The other point (I am not making very well) is that if the church only feeds its people milk and maybe a little mush, then bored foyer characters like myself (or worse) are going to entertain themselves by making church history into a circus. Honest and more complete truth telling in our history will take some of the “fun” out it. Or maybe even take it to a level where something useful might happen.

BTW Ardis, the church archives are still pretty much closed to me; because I am too lazy to go there and too stupid to know exactly where they are. Out west in Utah somewhere, is it?

I’m weird. … I’ve already admitted to being weird.

That should make all other parts of my comment perfectly acceptable to you.

I can relate to your experience in church mentioning something colorful in our history and everyone thinks you are making it up. It happens to me all the time and I actually enjoy it. The best example, I remember a conversation I had in the foyer with this lady in our ward who was getting ready to teach a lesson in Relief Society about getting along with your husband, or something along those lines from the Joseph F. Smith book. I mentioned to her that Joseph F. should know since he was married to about 6 women. She didn’t believe me. Then I related that his first wife divorced him and I was accused of slander. Oh, that can’t be true! Prophets never get divorced. When I added that some sources circulate a story about Joseph F. getting so angry with her that he threw her out of the house and actually slapped her, I might as well have painted my face black and had “Missouri Mobster” printed across my shirt.

The problem with the milk-before-meat approach is that if you don’t keep watering the milk down, it goes sour after a while.

Darn! I’ve always wanted to discuss whether or not we can teach our kids the TEMPLE version of creation, as opposed to the publicly printed one.

Anyway…

Amen, Ardis. And not just those “too distant from academic studies” but those too distant from academic study of Mormonism.

Geoff, I understand what you’re saying. And it does cause testimony issues. I grew up in Utah, went on an annual school field trip to the Beehive House, graduated from seminary, attended at graduated from BYU, and moved to Florida. It was then, reading Mormon Enigma, that I first learned that Joseph Smith was a polygamist.

Thinking that I must have just been in a coma until I was 27, I actually mentioned in church that Eliza R. Snow was married to two prophets. The house nearly came down. No one there knew. And some claimed I made it up.

I really felt deceived by what felt to me like straight up lying.

So, my problem with the layer-by-layer approach is that it sounds EXACTLY like what all my evangelical friends tell me Mormons do. They suck you in with the clean living and plates of brownies. It’s only LATER that they tell you the real deal. I really don’t know if that’s honest or fair, even though I understand the position.

Frankly, I think–particularly in a day when the layers are only as far away as google–we (meaning our leaders) just need to step up and explain some stuff.

This thread seems to follow the same line: Yes, the academic awareness of the editing of revelations has been freely available at least since Robert Woodford studied the topic all those years ago. Yet most members of the church had never heard the idea, because it isn’t a standard part of our lesson cycle and because very few people make a practice of reading church magazines from a generation ago. I’m weird. I read them. But then, I’ve already admitted to being weird.

The essential knowledge may not be new, but this article is the first time in this generation that it has been presented in an accessible way for the general church membership. In that sense of breaking new ground for a large segment of the church who is too young, too distant from academic studies, or too newly members of the church, this article is a blockbuster.

Can’t we at least agree that it’s a new idea for many people? Even if it’s familiar ground to Bloggernacle savants?

As for your citation to Ardis, I don’t think that it helps your argument much. I’m happy to agree with Ardis’s assessment of the state of the archives. I don’t see how the openness of the archives in 2006 (Ardis’s date of writing) contradicts my initial assertion (which seems to bother you) that “recent years have been characterized by an extremely open approach.” (I also cite the 2007 MMM article for this assertion.)

In fact, I think that Ardis’s post supports this idea. She writes that the archives have “come of age,” and the entire point of her post (stated repeatedly) is that the then-present archives (2006) are quite different than they were in 1983. Ardis goes on at some length about recently opened collections of documents. Nate states in a comment that “there are literally hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that are available today that were not available in 1983.” Stapley agrees. Suzanne cites a Carmon Hardy comment about “helpful, welcoming spirit displayed in recent years by stewards of the church’s archives.” All of this seems to support the idea of a shift towards greater openness.

John writes:

The depiction made here of Elder Jensen’s Ensign article as “ground-breaking” is one that praises one small thing largely as an opportunity to condemn the larger setting it exists in.

Huh?

Prior restrictions were not the point of the post, which has all of one sentence about them. The post focuses on inoculation and openness as good things. Your characterization does not reflect what the post actually says.