Popular BYU Randy Bott Takes Heat for Comments

[_Tobin]

C'mon, Brethren, stand for something!!!

That would require that they repent. Publically acknowledge that they were wrong. The sun will stop and the earth will implode before that happens.

I think they really BELIEVE they are prophets, seers and revelators and have received the mantle of power and authority from God. I find that claim to be ridiculous. If you can't relate to us when you last saw or spoke to God or if you had a vision from God or heck, I'd take seeing an angel from the Lord - then DO NOT claim you are any of those things. That is the problem they have right now and until they recognize they are not divinely inspired and called just because they inherited a title, nothing will change. You can not be in denial of the obvious truth like that and be able to ackowledge the truth at the same time.

[_DrW]

I think the reluctance on the part of the Church to acknowledge this and abandon another of BY's doctrines is because it was institutionalized and so many later prophets of the Church shared in his racist views which taints them as well. They don't yet realize (or wish to ackowledge) that the Church leaders are not as they claim (prophets, seers, and revelators in the sense that Joseph Smith was) and merely corporate caretakers of Mormonism. In that capacity they have substituted divine revelation with their own biased and mistaken views. This is being felt acutely now in many areas, not only in this issue. Unless and until they return to their roots and seek real experiences with God and real revelation, this institutional decay will continue.

Tobin,

Coming from you this is a surprising statement (to me at least). The fact that you feel this way about this issue and are willing to express such a viewpoint on this board is impressive.

You have done yourself proud here and I salute you for your honesty. I will even promise to read your posts with a more understanding and charitable attitude for some time to come.

Well done.
__________________

Note to bcspace: Perhaps you should pay some attention to Tobin here. This is how its done.

[_Buffalo]

Thanks for quoting this. I was unaware of this statement by SWK, when, as early as 1963, he conceded the priesthood ban was a "possible error." Again, not to 'beat a dead horse,' but it IS time for the Church to issue an official apology and to renounce once and for all the priesthood ban and all reasons offered to support of it. C'mon, Brethren, stand for something!!!

So far the Brethren seem unable to stand for anything when faced with the glare of the public eye.

[_Buffalo]

C'mon, Brethren, stand for something!!!

That would require that they repent. Publically acknowledge that they were wrong. The sun will stop and the earth will implode before that happens.

Repentence is for lay members, not for church royalty.

[_harmony]

That would require that they repent. Publically acknowledge that they were wrong. The sun will stop and the earth will implode before that happens.

Repentence is for lay members, not for church royalty.

Maybe there should be provision for the highest ranking to be busted to private, as it were, for rank stupidity.

[_Sethbag]

by the way, I've always been a bit miffed that, even in his statement where he's answering for his own errors on the blacks and the priesthood issue, Elder McConkie calls the members to repentance rather than stating that he needed to repent himself. The only error he admits to on his own part is "speaking with limited understanding."

Even when the leaders are undeniably wrong, it's still the members who are wrong.

What does it mean when a man who has been sustained as a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator holds forth on a subject, which he later admits he spoke on with "limited understanding"? It means that LDS have given their leaders carte blanche to say whatever they want, whether they know what they're talking about or not. That's exactly what McConkie admitted to having done. And he taught it as the Lord's own truth. How LDS refuse to see how little credibility their Prophets, Seers, and Revelators actually have is stunning.

[_krose]

Because he was repeating a Latter Day Prophet's (SWK) publicly stated belief that a persons skin will turn lighter the more righteously Mormon that person becomes. Presumably they think the reverse is equally true...

Geez, I wish that were the case. I could really use some more melanin, darkening it up a bit.

But alas, no matter how much I sin, no matter how much denying Elohim and trashing the temple "covenants," I remain as lilly white (or red, with any time in the sun) as can be. Virtually indistinguishable from the rest of my northern European clan.

Bummer.

[_Sethbag]

I think McConkie left the door wide open with his injunction that Mormons forget everything that was said on the subject in the past because the leaders "had a limited understanding."

I'd like to propose that members get a jump on their posterity and just disregard everything their leaders say now, acknowledging that they speak with limited understanding, and following precedent set in McConkie's admonition.

[_Rollo Tomasi]

I thought this was interesting. After the mod at MADB posted the Church's undated statement about race relations (which is different than the dated statement denouncing Bott), the mod locked DCP's thread on the topic. I guess even they were feeling the heat too much. The Church sure is scrambling about on this one.

[Guest]

Hi Maklelan,

It's good to see you again!

You too. Hope your studies are going well.

I'm sorry to see that this thread has gone and grown 4-5 pages since I last checked it. I've been so busy as of late.

Anyways, you said:

You agree with me that the church has never recanted these sentiments in "any kind of official capacity," yet you think that what I wrote was untrue?

Yes. I don't think, in the context of Bott's case, there's an appreciable difference between official, formal, and specific repudiation of past comments and repeated informal repudiation of the same on the part of church leadership, and I don't think that drawing such a distinction exonerates Randy Bott. He would never claim that it doesn't matter what all the leadership has said for the last 24 years, since there's not an official declaration on the matter (and not least of which because there was never any official declaration beforehand which established the interpretation he promoted). If Bott is an expert on church doctrine then he should be aware of what the church and the scholarship has been saying for the last three decades, should he not? His interpretation directly contradicts both.

This states that the reasons had not been made fully known to man. Though it does hint at the "We just don't know" response currently favored by the church, it does not go so far as to declare that the former reasons articulated by church leaders were invalid. One could read this and decide that the other reasons articulated by past church leaders formed part of the reason but not all.

That's an awful lot of evidentiary weight to hang on one adverb. David O. McKay, who was the president at the time, had written this earlier, though:

There is not now, and there never has been a doctrine in this church that the negroes are under a divine curse. There is no doctrine in the church of any kind pertaining to the negro. We believe that we have a scriptural precedent for withholding the priesthood from the negro. It is a practice, not a doctrine, and the practice someday will be changed. And that's all there is to it.

Sterling M. McMurrin affidavit, March 6, 1979

Concerning Bruce R. McConkie's speech to CES employees in 1978, you left out a significant part of the citation:

We have read these passages and their associated passages for many years. We have seen what the words say and have said to ourselves, “Yes, it says that, but we must read out of it the taking of the gospel and the blessings of the temple to the Negro people, because they are denied certain things.” There are statements in our literature by the early Brethren which we have interpreted to mean that the Negroes would not receive the priesthood in mortality. I have said the same things, and people write me letters and say, “You said such and such, and how is it now that we do such and such?” And all I can say to that is that it is time disbelieving people repented and got in line and believed in a living, modern prophet. Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever 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.

http://speeches.BYU.edu/reader/reader.php?id=11017

McConkie, Cannon and Young were all church leaders who had taught that black people would not ever receive the priesthood in mortality;

To my knowledge, Cannon never said that. What I understand is that he stated that black people would not receive the priesthood "until the seed of Abel should come forward and take precedence over Cain's offering."

members were asking what to make of those leaders' statements since the 1978 policy change had obviously made them wrong. The immediate context suggests that that is what McConkie was telling people to forget about, not necessarily the rationales that were articulated for denying blacks the priesthood.

I think the larger context does not support understanding McConkie's comments to be limited to the duration of the ban to the exclusion of assertions regarding the origins of the ban. It should be noted that the revision made to McConkie's Mormon Doctrine immediately after the 1978 revelation removes all references to reasons why the ban was implemented. He still has comments about blacks being descendants of Cain and so forth, but the connection of any curse with the priesthood ban are entirely absent.

Richard Ostling reported in a Time magazine article the following about an interview with President Kimball in 1978:

President Kimball "says flatly that Mormonism no longer holds to . . . a theory" that Blacks had been denied the priesthood "because they somehow failed God during their pre-existence."

I agree that the statements from Elder Oaks and Elder Holland come closer to recanting what past leaders taught and calling those teachings wrong. However, a Deseret News article and a PBS interview aren't particularly strong venues for recanting things that were once proclaimed from the pulpit of General Conference.

I never said they were, I just said that no one can accuse the church of misleading or confusing Randy Bott. As an expert in Mormon doctrine, he should certainly be aware of these things.

They don't even show up in searches of LDS.org. I think that if I tried to give force to something that an LDS leader said in one of those venues, those who disagreed with me would play the "not-doctrine" card in a heartbeat. Frankly, the church has just got to be more specific and more official if it really wants members to let go of what former leaders said.

I agree, but that's not the issue here.

In regards to Bott, I simply cannot fault him for believing in things that his leaders have taught in the past and never formally recanted.

I would consider it to be faulting Randy Bott to project onto him a rather myopic and etic view that holds the church taught him stuff decades ago and then stealthfully pulled the rug out from underneath him by unilaterally rejecting those positions over thirty years ago, but neglecting to do so in a formal, official, and specific publication. He's an academic speaking as an academic. He doesn't get to appeal to the "But that's what I was taught as a kid!" card.

Nor can I fault him too much for reading the Book of Abraham as a reference to the "curse of Cain" doctrine. LDS scholars are correct that the text does not explicitly state that it applies to blacks, but it was written in the 1830s, when the Christian world widely believed that blacks were the descendants of Cain, and that is how it was interpreted by Mormons for generations. Seeing it as a reference to blacks is a pretty natural reading of the text. His only crime is being rather naïve in not knowing how much repeating this material to a national newspaper would embarrass Mormons.

He also represents himself as an expert on Mormon doctrine while ignoring the last 30+ years of Mormon doctrine and scholarship on the topic. I consider that to be a quite serious oversight.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that he's the John D. Lee of this issue, but I just cannot respect the idea of applying anger and outrage to Bott that has never been applied to LDS leaders of the past who taught very similar things.

I'm not angry or outraged at Bott, I'm just critical.

To do so is to treat a symptom while allowing the disease to go unchecked. I think the reality is that speaking out against a BYU professor is safe, while speaking out against former LDS leaders is "ark-steadying," and that's why Bott is taking the heat.

I disagree. The teachings of former LDS leaders have been rejected for decades. Bott is expressing those same teachings right now. Who needs to be addressed first?