I think I stopped believing that the Book of Mormon was historical in 2011. I keep a journal, but didn’t write that “event” down. Anyway, sometime around then, but I’ve continued practicing Mormonism. I was called as a bishop in December 2018, so did the bishop thing not believing the Book of Mormon was historical. I’ve seen comments on this blog and elsewhere noting that most non-history BoM believers end up leaving. That’s probably true, but some stick around, like me. This is a big topic that I’ll break into a few posts (perhaps post some over at the JI), but I figured I’d start with a little background. As we all know, debates over BoM historicity tend to be central to debates over validity of the faith, so when I got into Mormon history at the end of my undergrad at BYU, even though that meant early republic US religious history and not ancient Mesoamerica, that issues of historicity floated in the background nonetheless.
Year: 2024
Joseph Smith’s Uncanonized Revelations, a Review
Joseph Smith’s Uncanonized Revelations, edited by Stephen O. Smoot and Brian C. Passantino, is a new collection of revelations by or attributed to Joseph Smith. It builds upon the research and publication of documents by the Joseph Smith Papers Project, drawing together the relevant documents into one easily accessible place and providing context for each. The main section of the book focuses on revelations that can reliably be attributed to Joseph Smith while an appendix contains revelations that either are attributed to someone close to Joseph Smith or are late, second-hand recollections that may or may not be accurate and authentic reproductions of Joseph Smith revelations.
On Pie and Beer Day
Last Utah post for a while, I promise Imagine you lived in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia, or some other area settled by a historically disenfranchised religious group. Also imagine, if you will, that this Jewish or Muslim or what have you group had a local holiday that celebrated their escape from persecution and their settlement in their new land. In such a situation, using wordplay to come up with an alternative holiday where one ate pork would be considered in poor taste given the genesis of the holiday. (Or, for example, a Friday Meat Day on Good Friday for a Catholic community). The mature thing to do would be to be happy for them, maybe even join in the local celebrations. You wouldn’t be offended just because it was particular to the religious group that has historical roots in the place. If you switch Mormon with literally any other group, Buddhist, Muslim, Baha’i, whatever, this is obvious, but for some reason this is one of those things where it’s normatively okay to be demeaning towards Latter-day Saints in a way that would be considered inappropriate for virtually any other religious group.
The New Ex-Mormons
We just returned from our yearly-ish pilgrimage to Utah. Trips to Utah are always an opportunity to stick my finger in the air to get a more subjective, qualitative sense of things are going in the Church. Of course, Utah does not equal the Church in so many ways, but it does act as a sort of financial and membership ballast, and the amount of Mormon-ness in Utah is big enough that one can notice trends and patterns that would be harder to discern from random noise with a smaller sample size. However, here I’m not backing up any of these conjectures with quantitative data, it’s just my own anecdotal sense that may or may not be right, for what it’s worth. Back in my day Utahns could basically be separated out into three groups: members, whether active or not, ex-members, and never members. Typically but not always there were tensions between the first two groups, and ex-members either moved to Salt Lake Valley or left Utah altogether. The ex-Mormon identity was a very reified, concrete thing. It could hardly be otherwise with a relatively high-tension, high demand religion like the Church. Now I’m noticing another group, the second-generation ex-members. Some are what immigration scholars would call “generation 1.5,” or people who are born in one country as children but moved to another country young enough that for all intentions and purposes the UK/the US/whatever is the only country that…
A Review: The Last Called Mormon Colonization
Growing up in Utah, I heard many pioneer stories about my ancestors and their colleagues who traveled west to settle the Intermountain West region. I found, however, that many of the stories focused on the journey itself rather than the years that followed as they established settlements and survived in an arid region. The latter half is just as important, as is the observation that many people uprooted their lives repeatedly to settle more remote areas beyond the Wasatch Front in Utah. One dramatic story of that sort is among the last that could be considered pioneering—the settling of the Big Horn Basin in northern Wyoming in the early twentieth century.
Misuse of the “Lost Sheep” Parable
People often misuse the Parable of the Lost Sheep, where the Lord leaves the 99 to go after the 1, and draw analogies and connections that don’t make a lot of sense given the premises of the Parable, so I thought I’d make a set of guidelines for logically using the Parable. Note: I have wanted to do this post for a while, and it is in no way a critique or analysis of the Church’s recent 99+1 initiative. The motivation for this came from non-Church sources. If you self-identify as “the lost sheep” the logical corollary is that you should return and join the 99 crowd instead of making the Shepherd come after you. There is also the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” parable. Sometimes people have to be isolated for the good of the flock, this is part of what Church discipline is for. Jesus didn’t leave the 99 to find the one wolf in sheep’s clothing. On that note, the point of the parable isn’t that the one lost sheep is in fact in the right and all of the others are in the wrong. The lost sheep is, in fact, lost, and the point is not that they are going to co-opt the role of the shepherd and lead them somewhere else. Jesus doesn’t leave the 99 to find the lost sheep to only find out that the lost sheep was where everybody should…
A Review: Buffalo Bill and the Mormons
Buffalo Bill and the Mormons by Brent M. Rogers is a fun and interesting book about the intersections of “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s life with the Latter-day Saints. The basic idea is that the American superstar, soldier, bison hunter, and showman launched his acting career at a time when anti-Mormon propaganda had become a profitable and popular area of storytelling. Cody embraced using Latter-day Saints as stock villains in his storylines, portraying Latter-day Saints as enemies of the proper home. Cody was, of course, the defender of the proper home in the plays in which he performed and seems to have initially believed the messages of that propaganda to some degree.
The 1978 Priesthood Revelation Process
The term “revelation” in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a word with multiple interpretations, as can be seen in the process that led to the 1978 priesthood revelation.
To Live in Utah or not to Live in Utah? The Grand Debate
I asked Dalle-3 to “Create two images side-by-side, one representing Utah in a good light and one representing Utah in a bad light. Show me images that show bad things particular to Utah and good things particular to Utah, instead of just generic bad and good things.” In the image it generated “the left side highlights Utah’s natural beauty and outdoor activities, while the right side depicts issues like smog from the Salt Lake City inversion, a dried-up Great Salt Lake, and urban congestion.” For my family living in Utah is the eternal question (“next year in Utah”). Like a lot of members, we have a lot of ties leading back to our homeland. For my children Utah is the land of milk and honey, a Willy Wonka-esque existence of eternal grandparent candy and attention, where the urinals flow with ambrosia and nobody ever raises their voice. They talk about “those East Coasters” with a lilt of disdain despite the fact that they themselves are, in fact, born and raised East Coasters (kind of the flip side of those lifelong Utahns who say they’re “from” the cool state they lived in for a few years as a kid while their parents were in graduate school). As of now we feel that we are where we need to be right now, but we’ve thought through the pros and cons many times. Con: Housing Affordability Dear Utahns, this is insane. You can’t…
Thoughts on the First Batch of New Hymns
I have wanted to share my thoughts on the first batch of hymns and songs released by the Church as candidates for the New Latter-day Saint Hymnbook (and I would love to hear your thoughts as well).
Wilford Woodruff and the Founding Fathers
While Wilford Woodruff has only one canonized document in Latter-day Saint scriptures (Official Declaration 1), he did record a number of visions and revelations of his own. Perhaps the best-known among these is his vision of Wilford Woodruff and the Founding Fathers that led him to do proxy temple work for them and other eminent individuals. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Jennifer Mackley discussed what we know about Wilford Woodruff’s vision. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview.
Interesting Wikipedia Articles About Latter-day Saints
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Murderer, Ex-Mormon (according to Wikipedia) James Earl Ray A recent project of mine has been to figure out a way to generate a list of all Wikipedia articles that mention the word “Mormon” or “Latter-day Saint” so that we can generate the comprehensive compendium of all things Latter-day Saint/Mormon on Wikipedia. This project was inspired in part by an episode of the Omnibus podcast by Ken Jennings and Jon Roderick (incidentally, IMHO the wittiest podcast out there) about a prison breakout by James Earl Ray, the man who killed Martin Luther King Jr. Ken Jennings, who as most of us know is a member, bemusedly noted that the Wikipedia article on Ray indicated that he had been raised a Mormon. After preliminarily digging into the cited reference, however, Jennings seemed skeptical, and when I checked the page myself that little bit had been removed. (As an aside, given the sensitivities around racial issues given our history, I’m 1000% sure we would all know if the killer of Dr. King was raised Mormon). Still, it made me curious about other less-known tidbits, plus I thought it would be fun to have a variety of other comprehensive lists: a complete list of all celebrities raised Mormon, a complete listing of all organisms named after Mormons (more than you’d think), etc., which could easily be generated by scraping the meta-tags on the ur-list. To create such a list I…