That’s what we haven’t really gotten yet.

One of these things is not like the other

Why do Mormon sacrament services tend to have oddly random choral exhibitions? Like, a service in which all the speakers talk about the covenants of the sacrament, but then we get a bunch of youth singing some modern fluff song with random scriptural quotes about bringing one soul to God? I mean, really.

What the world needs now

I’m rather tired of hearing lines such as “What people need most is a knowledge of the gospel”. I mean, let’s make sure they’re getting enough oxygen first, and then maybe we can talk religion…

Comparative love

So i heard a speaker in church recently say that if we commit sin, that means that we love that sin more than we love Jesus Christ.

Is that claim actually true? I have some serious doubts about it, but i’m not absolutely certain one way or the other. Others’ thoughts?

I have a dream (that sacrament meetings will sound interesting)

So yesterday was a holiday here in the United States in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. As a result, i heard a bunch of archival recordings of Dr. King on the radio, especially of his most famous speech.

Listening to that, i wondered why our church speechifying is so, well, boring. I mean, not necessarily in terms of content, but in style—even when the speaker is saying something stirring, there’s almost never any prosodic shifting going on, there’s no serious attempt to bring the congregation into the flow of the words.

And it’s not like this flat delivery is something inherent to Mormonism—if you listen to old general conference addresses, the old-school speakers (those who came of age in the nineteenth century) got into it. So apparently it used to be part of Mormon preaching—but now it’s not. So what happened? Why did we move away from interesting-sounding sermons to monotonous-sounding ones?

Nylons and the oral tradition

The overreliance of Mormons on what i sometimes call (for lack of a better label) the “oral tradition” troubles me. This is particularly the case for a religion like ours that leans so far to the orthopraxy side of things.

Specific case:

When we lived in Florida, most of the women in our stake didn’t wear nylons to church. In fact, it was generally regarded as a silly thing to do—we were in Florida, after all, and nylons are a rather warm bit of clothing.

Now that we live in Alaska, as far as i can tell, nobody cares one way or the other—some women wear nylons to church while others don’t, and it’s not a big deal.

I know women who live in other locations, though, who have been taught over the pulpit by bishops and stake presidents that it’s a moral sin—yes, that’s not made up—for women not to wear nylons to church.

Sorry, folks, but i’d have to think that if it’s not a sin in Florida or Alaska, it’s also not a sin in Maryland or even Utah.

(Of course, i still remember a post from a while age on the Spanish Fork 401st Ward blog where the question was posed whether nylons are a “spiritual requirement for sisters, or old-men fetish?” Well, given that there really apparently is a word in Japanese porn for that, i know what my guess is…)

Why do we end that way?

When did closing speeches with “…in the name of Jesus Christ, amen” become standard in church meetings? General conference addresses in the first half of the twentieth century didn’t always end that way. Did sacrament meeting addresses and public testimonies end that way back then, or did that come in later? Anybody out there have any memory of that era of public speaking in the church?

No more memorizing?

The new (well, newish, really, since it’s a few years old by now) approach to the missionary discussions (yeah, yeah, i know, lessons—distinction without a difference, folks) gets portrayed as a huge shift from previous practice, particularly in that the full-time missionaries aren’t expected to memorize the discussions now, but rather to try to teach the various principles in their own words.

Really? This is new? I didn’t memorize the discussions when i was a full-time missionary nearly twenty years ago. Jeanne (my wife) didn’t memorize them when she was a full-time missionary almost as long ago. I’ve met very, very few people, in fact, who memorized the discussions as full-time missionaries. So how is this a big change?

No preaching for the non-ideal

Mormon culture (at least as i’ve experienced it in lots of places in the US the past several years) is, i think, really hung up on familial roles right now, which leads to a lot of “This won’t work for everyone, but we won’t even mention the possibility of alternatives” sorts of statements in church meetings. This bothers me—why not at least occasionally deign to preach directly to those that don’t fit your particular ideal?