A ground-breaking report on how Mormonism works

[slskipper]

https://slate.com/culture/2022/09/rache ... acism.html

This is, to my knowledge, the first honest attempt by an outsider to explain Mormonism to the general public. It is journalism as it should be practiced when it comes to religion, rather than simply regurgitating feel-good press releases because religion must always win out. Toward the end, the author states the central problem of Mormonism, which is that modern leaders simply cannot repudiate former ones because that undermines the very claim to the modern leaders' authority which is based on the foundation of previous prophets.

I suspect that the big change that has allowed this kind of thing is the recent series of exposes on Netflix and other places that ripped off the bandages.

I note that The Church has deftly introduced reasonable doubt that the heckling event never really happened. Just like cigarettes don't really cause cancer and fossil fuels don't really cause global warming and the police didn't actually beat Rodney King to death. And so it goes.

[Marcus]

In 1947, Smith responded to a critique of the church’s ban on full Black membership by insinuating that allowing Blacks to become full members would place the church on a slippery slope toward “intermarriage of the Negro and the white races, a concept which has heretofore been most repugnant to most normal minded people… and is contrary to Church doctrine.”

sounds like midgley's "slippery slope" rationale for why it couldn't happen before 1978:

Louis Midgley:

My own attempt at a rationalizing explanation for what I call the strident anomaly of Blacks not being able to hold the priesthood, is that if we had initially gone to them we would have become a Black church, and this would have prevented the huge initial missionary harvest first in England, then Wales, and Sweden, Denmark and Norway, as well as Germany and the Netherlands. Those folks would not likely have become Latter-day Saints, if we had been even a bit Black.

both remarks are disgusting. the latter one was made in 2021.

[Res Ipsa]

Thanks for posting that article, siskipper. It’s the most insightful take on the incident I’ve seen yet. I wondered who the author was, and it turns out he write a book on Mormonism and black folks. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1469636166/re ... e0c39a1ce0

I don’t really read much on Mormonism these days, but I’m adding this to my to read list.