In the comments section of a blog piece attempting to rebut BH Robert’s supposed loss of faith, poster “Jack” writes...
Thanks for addressing this issue. Yes--it's "old hat," but I fear that a student's master's thesis on the subject might be developed into a book in the near future. I don't know for certain that that's the case--it's just a hunch. And so I'm glad to see that there are ready sources that one can turn to to get the real story. Even so, some Latter-day Saint scholar might need to be primed to pump out an in depth review--if such a book were to ever be published; or even if the thesis itself were to be widely circulated.
I look forward to the book, if one is coming. John’s interviews with Montez are fascinating. Mormonism finally slams into modernity thanks to B. H. Roberts, and it freaked some of those Brethren out. I see Roberts as a hero and trailblazer, for whom the LDS Church is still not ready. Now is the time to embrace him, since the world is increasingly catching up to his position, i.e., the information challenging the antiquity of the Nook of Mormon is everywhere. Instead of hiding from the evidence or performing prestidigitation, now is the time to rework how people view the Book of Mormon and scripture more generally. Sam Brown is on it, and it is a good thing that the task is not left to the Mopologists altogether. It’s just a shame that so many doubters go to them looking for help only to be handed a concrete block in the rising flood waters.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
I'd like to hear more about what she couldn't see in the first presidency vault. The church still hides a lot even in the era of the JSP and I still wonder what didn't make it into the published papers. Discovering cover-ups make scandals out of less than occurrences and too much reliance on the appeal to authority fallacy means that the cover-up continues. Maybe just deal with it? I'm sure the members all know that the leaders aren't perfect as the leaders say over and over again. The emperor doesn't have clothes. So, just admit it already. However, they don't like to say so in real time as in admitting that President Nelson's clearly false claim about paying tithing will somehow bring people out of poverty. Or maybe that the members don't need to pay 10% any longer due to the financial disclosures that occurred late last year.
From a believer's perspective, so what if E. Roberts had questions. He should have. The Book of Mormon isn't historical and it is an embarrassment that the church insists on pushing this nonsense despite the facts or lack thereof. Time to rip the band aid off and let the healing begin. The people are still good and there is something to meeting together socially in a church context regardless of whether or not the beliefs are myth. But, questioning historicity leads to more questions, more doubts about authority. They are sitting on a pile of money and seem dead set on reaching $1 Trillion.
"Religion is about providing human community in the guise of solving problems that don’t exist or failing to solve problems that do and seeking to reconcile these contradictions and conceal the failures in bogus explanations otherwise known as theology." - Kishkumen
20 or 30 years ago, sociologists came up with a model where they looked at how much tension a religion has with the society in which it is located. "Low tension" religions were liberal religions where people met because they liked getting together in a place that had some trappings of church. However, low-tension religions don't ask their adherents to believe anything too crazy or make any sacrifices that are too hard. In contrast, high-tension religions require a ton of sacrifice in every way--time, money, intellectual integrity, and sometimes even family relationships. The claim was that high-tension religions were the ones that thrived, while low-tension religions withered. Part of the reasoning was the idea that because of their strict demands, high-tension religions have massive resources they can give back to the faith community, which makes membership worthwhile. The bigger point, though, had to do with psychology. There is something exhilarating about belonging to a religion that forces you to sacrifice everything, including your intellectual integrity. Such big claims are exciting. They make you feel special. They present a challenge. Sure, not everybody can do it, but enough people can do it to make the strict, literal-believing high-tension religions the ones that tend to grow and thrive. In fact, this concept of the Church being a high-tension religion was one of the bases for Rodney Stark forecasting that the Church would grow exponentially for the next century.
It seems to me that the LDS Church is inherently a high-tension religion while, say, the Unitarian Universalists are inherently low-tension. Sure, the Church could go against its fundamental nature and turn low-tension. Such a message would be, "Yea, Joseph Smith was a 'Prophet' and said some interesting things that we can appreciate if not literally believe. But we concede he was also a conman, and that most of the 'prophets' of the Church back to and including Brigham Young were just old, uninspired men. But we still go to church because we think it is worthwhile! But if you don't feel the same way that's fine--your eternal salvation is decidedly not at stake over such decisions." It could say that. But it would lose a ton of members in two groups: the people who are inherently conservative and actually believe the myths, and the people who would move on to other things if the manipulation were to end. And then some other intellectual types would feel less ostracized and might go back. In aggregate would it make the church stronger? Certainly not.
The Church is in a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't situation. There are forces that are causing the Church to transition from being a high-tension "cult" to a low-tension "sect". We see some of that at BYU and the Maxwell institute. But despite that, the leaders have decided that they are going all-in on being a high-tension religion.
The first principle of the gospel is faith, not intellectual integrity.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
20 or 30 years ago, sociologists came up with a model where they looked at how much tension a religion has with the society in which it is located. "Low tension" religions were liberal religions where people met because they liked getting together in a place that had some trappings of church. However, low-tension religions don't ask their adherents to believe anything too crazy or make any sacrifices that are too hard. In contrast, high-tension religions require a ton of sacrifice in every way--time, money, intellectual integrity, and sometimes even family relationships. The claim was that high-tension religions were the ones that thrived, while low-tension religions withered. Part of the reasoning was the idea that because of their strict demands, high-tension religions have massive resources they can give back to the faith community, which makes membership worthwhile. The bigger point, though, had to do with psychology. There is something exhilarating about belonging to a religion that forces you to sacrifice everything, including your intellectual integrity. Such big claims are exciting. They make you feel special. They present a challenge. Sure, not everybody can do it, but enough people can do it to make the strict, literal-believing high-tension religions the ones that tend to grow and thrive. In fact, this concept of the Church being a high-tension religion was one of the bases for Rodney Stark forecasting that the Church would grow exponentially for the next century.
It seems to me that the LDS Church is inherently a high-tension religion while, say, the Unitarian Universalists are inherently low-tension. Sure, the Church could go against its fundamental nature and turn low-tension. Such a message would be, "Yea, Joseph Smith was a 'Prophet' and said some interesting things that we can appreciate if not literally believe. But we concede he was also a conman, and that most of the 'prophets' of the Church back to and including Brigham Young were just old, uninspired men. But we still go to church because we think it is worthwhile! But if you don't feel the same way that's fine--your eternal salvation is decidedly not at stake over such decisions." It could say that. But it would lose a ton of members in two groups: the people who are inherently conservative and actually believe the myths, and the people who would move on to other things if the manipulation were to end. And then some other intellectual types would feel less ostracized and might go back. In aggregate would it make the church stronger? Certainly not.
The Church is in a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't situation. There are forces that are causing the Church to transition from being a high-tension "cult" to a low-tension "sect". We see some of that at BYU and the Maxwell institute. But despite that, the leaders have decided that they are going all-in on being a high-tension religion.
The first principle of the gospel is faith, not intellectual integrity.
This is a great point. The church is in a dilemma. I think the rising generations will continue to leave and the church will have to soften a la the Community of Christ or become a smaller church of fanatics. Either way, it's going to shrink.
Last edited by Guest on Wed Sep 23, 2020 11:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"Religion is about providing human community in the guise of solving problems that don’t exist or failing to solve problems that do and seeking to reconcile these contradictions and conceal the failures in bogus explanations otherwise known as theology." - Kishkumen
I think the low to high tension spectrum for religions makes a fair amount of sense, as long as one doesn’t think too carelessly about what “tension” means. Someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer could be pretty relaxed about how seriously you should take medieval metaphysics but kind of strict about opposing the Nazi government. So I think this religious tension has some element of demand for sacrifice in it, but I don’t think that’s quite the main thrust of it. To me the tension is more essentially about how differently you have to see the world from how people outside your religion see it.
My impression from some higher-tension evangelical Christians I’ve known is that high-tension religions tend to reinforce their own high-tension nature. Fundamentalist Christian preachers, for example, like to emphasize how worthless any less fundamentalist form of belief would be. I think there’s a tendency to eliminate from the religion anything which might appeal independently from the official beliefs, like catchy music or fine art. It’s a sort of scorched earth defense that tries to discourage the rank and file from retreating by leaving them nothing onto which they could fall back.
So I keep asking whether Mormonism can really manage a lowering of tension. There may be some good things in Mormonism without literal faith in the Prophet and priesthood power and the golden plates, but the question is whether there is enough good, compared to similar things that one can have better or more easily in other religions or without any religion.
I can’t claim to know but my impression is that the most distinctive things about Mormonism are precisely the most wackily untenable things. Once you lower the tension in Mormonism, is there really anything left that is still distinctively Mormon?
One of the things that the sociologists emphasized was that there was a natural lifecycle of religions to start out has high-tension cults and then mellow out over time. The idea is that as the religion grows and matures, the leaders want to be respected and be respectable, so they mellow things out.
This has undoubtedly happened in the Mormon context. The first big step towards lowering tension was abandoning polygamy. They've also abandoned or at least stopped emphasizing frequent additions to the canon, a physical gathering of the saints to Zion, the law of consecration, Adam-God, blood atonement, oath of vengeance, young-earth creationism, a hemispheric Book of Mormon geography, no death amongst animals before the fall, the second coming (at least imminently), the anti-Christ, food storage, white horse prophesy, God was once a man, an infinite regression of gods, King Follet discourse, the Gulf of Mexico being the crater left over when the city of Enoch was translated and floated away into the sky, Cain never dying and wandering around like a 7-foot monster, the three Nephites, demonic possession, blacks sitting on the fence in the war in heaven, a reworking of--what--over 50% of the temple endowment, sex outside of marriage being the third worst sin (i.e. not as bad as denying the Holy Ghost and murder, but worse than torturing children etc.) etc.
I'm not sure if we remember what Mormonism was like 40 years ago. There were a lot of mysteries and a lot of answers. They've gotten rid of almost all of that in exchange for putting the word JESUS CHRIST really prominently on the Church's logo. There has been a major retrenchment where they've given up on almost everything other than the Book of Mormon and the story of its origins being literally true.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
One of the things that the sociologists emphasized was that there was a natural lifecycle of religions to start out has high-tension cults and then mellow out over time. The idea is that as the religion grows and matures, the leaders want to be respected and be respectable, so they mellow things out.
This has undoubtedly happened in the Mormon context. The first big step towards lowering tension was abandoning polygamy. They've also abandoned or at least stopped emphasizing frequent additions to the canon, a physical gathering of the saints to Zion, the law of consecration, Adam-God, blood atonement, oath of vengeance, young-earth creationism, a hemispheric Book of Mormon geography, no death amongst animals before the fall, the second coming (at least imminently), the anti-Christ, food storage, white horse prophesy, God was once a man, an infinite regression of gods, King Follet discourse, the Gulf of Mexico being the crater left over when the city of Enoch was translated and floated away into the sky, Cain never dying and wandering around like a 7-foot monster, the three Nephites, demonic possession, blacks sitting on the fence in the war in heaven, a reworking of--what--over 50% of the temple endowment, sex outside of marriage being the third worst sin (i.e. not as bad as denying the Holy Ghost and murder, but worse than torturing children etc.) etc.
I'm not sure if we remember what Mormonism was like 40 years ago. There were a lot of mysteries and a lot of answers. They've gotten rid of almost all of that in exchange for putting the word Jesus Christ really prominently on the Church's logo. There has been a major retrenchment where they've given up on almost everything other than the Book of Mormon and the story of its origins being literally true.
That's the only Mormonism I know -- the Mormonism of mystery and answers. I have trouble imagining what it's like to be LDS today. Yet, the majority of folks I knew back in the day remain LDS today. I wonder if they notice the change.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
When I first heard the Mormon Stories podcasts, I thought the subject matter should be in a book. Not sure if Dr. Midgley is too old to pull on his high top black boots and faded trenchcoat to hound Ms. Montez's church leaders, work colleagues, neighbors, and family members for salacious tidbits into which he could weave a so-called "book review". Maybe one of the shiftier young apologists could cast the required desecration spells to make it happen. Anyway, might as well get started early with spurious arguments. No need to actually read the book.