On pressuring Church leaders to change doctrine

[6EQUJ5]

20 minutes ago, Scott Lloyd said:

On this subject see the treatment here on FairMormon Answers.

That was a great answer/overview.

I've always said that technically the endowment could be over in 10-15 minutes but that we have the privilege of a ~90 minute session.  I often envy my grandma who described her endowment experience as being several hours.

[Zakuska]

11 hours ago, JLHPROF said:

Yes, that's what people tell me.  Funny how things are considered doctrine under the prophets that keep them and not doctrine under the prophets that change them.  Every doctrine is only doctrine until someone decides it isn't.

 

Tell me about it.  It used to be doctrine that Hams descendants where the Black African race now the church wont touch that doctrine with a ten foot pole.

No race baiting.

[JLHPROF]

42 minutes ago, Scott Lloyd said:

Apparently JLHPROF has arrogated to himself the privilege of declaring for the Church what is and isn't doctrine.
 

I declared nothing for the Church.  I have repeatedly specified that these are MY beliefs.  My problem is that the Church changed it's doctrine - the whole point of this thread.

Quote

People sometimes confuse the ordinance of the endowment with the presentation of the endowment. The presentation has undergone many changes since the time of Joseph Smith as it is adjusted to meet the needs of a modern and ever changing membership.

Joseph Smith restored the endowment ordinance, but the method of presentation of the ordinance is adapted to fit the needs of the times. There would be no point in having continuing revelation, a founding idea of our faith, if we are not permitted to advance and meet new needs. God’s directives and how He deals with His people may vary according to His people’s understanding and needs. God doesn’t tell everyone to build an ark and wait for a flood. Changes sometimes occur as a result of God dealing with His children according to their changing circumstances.

Yes, I know that is the excuse.  And it's true as far as it goes.  But people are simply wrong about what is presentation and what is ordinance.  Moses saw his endowment in real time or vision (and we got the books of Genesis/Moses as a result).  Different presentation for sure but the elements were unchanged.  And this is used as an excuse to change anything.  I don't think there is any element of the endowment that is off limits for change, and most members wouldn't care.

But whatever.  People don't have to agree with me and I have no say over the way the Church operates the ordinances.  So this is all moot. 

[halconero]

Sigh...and here's me missing the lecture at the veil...

I'm not even joking...

[Stargazer]

9 hours ago, Gray said:

My statement is a value judgement. You might as well issue a CFR about licorice being gross or cats being cute. 

But my reasoning (really borrowed from Greg Prince) is based on the idea that keeping all programs and manuals within strict control of church HQ is cutting off a source of revelation previously available to the church.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priesthood_Correlation_Program

 

I believe you're wrong in your value judgment.

I'm currently the teacher of our high priests group, and the manual specifically directs teachers to seek inspiration through the Spirit in teaching these lessons (and before you try to distinguish inspiration from revelation, they really are different only in degree, not kind).  And in so seeking it, I have received it, both in preparation and in delivering these lessons -- and the other lessons I have been invited to give to the high priests group of my ward.  I think you would find (if you're not too dogmatic yourself) that providing the manual as a guideline acts as a kind of catalyst for effective teaching.  It provides the framework, and the Spirit provides the meat.

This is my experience, anyway.

[Stargazer]

9 hours ago, Thinking said:

Polygamy

U.S. Government: Stop practicing polygamy.

LDS Church: No.

U.S. Government: Stop practicing polygamy.

LDS Church: No.

U.S. Government: Stop practicing polygamy.

LDS Church: No.

U.S. Government: Stop practicing polygamy or else you can't become a state.

LDS Church: OK.

U.S. Government: We're glad you finally listened to us.

LDS Church: We didn't listen to you. God told us to stop.

 

You know that Wilford Woodruff stated that he was going to endure to the end with respect to polygamy; that absent any direction from God he was going to persist to the point of losing everything, since he was not going to disobey God and give it up.  He said that God showed him what would happen in that event, and told him to give it up.  

In short, it looks like the threat to destroy the Church was in fact what caused the end of polygamy, but Woodruff was not the one who was intimidated.  It was God who blinked.  So to speak.  And it wasn't lack of statehood that pushed the matter over the edge, it was the survival of the Church itself.

[Thinking]

9 hours ago, Russell C McGregor said:

The claim that it was done to secure statehood for Utah is false.

It is also standard anti-Mormon boilerplate.

And standard accepted history.

Quote

Utah Territory tried several times to get admitted to the Union, starting in 1849.  The state the LDS first proposed was gigantic. It covered territory that now belongs to Colorado, Nevada and Utah. 

The second time, they tried for a smaller piece of land, but because U.S. citizens disliked the practice of polygamy among the Mormons, Congress did not want to give the Mormons statehood.

No attempts after that got much of anywhere until late in the 1800s.  During the sixth attempt at statehood, a Democrat was back in the White House after years of Republicans blocking statehood. LDS church leaders began to work quietly behind the scenes.  President Cleveland appointed negotiators to territorial posts. LDS church agreed to include an anti-polygamy clause in the proposed state constitution. The church also told voters in the state to ratify the constitution that had been written.

But Congress didn't agree, because the new constitution didn't prohibit polygamy. The whole failed scheme damaged the relationship between the LDS church and the Democrats.

The Manifesto advising Latter-day Saints not to enter illegal marriages was published in 1890. And the political landscape changed. The Mormons gave up their People’s Party—which had dominated state politics—and the non-Mormons gave up their Liberal Party. People joined either the national Democratic or Republican party.

Utah delegates wrote a new constitution that prohibited polygamy.

The roadblocks that had stopped Congress from admitting Utah into the Union were gone, and statehood soon followed. Link

 

Edited January 14, 2016 by Thinking

[Avatar4321]

14 hours ago, Jeanne said:

The ones who want to be baptized should be.  If the parents want to do what the child wants..it should be.  I don't know of any inactive or ex-member or members of part-member families ever saying no..but taking away a choice isn't right.

If the Lord commands us to wait for an ordinance or a blessing, should we wait or try to force it?

Waiting on the Lord is an important principle of the gospel. Should we ignore it because we don't want to?

Our temple ordinances are important. As vital as baptism. And yet all members are asked to wait till at least age 18. Converts are asked to wait a year at least before obtaining them. How is waiting to go to the temple different than waiting for baptism?

[Avatar4321]

10 hours ago, consiglieri said:

I would add to that by saying that the "correlation movement" has killed revelation entirely.

And yet, the prophet is still getting revelation as well as the twelve unless you are calling president Nelson a liar. Local leaders are still getting Revelation. Individuals such as myself and others are still getting Revelation. Investigators the missionaries teach are getting Revelation and joining the Church.

The only ones who don't seem to be getting Revelation are the critics bad mouthing the brethren. Why do you think that is?

[JLHPROF]

5 hours ago, Avatar4321 said:

And yet, the prophet is still getting revelation as well as the twelve unless you are calling president Nelson a liar. Local leaders are still getting Revelation. Individuals such as myself and others are still getting Revelation. Investigators the missionaries teach are getting Revelation and joining the Church.

The only ones who don't seem to be getting Revelation are the critics bad mouthing the brethren. Why do you think that is?

Nobody is calling our leaders liars, but as was discussed on the now closed thread the definition of revelation has shifted.

[Avatar4321]

5 minutes ago, JLHPROF said:

Nobody is calling our leaders liars, but as was discussed on the now closed thread the definition of revelation has shifted.

I don't believe that for a second. Look at what the Lord taught us about Revelation imn D&C 6, 8, and 9. Look at what Joseph taught about recognizing the Holy Ghost. It's the same process it has always been.

[6EQUJ5]

9 hours ago, JLHPROF said:

Doctrinal scripture Genesis 3:21 - used to be represented in the ceremony, now is not.  The correct relationship is that the Lord bestow the garment upon the man Adam.  Not that the man Adam present the garment before the Lord to be blessed.

The Adam/Lord relationship is represented all through the temple.  It is in fact the entire point of the ceremony.  It is the eternally exoteric representation of the eternally esoteric meanings.

But I feel like I am derailing the thread, and we are missing the point.  The point is, members have influenced the change in Church doctrine on many occasions.  This is just one of them.
 

I disagree with your interpretation of the ceremony but I do agree that members have influenced change in the Church.  But those members also always happen to be part of the Quorum of the Twelve and First Presidency.

In other words, Prophets and Apostles have influenced change in the Church.  When this particular change was announced we were made to understand that this was inspiration directly given to President Hinckley.  No member input required.

[Nevo]

18 hours ago, Bobbieaware said:

. . . . since the early 70's I had observed the priesthood ban had pretty much become a non-issue.

This seems to be the consensus among the old-timers on this board, that—as FairMormon puts it—"social pressure was actually on the decline after . . . 1971."

Yet the editors of a recent documentary history of the priesthood ban note:

Quote

During the 1960s and 1970s, the church faced tremendous pressure from both within and outside of the Mormon community to admit blacks into full fellowship. Indeed, such discussions dominated nearly every public event where high-ranking church leaders appeared. Lawsuits and potential legal action constituted another concern. The church's expanding presence in countries with a significant black population was another factor, particularly in Brazil, where the church had announced a temple in 1975. Likewise, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, scholars began probing the church's racial past, finding contradictory evidence concerning the precise origins of the ban. Finally, the church's genealogy department became overwhelmed with the large number of requests to determine temple and priesthood eligibility for "dark-skinned" converts. All such factors hastened the demise of LDS racial policy by creating a cultural milieu in which the ban could be lifted.

— Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, ed., The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 92.

Regarding lawsuits and potential legal action, they write:

Quote

In the mid-1970s, potential lawsuits created another problem for LDS officials. In 1974, the NAACP challenged Mormon racial teachings in a lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America. While the church was not a direct party to the suit, LDS officials feared that the case could have far-reaching implications for the church's racial policy. The church denied an African-American boy in an LDS troop the opportunity to serve as a senior patrol leader—a position reserved for the deacon's quorum president, an Aaronic priesthood holder. When the boy's family threatened a lawsuit with the NAACP claiming discrimination, Spencer Kimball, as church president, was supoenaed. Kimball's long-time secretary, Francis Gibbons, recalled that the subpoena instructed Kimball "to bring to the deposition every document relating to the Church's policy withholding the priesthood to blacks." The court dismissed the case when LDS officials changed the policy, no longer requiring a deacon's quorum president to serve as the patrol leader. This resolution brought closure to a potentially damaging lawsuit and ended an affair that had "dominated" Kimball's "thoughts" for months.

. . . . [Church leaders] had watched very closely the Bob Jones University case, in which the IRS revoked its tax exemption status in an important 1975 ruling. The IRS determined that Bob Jones's discrimination against African-Americans, particularly the school's prohibition against interracial marriage, had violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In addition, state policies worried Mormon officials. "Various states," LDS church historian Leonard Arrington observed in 1978, refused "to exempt Church property, including temples and chapels and stake houses, from taxation on the grounds that the church discriminates against blacks. This has already been done by Wisconsin, was being considered in Hawaii, and plans were being made to take the case to other states." . . .

Similarly, the J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU came under assault in 1975 when law school officials received a troubling letter from the American Bar Association indicating that its accreditation was in jeopardy owing to the church's "discriminatory" racial policies. Though the ABA eventually granted accreditation, then BYU president and later LDS apostle Dallin H. Oaks remarked that it was a miracle. . . .

Internationally, the church faced the threat of expulsion from governments that disagreed with the church's racial policies. In 1976, a lawsuit in Costa Rica concerned church leaders when a black lawyer tried to disenfranchise the church there, stating that LDS officials had violated laws by racially profiling potential converts. . . .

— Harris and Bringhurst, The Mormon Church and Blacks, 106–107.

 

 

Edited January 14, 2016 by Nevo

[Scott Lloyd]

44 minutes ago, Nevo said:

18 hours ago, Bobbieaware said:

 

This seems to be the consensus among the old-timers on this board, that—as FairMormon puts it—"social pressure was actually on the decline after . . . 1971."

Yet the editors of a recent documentary history of the priesthood ban note:

Quote

During the 1960s and 1970s, the church faced tremendous pressure from both within and outside of the Mormon community to admit blacks into full fellowship. Indeed, such discussions dominated nearly every public event where high-ranking church leaders appeared. Lawsuits and potential legal action constituted another concern. The church's expanding presence in countries with a significant black population was another factor, particularly in Brazil, where the church had announced a temple in 1975. Likewise, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, scholars began probing the church's racial past, finding contradictory evidence concerning the precise origins of the ban. Finally, the church's genealogy department became overwhelmed with the large number of requests to determine temple and priesthood eligibility for "dark-skinned" converts. All such factors hastened the demise of LDS racial policy by creating a cultural milieu in which the ban could be lifted.

— Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, ed., The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 92.

 

 

None of the above conflicts with anything I have said here drawn from my own clear recollection: intense social pressure, militant protests, etc., during the late '60s and early '70s which had subsided years before the revelation was received in June 1978. As I've indicated before, if the Church leaders were going to knuckle under to social pressure in this, the time to have done so would have been when protestors were wearing black arm bands and hocking molotov cocktails.

Threats of lawsuits can be a worrisome thing. But none of the legal sabre rattling mentioned in your quote had anywhere near the profile of what was going on in the late '60s and early '70s.

I clearly remember the issue with the senior patrol leader position. It got a lot of attention in the media for a few weeks, then was resolved and quickly vanished from the public consciousness as these things do.

If there was an proximate catalyst for change, it was probably the Church's expansion in countries with large black populations. But bear in mind, the Brethren had obviously been deliberating for years over the racial ban, and the quotes in the link I provided in the OP clearly shows that Spencer W. Kimball was determined not going to be pressured into action by such elements as protests and threats from the outside.

Edited January 14, 2016 by Scott Lloyd

[Russell C McGregor]

15 hours ago, Zakuska said:

Glad to know the church is anti-mormon and uses "anti-mormon boilerplate" when it notes that one of the things the church had to do to secure statehood for Utah was to give up polygamy.

https://www.lds.org/manual/church-history-in-the-fulness-of-times-student-manual/chapter-thirty-four-an-era-of-reconciliation?lang=eng

Thank you for that. Did you actually read it? As in, read for comprehension? If you do, you will note that it does not claim, nor imply, that polygamy was abandoned in order to obtain statehood for Utah.

[Russell C McGregor]

10 hours ago, Thinking said:

And standard accepted history.

 

Nope.

Someone else who doesn't actually read his own sources.

 

[Scott Lloyd]

10 hours ago, Thinking said:

And standard accepted history.

 

Accepted by whom? You link to an abbreviated, simiplified elementary school account and label it as "accepted history"?

You're going to ignore what Russell pointed out then? Heavy-handed oppression by the federal government leading inexorably to the destruction of the Church.

I agree with Russell. It is extremely simplistic to assert that plural marriage was ended as a trade-off for receiving statehood.

 

[consiglieri]

10 hours ago, Stargazer said:

  In short, it looks like the threat to destroy the Church was in fact what caused the end of polygamy, but Woodruff was not the one who was intimidated.  It was God who blinked.  

This is one of the problems I see with attributing every statement by a Church president to God.

Inevitably, any mistake the leader may have made is laid at God's feet.

In the context of the priesthood ban, there is a stark choice to be made--either God is a racist or the leaders of his Church were racist for over a hundred years.

In such a situation, I think it preferable to give the leaders the credit rather than God.

[consiglieri]

9 hours ago, Avatar4321 said:

And yet, the prophet is still getting revelation as well as the twelve unless you are calling president Nelson a liar. Local leaders are still getting Revelation. Individuals such as myself and others are still getting Revelation. Investigators the missionaries teach are getting Revelation and joining the Church.

The only ones who don't seem to be getting Revelation are the critics bad mouthing the brethren. Why do you think that is?

I will repeat myself that I receive revelation all the time.

Why do you think that is?

[consiglieri]

3 hours ago, 6EQUJ5 said:

I disagree with your interpretation of the ceremony but I do agree that members have influenced change in the Church.  But those members also always happen to be part of the Quorum of the Twelve and First Presidency.

In other words, Prophets and Apostles have influenced change in the Church.  When this particular change was announced we were made to understand that this was inspiration directly given to President Hinckley.  No member input required.

You are aware the Church sponsored a far-reaching poll among its members regarding their thoughts about the temple ceremony prior to instituting the changes in 1990?

[consiglieri]

18 hours ago, Scott Lloyd said:

The tax-exempt thing was a pretty arcane observation. For the vast majority of the public, friend or foe, it was not even on the radar.

 

You are shifting the argument, I think.

Are you saying that Church leadership was unaware of the lawsuit contesting the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University?

[consiglieri]

18 hours ago, Scott Lloyd said:

Nothing inconsistent about Russell's reasoning.

What's inconsistent is your position vis-à-vis Church teaching. We don't pray to get God to change His mind. That's not a logically coherent notion for one who believes in the omniscience of God.

Yes, it is inconsistent.

The scriptures I quoted regarding Moses and Abraham clearly show prayer used to change God's mind.

And it worked!

Russell then quoted me from the LDS Bible Dictionary that this is not what happens with prayer.

Russell then told me that both are correct.

As I said, it is inconsistent.

[consiglieri]

18 hours ago, Bobbieaware said:

I said the ban had PRETTY MUCH become a non-issue, not that every single soul on planet earth was sanguine about the 130+ year old ban.

Calling the ban a non-issue in 1978 is a rewriting of history to make it fit a certain paradigm.

Something I think Nevo just demonstrated with his quote.

[consiglieri]

17 hours ago, Scott Lloyd said:

If my memory serves, he reminded the quorum that if the change were to come about, it ought to be driven by divine revelation, a thought that the others apparently hadn't considered carefully enough, given the ease with which they backed off on the matter.

 

Now hold on there, Bubballooey!!!

Are you saying that every other member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles somehow forgot that such a change should be driven by divine revelation?

That seems a remarkable admission.

[consiglieri]

16 hours ago, Russell C McGregor said:

Y'know Consig, it occurs to me that if you could actually show any inconsistency, you would do it.

That you resort to these kinds of snarky drive-bys suggests that you can't.

Your lack of self-awareness is astonishing, Russell.