COB/Corporate Mormonism

[_Nightlion]

My home ward was much like Zeez only a huge emphasis on Church Education workers and administrators. But I spent two weeks every Summer in a small, very small, LDS hamlet in Cassia County, Idaho. My step-grandpa was a salt of the earth rancher. So were everyone else in the valley.

It was a wonderful village to thrive in like a big caring family. My home ward was filled with nice people too. I never preached to the Idaho saints. But if I had they would have turned upon me enmasse just like the Salt Lakers did.

Fairly certain. What do you think?

[_sock puppet]

My home ward was much like Zeez only a huge emphasis on Church Education workers and administrators. But I spent two weeks every Summer in a small, very small, LDS hamlet in Cassia County, Idaho. My step-grandpa was a salt of the earth rancher. So were everyone else in the valley.

It was a wonderful village to thrive in like a big caring family. My home ward was filled with nice people too. I never preached to the Idaho saints. But if I had they would have turned upon me enmasse just like the Salt Lakers did.

Fairly certain. What do you think?

In that home ward of mine described in the OP, I heard many things from the pulpit that did not fit squarely with what I had been taught before. As long as the ideas were not presented in a way that forced the hand of the congregants to choose, most would respect and consider the ideas. I even remember one Sacrament Meeting speaker that tried to parallel notions between the preexistence and his own feelings that he had previously lived, albeit on this earth (his current life being reincarnation). The bishop did not stop him, did not reprimand, did not give a disclaimer at the end of or at any later sacrament meeting. It was talked about for months afterward, with some discarding his ideas entirely, and others leaving it open and unresolved.

Can't speak to the Cassia county ward of your grandfather that you attended. But given your description of its attendees and those in the ward in which you grew up, I bet your ideas would have been better received in Cassia even if you would have been turned on. Perhaps not so viscerally as in the ward you grew up.

Heck, in my home ward, the Sunday School president for a couple of years was a known smoker, but was always saying he knew it was bad and that he was going to quit real soon. When they formed the third ward, they tapped for the bishop a guy who had been inactive for 18 months, but was universally respected in our small community. Just seems so different than the corporate ladders in LDS Inc today.