Re: The Millennials simplified.
Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 6:13 pm
fetchface wrote:I'd still call my wife 'TBM' but this describes her more and more. Lately she has been relaxing on things and seeing the leaders as fallible. This has been helped a lot by recent actions by the leaders. She recognizes their attempts to use weasel-words to lie with the technical truth. She recognizes the absurdity of having a victim's help line that is staffed by lawyers who are in charge of litigating against victims. She doesn't try to defend these actions as somehow the wisdom of God that we just can't understand yet. She recognizes them as simple mistakes that have no justification.
This is very different from how she and I saw the church 10 years ago.
I see this as healthy for the Church. I wrote a paper years ago highlighting the emphasis the Brethren have historically put on not blindly following, and on questioning and having mature, self-reliant testimonies.
https://www.fairmormon.org/archive/publ ... gerous#en1
I freely admit that this is unofficially frowned on in current Church culture (many Mormons pay lip service to fallibility, but when pressed, won't ever give recent examples or even past ones beyond maybe Adam-God or the priesthood ban), but it hasn't always been so, and will have to be so again. That's a good thing.
Both the Church and its members will be the stronger for it and better off when the pendulum swings back. I think (just my own feel and observation) that President Nelson is readjusting based on reaction to his downgraded idea of revelation (whatever thought I am thinking = revelation). He seemed really subdued this last conference after the giddy barrage of the first year. I think that reality is settling in about the "Mormon" de-emphasis (the Church hasn't even changed the major websites yet).