Several years ago I found myself at a restuarant in Berkeley, California with some of my elders. They were bright, friendly, and very kind to me. I enjoyed the evening, and I am glad that I was invited. During the course of the conversation one of the interlocutors, a disillusioned returned-missionary from someplace in the former Soviet Union, began talking about the Church. She had decided that she wanted to write a story about a Russian convert to Mormonism. The convert would be a former KGB agent, who upon joining the Church would feel immediately at home in the culture of control, monitoring, and intimidation. Everyone at the table thought that this was a great joke, and I have to admit that it was a very clever way of making a point. I didn’t say anything. I smiled politely, ate my meal, and enjoyed the rest of the flow of the conversation.<\/p>\n
I have wondered, however, what I would have said if someone had turned to me and asked, “What do you think?” This was hardly a forum in which earnest protestations of faith or love for the Church would have been appropriate, welcome, or even useful. It’s a big world, people disagree strongly about things, and dealing pleasantly with that is part of life. On the other hand, I felt as though I had some experience with the Church. I had been a member all of my life. I was a returned missionary. I was a Gospel Doctrine teacher at the time. I had worked at BYU Studies<\/i> in the early 1990s and followed the pyrotechnics in Mormon intellectual circles at that time. There were things that disturbed me about the Church, but frankly I thought that comparison to the KGB was glib, offensive, and unfair. I didn’t experience my own life as that of a small cog in the secret police organization of a brutal totalitarian state. <\/p>\n
I have to admit that there is a part of my soul that wants to respond to these sorts of statements by very sweetly saying, “I personally think that you are full of sh_t.” On the other hand, I realize that this is an unfair overreaction. I generally do a good job of controlling myself, and hopefully my nasty side doesn’t bubble up too often. On the other hand, there is something deeply phony and a morally hollow in saying, “Ha! Ha! Yeh, Elder Packard really is just like Yuri Andropov, isn’t he?” So I am left with the problem of expressing sympathy, disagreement, and some coherent articulation of my own beliefs that others will find compelling or at least reasonable.<\/p>\n
It is probably just as well that no one asked me my opinion…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Several years ago I found myself at a restuarant in Berkeley, California with some of my elders. They were bright, friendly, and very kind to me. I enjoyed the evening, and I am glad that I was invited. During the course of the conversation one of the interlocutors, a disillusioned returned-missionary from someplace in the former Soviet Union, began talking about the Church. She had decided that she wanted to write a story about a Russian convert to Mormonism. The convert would be a former KGB agent, who upon joining the Church would feel immediately at home in the culture of control, monitoring, and intimidation. Everyone at the table thought that this was a great joke, and I have to admit that it was a very clever way of making a point. I didn’t say anything. I smiled politely, ate my meal, and enjoyed the rest of the flow of the conversation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn","category-mormon-life"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6430,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions\/6430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}