https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/teach ... r-AA1wzJJJCandidly explaining Mormonism’s complicated experience with polygamy to adults requires nuance, context and care. Introducing it to children can be even trickier, if not nearly impossible.
But that’s exactly what The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has tried to do as members prepare for a yearlong study of the global faith’s history and its Doctrine and Covenants book of scripture beginning in January.
In mid-December, the church posted online “a revised, illustrated edition of ‘Doctrine and Covenants Stories,’” according to a news release, along with accompanying videos, “40 years after the “original illustrated edition was published.”
Teaching children that polygamy was God’s idea and promoting the idea that members were right to go along with it against their instincts, is grooming. The Church is mentally conditioning its children to obey male Church leaders no matter what they think, even in matters of marriage and sex.The illustrated chapter on plural marriage begins with church founder Joseph Smith and other Latter-day Saint leaders’ initial reluctance to take additional wives, followed by their ultimate “obedience” to what Smith said was a “commandment from the Lord.”
And that’s the main message: God blesses those who obey, even when it’s hard.
The chapter is already getting plenty of pushback, including some mockery, on social media.
It is “a rather whitewashed version of history complete with cartoon images, as if this was all a fun children’s story,” Abby Maxwell Hansen writes on an Exponent II blog, “instead of systematic and institutionalized sexual abuse of women and girls.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who wrote a book about polygamy, “A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870,” praises the church for its attempt to be open with the next generation.
“The good news here is that kids who get this lesson in Primary [children’s Sunday school] won’t grow up surprised when they learn about plural marriage later,” Ulrich writes in an email. “This account reflects how the church has long explained plural marriage to grown-ups.”
But it also is “a story about sex as well as gender,” she states, and “that might make young children (or adults) more susceptible to ‘unrighteous dominion.’ For a very young child (and many adults) it may be hard to distinguish between the voice of a charismatic leader and the voice of God.”
The Church has learned absolutely nothing from the plethora of child abuse cases perpetrated by men in leadership positions. This latest initiative just helps the predatory males by teaching kids that it’s okay, even if they feel uncomfortable about what their leader is asking them to do. “God blesses those who obey, even when it doesn’t feel right.” I’m staggered that the Church would do such a stupid and dangerous thing.
