Category: Latter-day Saint Thought

Doctrine – Theology – Philosophy

Grinding the Faces of the Poor Through the Lottery

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I do not have the brain chemistry for gambling. If I bet my house on a coin flip and won, I would be a sleepless wreck for weeks anxiously wondering about what would have happened had I lost. (Like tobacco, this is one of those Latter-day Saint rules I would keep even if I left the Church). Perhaps because of this, the idea of a gambling addiction, where people destroy their lives because they need the next hit or are trying to get back to even, is very viscerally unpleasant to me (which makes gambling addiction-centered films such as Molly’s Game, The Gambler [preferably the 1974 version, which is based on Dostoevsky’s novel of the same name] and Uncut Gems very intense for me), and I am glad that Utah is one of the most anti-gambling states in the country. I usually bristle at the reflexive Utah=Latter-day Saint connection that many draw, but in this case it makes theoretical sense that Utah’s anti-gambling is in part derived from its Latter-day Saint heritage.  Recently due to a Supreme Court decision the floodgates for sports gambling were opened across the country, and many states liberalized gambling laws. They did this in a staggered fashion, which makes it so that researchers can more rigorously draw causal conclusions about what happens when sports gambling is legalized. A recent paper that just dropped found that when online sports gambling was legalized they “find a roughly…

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A Review: Second Class Saints

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The priesthood and temple ban against individuals with Black African ancestry is a topic that is both fraught and crucial in understanding the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Matthew Harris’s recently-published Second Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality provides one of the most in-depth looks at that ban, with a special focus on the process by which it was challenged and lifted in the twentieth century by the 1978 priesthood revelation. It also discusses the ongoing effects of the ban and the anti-Black teachings in the Church that framed it after the revelation and the reluctance of Church leaders to come out against those teachings until 2013. Ultimately, however, the focus of the book is “on racism as it affected Black and biracial people in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (p. xiv).

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John Turner on his Joseph Smith Biography

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John Turner is known in Latter-day Saint circles for his biography of Brigham Young and his book The Mormon Jesus: A Biography. Next year, however, he will add to that collection with John Turner’s Joseph Smith biography. Turner recently spoke about the forthcoming biography with From the Desk, and announced that “I loved writing Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, which Yale University Press will publish in Summer of 2025.” What follows here is a copost to the full interview.

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Churches with Sound Fundamentals Are Very Robust

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Imagine President Nelson and the First Presidency came out with a revelation prophesying that the Second Coming would happen on a specific year (yes, that would never happen in the Church for a great number of reasons, but suspend disbelief for a second). This message was trumpeted from the General Conference pulpit on multiple occasions and carried across multiple issues of the Ensign. Missionaries are told to incorporate the message of God’s imminent coming in their materials. After several years of this kind of consistent, focused preparation the prophesied date comes….and nothing happens. At first there’s some fudge factor. Maybe it’s the next month or the next year? But soon it becomes clear that the entire prophecy is wrong.  Would that be the death knell to the Church? Something very similar to this actually happened to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1975. My understanding was that there was always some level of plausible deniability, but you had to be a more nuanced believer to read between the lines of official material to parse out such a space. The Witnesses by and large were gearing up for the Second Coming.  And what happened to them when Christ failed to arrive? I ran across this graph of Witness growth during the 20th century (citation, since I don’t know how to do footnotes in WordPress: Sturgis, Paul W. “Institutional versus Contextual Explanations for the Growth of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States, 1945-2002.”…

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Being a Mormon without Believing in a Historical Book of Mormon, Part 1

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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.

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Joseph Smith’s Uncanonized Revelations, a Review

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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.

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On Pie and Beer Day

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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. 

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The New Ex-Mormons

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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…

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A Review: The Last Called Mormon Colonization

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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.

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Misuse of the “Lost Sheep” Parable

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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…

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