MILLIONS spent by LDS Inc on new MMM book

[_Dr. Shades]

Perhaps there's a way to reconcile both the insistence of the authors and the intent of the apostles: Maybe the authors were allowed to look at the existing material and publish what they wanted, but chances are the apostles removed all incriminating information beforehand.

[_LifeOnaPlate]

DCP

In a contest between inferences drawn from previous statements by leaders about related but distinct subjects, and direct statements by those directly concerned with the project itself, I don't find it difficult to choose.

Considering those same leaders have the last say in this LDS sponsored publication - its not difficult; the LDS Mission will supersede truth.

So we know that the two people who reviewed the manuscript before publication were Oaks and Packer? Any evidence, or?

[_LifeOnaPlate]

Perhaps there's a way to reconcile both the insistence of the authors and the intent of the apostles: Maybe the authors were allowed to look at the existing material and publish what they wanted, but chances are the apostles removed all incriminating information beforehand.

Presto!

Now watch me pull another rabbit out of my hat...

[_LifeOnaPlate]

"Evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed is in a class by itself. It is one thing to depreciate a person who exercises corporate power or even government power. It is quite another thing to criticize or depreciate a person for the performance of an office to which he or she has been called of God. It does not matter that the criticism is true."

Oh, I get it. You believe that publishing the facts as far as historians can find them about Brigham Young would constitute evil speaking of the Lord's anointed. I know this won't be acceptable to you or many of the folks on this board, but I believe blogger Steve Evans has some illuminating thoughts on this quote. Of it, Evans says:

This statement — particularly the whopper at the final sentence — may raise the hackles of some historians, but I agree with Elder Oaks.

First I believe we need to differentiate between history that criticizes, or that has a political end in itself, and history or biography that tells a complete narrative of a person or event, “warts and all.” The former leads to a nefarious kind of history, a Krakauer-esque amalgamation that begins a priori with a given thesis and tends to adapt itself to suit that thesis. It’s poor work, I think, if a history steps out of analytical shoes and slips on instead the noisy clogs of the author’s pet peeves (1).

Going beyond that, I do think that LDS Church members have an obligation — for some, a covenant — to avoid practices that tear down the Kingdom of God. It is an ongoing temptation to be cruel to past leaders for their limited understandings; sometimes it appears to be like shooting fish in a barrel, particularly when policies or doctrines have changed, and we can look back with the benefit of hindsight. I believe that in most cases it’s inappropriate to criticize or tear down the Church for its past mistakes. This may smack of intellectual dishonesty, but I am not speaking of covering up the truth or whitewashing history. Certainly I think we should be able to call a spade a spade. I guess I am thinking more of casual pot-shots or pithy put-downs, which tend to serve little purpose than to establish the moral superiority of the speaker.

Let’s take a pretty obvious example: Elder Bruce R. McConkie. Mormon Doctrine was (and in many ways still is) an erroneous book, and certainly one that presumed to speak in authoritative terms where the Church itself did not tread. I don’t know if the community of saints today is served well if I only remember him to scoff in a blog post, or if the only quote of him we keep is:

Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or George Q. Cannon or whoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world.

I guess my view (because of COURSE you all are dying to know it!) is that generally, (a) in the absence of certainty, we should be willing to give the Church the benefit of the doubt, (b) it speaks poorly of us if all we can remember from our history are goof-ups (and worse), and (c) we can tell a lot about ourselves and our relationship to the Church by the way we approach our history.

Over the weekend I bought Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball. I know, I know, I should have read it months and months ago. But if any readers would be interested, I’d be up to blogging from my reading of it as I go. Consider it putting Elder Oaks’ advice into practice.

(1)
(1) I suppose the same criticism could be leveled at “believing history” or “faith-promoting history,” and I have to admit that I am suspicious of the ability of an historian to be faithful to the full spectrum of detail while still knowing that the work as a whole must end up being laudatory of a given person or doctrine.
http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2008/08/ ... #more-4036

I also liked Elder Oaks' statements in his interview with Helen Whitney:

HW: Just one more question on that. In every church, in every person, there’s a shallow territory usually explained away through context. Many find information through the Internet — some would rather find things out about the Church history, doctrine through teachings, rather than the Internet, or other resources.

DHO: It’s an old problem, the extent to which official histories, whatever they are, or semi-official histories, get into things that are shadowy or less well-known or whatever. That’s an old problem in Mormonism — a feeling of members that they shouldn’t have been surprised by the fact that this or that happened; they should’ve been alerted to it. I have felt that throughout my life.

There are several different elements of that. One element is that we’re emerging from a period of history writing within the Church [of] adoring history that doesn’t deal with anything that’s unfavorable, and we’re coming into a period of “warts and all” kind of history. Perhaps our writing of history is lagging behind the times, but I believe that there is purpose in all these things — there may have been a time when Church members could not have been as well prepared for that kind of historical writing as they may be now.

On the other hand, there are constraints on trying to reveal everything. You don’t want to be getting into and creating doubts that didn’t exist in the first place. And what is plenty of history for one person is inadequate for another, and we have a large church, and that’s a big problem. And another problem is there are a lot of things that the Church has written about that the members haven’t read. And the Sunday School teacher that gives “Brother Jones” his understanding of Church history may be inadequately informed and may not reveal something which the Church has published. It’s in the history written for college or Institute students, sources written for quite mature students, but not every Sunday School teacher that introduces people to a history is familiar with that. And so there is no way to avoid this criticism. The best I can say is that we’re moving with the times, we’re getting more and more forthright, but we will never satisfy every complaint along that line and probably shouldn’t.

I believe this is one reason the authors would publish through Oxford rather than Deseret Book or some other publisher focused mostly on "milk."

Of course it's quite possible that church leaders did, in fact, assure the authors that they had full control of the material, and, in fact, I trust that the authors are being truthful when they assert as much. But would church leaders have adhered to this if the author's final work including clear proof BY ordered the attack? Why did the author submit the work to be reviewed by two apostles prior to publication?

Since they have stewardship over the archives I seen o problem with 2 apostles reading the book before publication, as did many other reviewers both Mormon and non, who read it before it even came to the apostles. One would think, given that many read it before, that were there any shocking revelations, the initial reviewers might say something about such crucial evidence being left out after church leaders read it. Again, I absolutely believe the information would have been included.

by the way, one of the things I found most striking about the podcast was that the interviewer, who read the book and was probably a believer - came away with the impression that the Fanchers DID do something to provoke the attack.

I see you are unfamiliar with RadioWest and Doug Fabrizio. He's not "a believer" by any stretch.

The authors tried to correct this impression, but I think this indicates that, for some reason, the way the authors constructed the work is leading some people to believe that the Fanchers DID do something provocative (and some remarks on the MAD thread demonstrate that, too).

Had you actually read the book yet (I'm glad you plan to; it is a heavy book but I think it will be a good read for you) you would see that records indicate this was not a story of "this side all wore white hats" and "this side all wore black hats." As the book tries to show even in the introduction posted free online, the emigrants (some of them) did things that upset some Mormons. There were provocations. Even when the authors admit this, however, they make it clear that many of these provocations, by and large the great majority of them, actually stemmed from the Mormons' temporary policy of conserving grain and not selling it to passersby in order to prepare for the Utah war.

This being examined, unlike in the almost-comical depiction in the recent MMM studio film, it wasn't a case off "all of these were good, and all of these were evil." (This is what seems to have bothered the reviewer of the book on this site, by the way. We tend to want Matlock endings which provide a "guilty-as-charged" verdict and swift, explainable justice.) Still, the authors make it explicitly clear that absolutely nothing the emigrants did came remotely close to beginning start to approach the possibility of justifying what the Mormons (and few Indians did) in the massacre.

[_TAK]

LifeOnaPlate

So we know that the two people who reviewed the manuscript before publication were Oaks and Packer? Any evidence, or?

Doesn't matter who they were.. none of them are going to expose BY as a murder despite your solid faith and assurances that they would.

[_harmony]

Perhaps there's a way to reconcile both the insistence of the authors and the intent of the apostles: Maybe the authors were allowed to look at the existing material and publish what they wanted, but chances are the apostles removed all incriminating information beforehand.

Actually, if it ever existed, I think it was gone long before our present leaders had access. The apostles opened the vault, and the authors had complete access, because there really was nothing incriminating to see. If it ever existed, it was removed long ago. There would be nothing keeping incriminating information safe in that vault.

[_beastie]

Well, I have little doubt that the vault has been regularly "cleaned out". Early church leaders, in particular, showed very little compunction against rewriting history, so I have no doubt that BY and others would have gladly burned anything even slightly incriminating regarding MMM. So it's not the vault, in particular, that would be problematic, but the potential of discovering something somewhere else, in some journal that was never in the vault to begin with. I don't think that it's possible for the church to eradicate all of that information, although, of course as has been mentioned already on this thread, some helpful believers did their best. So I agree that it was extremely unlikely for the researchers to discover any information proving BY directly ordered the massacre, but I don't think it was flat-out impossible, so I think there was some risk in telling the authors they could print whatever they found. I absolutely believe that if such information had been discovered, it would have caused quite a moral dilemma with the authors that would have undoubtedly resulted in counseling with church leadership. I also believe it would never have been printed, probably with full agreement of the authors.

And, by the way, I'm not fully convinced BY did directly order the massacre in the first place. I'm just using it as an example of why the conflict of interest is problematic.

[_beastie]

Oh, I get it. You believe that publishing the facts as far as historians can find them about Brigham Young would constitute evil speaking of the Lord's anointed. I know this won't be acceptable to you or many of the folks on this board, but I believe blogger Steve Evans has some illuminating thoughts on this quote. Of it, Evans says:

Of course it would constitute evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed if the information would tend to discourage faith in LDS truth claims. I guess where we disagree is if Packer and Oaks would also agree that it constitutes evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed. I think their talks make clear that they would. I understand you are interpreting their statements in a different, in my opinion, somewhat unusual fashion. As I said, the idea that their comments were only addressing CES employees (which, it seems to me, BYU faculty are a part of) and not addressing historians in the church is pretty far-fetched and, frankly, silly. History has already shown that the church tends to behave negatively and even punitively towards non CES employee historians who happen to publish information about the church that they don’t like. I do believe that the advent of the internet has resulted in the church being forced to reevaluate that game plan, however.

One snip from the blog you cited:

Certainly I think we should be able to call a spade a spade. I guess I am thinking more of casual pot-shots or pithy put-downs, which tend to serve little purpose than to establish the moral superiority of the speaker.

Well, this is a creative interpretation, just as yours is. I do not believe Packer or Oaks’ statements support this interpretation. Packer specifically cited that faithful historians who “follow the tenets of their profession” are putting themselves at risk if that true information discourages faith. There is no “tenet” of the historians’ profession that entails mocking, pithy put-downs, or pot-shots. In fact, quite the opposite.

Oaks:

That’s an old problem in Mormonism — a feeling of members that they shouldn’t have been surprised by the fact that this or that happened; they should’ve been alerted to it. I have felt that throughout my life.

Well, isn’t that interesting. This statement seems to expose the MAD myth that members who are taken aback by this stuff are just lazy and ill-informed. Even Oaks admits here to being surprised and feeling like he should’ve been alerted.

Oaks:

The best I can say is that we’re moving with the times, we’re getting more and more forthright, but we will never satisfy every complaint along that line and probably shouldn’t.

Once again, most people (including DCP) agree that if information were found that proved BY ordered the massacre it would put his prophetic calling into question and doubt. I believe that sharing information that would put a prophet’s calling into question is exactly the type of information that Oaks would think “we probably shouldn’t” satisfy the charge to be more forthright.

You and DCP disagree. Frankly, I see nothing within the history of the church to justify believing that the LDS church would agree to the publication of information that would directly, and significantly, negatively impact the faith of the followers.

Since they have stewardship over the archives I seen o problem with 2 apostles reading the book before publication, as did many other reviewers both Mormon and non, who read it before it even came to the apostles. One would think, given that many read it before, that were there any shocking revelations, the initial reviewers might say something about such crucial evidence being left out after church leaders read it. Again, I absolutely believe the information would have been included.

Come on, connect the dots. The apostles have “stewardship over the archives” and probably over the project as well. Stewardship implies religious obligation. The mission of the church is clear. You are insisting that these same apostles – whoever they were – would agree to allow information to be published that would potentially devastate the faith of many who read it. Come on!

I see you are unfamiliar with RadioWest and Doug Fabrizio. He's not "a believer" by any stretch.

No, I’m not from out west. That’s even worse, LoaP! A believer would have a pre-existing bias to want to believe that the Fancher party may have done something provocative, even aside from BY’s involvement. How much uglier is the whole thing when the context is that the Fancher party did NOTHING to provoke the Mormons??? So for a nonbeliever to also come to that conclusion after reading the book is truly troublesome.

Had you actually read the book yet (I'm glad you plan to; it is a heavy book but I think it will be a good read for you) you would see that records indicate this was not a story of "this side all wore white hats" and "this side all wore black hats." As the book tries to show even in the introduction posted free online, the emigrants (some of them) did things that upset some Mormons. There were provocations. Even when the authors admit this, however, they make it clear that many of these provocations, by and large the great majority of them, actually stemmed from the Mormons' temporary policy of conserving grain and not selling it to passersby in order to prepare for the Utah war.

This being examined, unlike in the almost-comical depiction in the recent MMM studio film, it wasn't a case off "all of these were good, and all of these were evil." (This is what seems to have bothered the reviewer of the book on this site, by the way. We tend to want Matlock endings which provide a "guilty-as-charged" verdict and swift, explainable justice.) Still, the authors make it explicitly clear that absolutely nothing the emigrants did came remotely close to beginning start to approach the possibility of justifying what the Mormons (and few Indians did) in the massacre.

I am in no way under the impression that the book tries to present the involved Mormons as “good guys”. Please. There is way too much information out there for anyone to try such a stunt, even if they would have wanted to.

I am sure that the authors explicitly stated that the behavior of the Fanchers justified the attack. I could tell that from their reaction to that particular question. However, I think it’s beyond dispute, at this point (given the interviewer’s question and the comments of some on MAD) that there are people who are reading this text and coming away with the impression that the Fanchers did, indeed, do something to provoke the attack. This is what makes me suspect that James’ summary may be correct.

The human mind works in a funny ways, as any teacher has been taught. If, for example, you want a child to stop running in the hall, it’s better to say, firmly WALK, than to stay STOP RUNNING. Why? Because, on a subconscious level, the last word the child hears in STOP RUNNING is RUNNING, and that tends to encourage running. It’s weird but true. So if the authors took pains to state that the Fancher party did nothing to provoke the attack, but then discusses all the rumors attached to the party for pages on end, many readers are going to register something different than what the authors may have intended to convey.

At any rate, as I said, I will be paying particular attention to that section to figure out why seemingly intelligent people are “hearing” something a bit different than what the authors state was their intent.

[_LifeOnaPlate]

Oaks:

That’s an old problem in Mormonism — a feeling of members that they shouldn’t have been surprised by the fact that this or that happened; they should’ve been alerted to it. I have felt that throughout my life.

Well, isn’t that interesting. This statement seems to expose the MAD myth that members who are taken aback by this stuff are just lazy and ill-informed. Even Oaks admits here to being surprised and feeling like he should’ve been alerted.

I object to the blanket statement of "MAD myth." Since I am a participant there I would fall under its general name, and I have never held that "members who are taken aback by this stuff are just lazy and ill-informed."

Oaks:

The best I can say is that we’re moving with the times, we’re getting more and more forthright, but we will never satisfy every complaint along that line and probably shouldn’t.

Once again, most people (including DCP) agree that if information were found that proved BY ordered the massacre it would put his prophetic calling into question and doubt. I believe that sharing information that would put a prophet’s calling into question is exactly the type of information that Oaks would think “we probably shouldn’t” satisfy the charge to be more forthright.

You and DCP disagree. Frankly, I see nothing within the history of the church to justify believing that the LDS church would agree to the publication of information that would directly, and significantly, negatively impact the faith of the followers.

Other than the explicit assertions of the actual authors that there was absolutely no change of the manuscript, content, etc. on the basis of trying to hide anything or protect the image of the Church, etc.

Come on, connect the dots. The apostles have “stewardship over the archives” and probably over the project as well. Stewardship implies religious obligation. The mission of the church is clear. You are insisting that these same apostles – whoever they were – would agree to allow information to be published that would potentially devastate the faith of many who read it. Come on!

The fact, (yes, the explicit fact) that you have no facts to back up your belief that the Church, leaders, or authors of this book are hiding a smoking gun speaks for itself.

I see you are unfamiliar with RadioWest and Doug Fabrizio. He's not "a believer" by any stretch.

No, I’m not from out west. That’s even worse, LoaP! A believer would have a pre-existing bias to want to believe that the Fancher party may have done something provocative, even aside from BY’s involvement. How much uglier is the whole thing when the context is that the Fancher party did NOTHING to provoke the Mormons??? So for a nonbeliever to also come to that conclusion after reading the book is truly troublesome.

Whoa, there, partner. Doug Fabrizio, the authors, and myself have never asserted that the "Fancher party" [somewhat of a misnomer, anyway. Geez. Come on, Amazon, let's get that book shipped.] "did NOTHING to provoke the Mormons." Your take on Fabrizio's comments make me wonder, they really do.

I am in no way under the impression that the book tries to present the involved Mormons as “good guys”. Please. There is way too much information out there for anyone to try such a stunt, even if they would have wanted to.

How about the Fancher's and the other emigrants as the "bad guys" then? Exactly.

I am sure that the authors explicitly stated that the behavior of the Fanchers justified the attack. I could tell that from their reaction to that particular question.

That's odd. They actually state the exact opposite!!

I am about done here, this is completely useless to even talk about with you. Good grief.

However, I think it’s beyond dispute, at this point (given the interviewer’s question and the comments of some on MAD) that there are people who are reading this text and coming away with the impression that the Fanchers did, indeed, do something to provoke the attack. This is what makes me suspect that James’ summary may be correct.

His summary is correct insofar as the authors do not solve the case like Nancy Drew, like some readers may desire.

The human mind works in a funny ways, as any teacher has been taught. If, for example, you want a child to stop running in the hall, it’s better to say, firmly WALK, than to stay STOP RUNNING. Why? Because, on a subconscious level, the last word the child hears in STOP RUNNING is RUNNING, and that tends to encourage running. It’s weird but true. So if the authors took pains to state that the Fancher party did nothing to provoke the attack, but then discusses all the rumors attached to the party for pages on end, many readers are going to register something different than what the authors may have intended to convey.

Actually the authors spend a good deal of time refuting rumors. Part 2 of the work will be dedicated to doing the same, as well.

[_beastie]

I am sure that the authors explicitly stated that the behavior of the Fanchers justified the attack. I could tell that from their reaction to that particular question.

Quick reply - that was a typo, I meant to say that I'm sure that they explicitly stated that the behavior of the Fanchers did NOT justify the attack. Sorry for that, but I would have thought you could tell from the context of my other statements it was a typo.