Dr. Peterson wrote:Sometime in the Fall of 1974, I read an article in the Georgetown University newspaper about the open house for the newly built Washington D.C. Temple. I particularly remember its mockery of the temple’s new president, a retired Singer Corporation executive whose hand the author had shaken during a press reception. It was a hand, the article sneered, that had undoubtedly demonstrated and sold many sewing machines in its time.
Tom wrote:I recall that Dr. Peterson highlighted the same article in
an essay published in
FARMS Review 12/2 (a revised version of a 1999 FAIR presentation posted
here):
"[b]ack when the Washington D.C. Temple was dedicated, the student newspaper at nearby Georgetown University published a lengthy article in which some of its editors responded to their tour of the building during its open house. Their report was not favorable. At one point, they met the president of the new temple, a retired executive (as I recall) from the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Shaking his hand, the writer observed with unconcealed contempt, one could not overlook the fact that it was a hand that must have sold many sewing machines in its day."
The article I assume Dr. Peterson is referring to can be accessed
here (pages 18-19 of the PDF). The writer notes that "the temple president describes the church's missionary program in terms of his experience as the manager of a business machine sales company: You don't criticize other religions, but sell your own product on its own merits....We are ushered into the temple offices, where the temple president greets us with a smile that must have sold thousands of business machines." The temple president had worked for Friden/Singer.
It's now been more than 44 years since the publication of the article "God's marble hotel-motel" in the Georgetown student publication titled
The Hoya Review (linked above). I must report that the indispensable Dr. Peterson draws attention to it
once more in a recycled blog post. (He discussed it in the same terms four years ago
here.) With Dr. Peterson's help, Andy Lang's feature may go down as one of the best-known pieces of anti-Mormon writing in the annals of Mopologetics.
Today, Dr. Peterson
relates:
A philosophy professor of mine went back for some sort of academic conference at Georgetown University right about the time of the open house for the then new Washington DC Temple and returned with a copy of the Georgetown student newspaper. He gave it to me.
Unfortunately, Dr. Peterson doesn't disclose the name of his professor, nor does he tell us why his professor gave him the article. More importantly, why does Dr. Peterson recall a passage from a student article from the mid-1970s? Did the professor, in granting Dr. Peterson a copy of the newspaper, solemnly charge him to stand as a living witness against said article "at all times and in all things, and in all places that [he] may be in" (Mosiah 18:9), throughout the remainder of his days? Was 1974 Dr. Peterson's birth as a vocal Mopologist? (Dr. Midgley frequently mentions 1980 or thereabouts as the time he placed everything upon the altar and lifted Laban's macuahuitl to defend the Kingdom of
Quetzelcoatl God.)
Dr. Peterson continues:
There was an exceedingly snarky article in it, in which several Georgetown grad students made merry over their visit to the soon-to-be dedicated temple. They must have been permitted to join in a VIP tour. Several passages linger in my memory from the article, but the one that’s relevant here concerns their shaking hands with Edward Drury, the newly-called president of the temple. He had, they said, been an executive with the Singer sewing machine company in his earlier life. With exquisite disdain, they wondered how many sewing machines his hands had made and sold.
Sigh. As documented above, Dr. Peterson doesn't remember Lang's observation correctly. Lang didn't wonder how many sewing machines Drury's hands had made and sold. Rather, Lang wrote: "We are ushered into the temple offices, where the temple president greets us with a smile that must have sold thousands of business machines." And Lang's comment was far from a gratuitous sneer. He related that "the temple president describes the church's missionary program in terms of his experience as the manager of a business machine sales company: You don't criticize other religions, but sell your own product on its own merits."
Lang used some snark (he observed, for example, that a mural inside the temple depicting Jesus standing in a cloud of glowing mist near the DC Temple presumably meant that the Second Coming would begin in Montgomery County, Maryland and commented that a funeral director would feel at home in the celestial room), criticized the church's commercial ethos, and viewed the temple's appearance and setting unfavorably in comparison to "the great cathedrals of the world." At the same time, Lang wrote with some flair, his renditions of church history were largely unobjectionable and neutral (he did say that the "church's president (and prophet) received a convenient revelation from God that plural marriage was no longer His will"), he carefully related the temple leaders' justifications for the pre-1978 temple/priesthood restriction (thereby performing a valuable service for modern historians of Mormonism and race), his discussion of the temple's saving ordinances was insightful, and, perhaps most importantly, he spelled "Latter-day Saints" correctly. Above all, it's not a piece worth citing and flogging nearly 45 years after it was published.
“A scholar said he could not read the Book of Mormon, so we shouldn’t be shocked that scholars say the papyri don’t translate and/or relate to the Book of Abraham. Doesn’t change anything. It’s ancient and historical.” ~ Hanna Seariac