https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comme ... nant_path/“Simon” wrote: I’m a biologist by training, and one aspect of biology that fascinates me is evolution. There is abundant evidence leaping out to us from all fields of biology, that all life on earth evolved from a common ancestor. When Mormon prophet, Russel Nelson, said “dogs have always been dogs” he could not have been more wrong. They were all once wolves. But the principles of evolution – survival of the fittest variants through natural selection – do not only apply to living organisms. Evolutionary principles can be seen at work in lots of places, even churches.
Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, came up with a wide variety of novel theological ideas. Some of these ideas still persist, but some were ripe for being selected against (given the boot) as society evolved. Polygamy was a bit of a problem for a while, but the leaders eventually realised that if they continued practising it, the church would soon run out of money and respectability and fizzle out in the desert. So, the church evolved its doctrine by arranging for a revelation to get rid of that multiple wives stuff. Blacks and the Priesthood was a big problem too. BYU would soon be in a football league of its own if something wasn’t done. Another revelation came along, and the church evolved again.
We can see evolution happening right before our eyes with the temple ceremony. Too many wives have complained to their husbands about how humiliated they felt at the temple. The ceremony evolves by the leaders every now and then quietly lopping off the most offensive bits of the ceremony. As society evolves, the church evolves to catch up. Any aspect of Mormonism that causes more people to leave than to stay, is ripe for negative selection and will eventually get tossed out. Otherwise, the church would eventually die, like most other cults have.
Another recent example of selection is the emergence of the phrase covenant path. The phrase was unheard of prior to 2007, but if you have attended General Conference in the last few years, you will have left with covenant path ringing in your ears. The leaders of the church know that large numbers are leaving the church, particularly the youth, so they will used any tool at their disposal to guilt members into strict, unquestioning obedience. Covenant path is currently the weapon of choice and is under strong positive selection in the church.
What fascinates me most is how covenant path got into the Mormon lexicon in the first place. It turns out that members of the YW General Presidency invented the term in their attempts to persuade young women to stop leaving the church, forget having a career and get married and have babies. Two women in particular, played key roles in bringing covenant path into mainstream Mormonspeak; Mary Cook and Wendy Nelson. Somewhat surprisingly, both of these women have never experienced the challenges of raising their own children from birth. They both married later in life to elderly Mormon widowers.
Covenant path was first used in 2007 by Elaine Dalton when she was second counsellor in the YW General Presidency. She used the term just once in a General Conference talk. Hardly anybody noticed. Remarkably, it had never been used in any conference talk going back to 1850. However, the big break for covenant path came a few years later, in 2013, when it was used eight times by four different women at General Conference; by two women in the YW General Presidency and two in the RS General Presidency. Covenant path was shifting out of the YW closet.
The most reckless wielder of the covenant path stick at the 2013 conference was Mary Cook, Elaine Dalton’s successor in the YW General Presidency. She used the term five times in her talk. This undoubtedly left an impression on women listening to her talk. Covenant path had arrived. One woman, who would have been especially taken with the phrase covenant path, was Wendy Nelson, the second wife of the current prophet. It aligned perfectly with Wendy’s views on how to get children to obey the commandments, and stay on the straight and narrow. These views are still on display in her 2013 book The Not Even Once Club. This book is still sold by Deseret Book in spite of the fact that almost 50% of its reviews are strongly negative. You get a sense for how troubling the book is from the promotional blurb on the Deseret Book website.
“The Not Even Once Club is an adorable and appealing way to engage children in a story that will help them choose for themselves to keep the commandments and to never break them. Not even once. Children will meet Tyler, an energetic boy who is excited to make new friends in his Primary class. They have invited Tyler to join their special club, but first he has to pass the test and keep the club promise.”
The Not Even Once Club is neither adorable or appealing. Teaching children they must never break the commandments and to form a club to exclude those who fail, are deeply disturbing themes for a children’s book. Maybe if Wendy had had her own children, she may have noticed that all kids make mistakes. All of us will commit sin, especially children and youth who naturally test their boundaries. That’s sort of what the Atonement was all about; helping sinners. But in Wendy Nelson’s world its perfection or else.
With Wendy Nelson now a covenant path convert, it was only a matter of time before the prophet would get a revelation (a Wendy prompting) to use it. Nelson first used the term in 2015 when he was President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. But like his pointless campaign to rid Mormonism of the Mormon brand, Nelson waited until he took the reins in 2018 to put his plans into action.
Between 2007 and 2018 the odd leader took pot shots at the members with covenant path. In the 2018 General Conferences the use of the term covenant path resembled machine gun fire. Covenant path was used no less than 36 times by 19 different leaders, four of them women and 15 men. The term has been used almost 200 times since 2018, almost 50 times per year, and it is now almost always used by men. The top six (ab)users include David Bednar (8 times), Gerrit Gong (8), Dallin Oaks (13) and Todd Christofferson (17; 16 in one talk). The experts at heart manipulation, cardiologists Dale Renlund (19) and Russell Nelson (23) top the covenant path league table.
How did 19 Mormon leaders all of a sudden get “inspired” to use the term covenant path at General Conference in 2018? As each of these church leaders were prayerfully ponderising about what they would say at conference, did they all receive the same inspiration from God? I'm sure that’s what the brethren would like the members to believe. Or did God (or Wendy more likely) instruct Nelson to tell them all to use covenant path in their talks? The Wendy intervention seems infinitely more plausible to me. But clearly, many of the speakers at General Conferences in 2018 were directed, most likely by Russell Nelson, to use the phrase in their talks.
The phrase covenant path is particularly appealing to the most hard-line apostles who preach strict obedience to the commandments and the covenants we make at baptism. In David Bednar’s view, when we chose to make covenants at baptism (as 8-year-old children), we surrendered our free agency and embarked on the covenant path. We now have the moral agency to only choose to do exactly what we are told. If that sounds like Satan’s plan, that's because it was Satan’s plan.
It remains to be seen if beating members with the covenant path stick will stop the bleeding or if it will evolve its way out of the lexicon. There can be no doubt that the brethren know the church is suffering the greatest apostasy in its history. From my analysis of census figures in Australia and Canada and leaked attendance and census data in the UK, roughly 40% of the members who were attending the church in the year 2000 have now left. The apostles know, in Technicolor, how bad the Internet apostasy has been, and that’s why we have heard nothing about it. The leaders are desperate for anything they can get their hands on to stem the flow out of the church and to hide the collapse.
Common sense would suggest the use of covenant path must surely go extinct. Any human psychologist will tell you that the more pressure you heap on young people to conform, the more they will rebel. Kids a far less gullible these days. You simply cannot pressure kids into staying in the boat, and if the church continues along the covenant path path, they will continue to lose growing numbers of the youth. But since when have the leaders of the LDS Church paid the slightest attention to what experts think? My guess is the church will need to go through a lot more pain before it evolves away from its obsession with perfectionism and the covenant path that supposedly takes you there.
What do you think, is the church wrong with this rebranding of the “plan of salvation/happiness”?
