Blixa wrote:
And the quote from Brother Holland? You've got to be kidding me. The Church is a lot stronger than that, or at least its membership is.
I think this, coming from a cultural Marxist who's intellectual life's work and entire belief system is grounded and invested in, not only the extinction of the Church and of religion
qua religion, but of western civilization in depth relative to its classical liberal and Judeo-Christian foundations, is a bit disingenuous (kudos to the Church's "strength"), to say the least.
Once the constitution, limited, constitutional government, federalism, the 10th Amendment, and free-market economic relations are finally crushed and the progressive paradigm much more fully implemented, the Church and its remaining faithful Saints will, at that point, have to separate themselves fully from the wicked, physically enter and gather within Zion communities, and, in essence, secede from the disintegrating secular culture around them.
Holland is correct, on many counts. This last election has unambiguously demonstrated the truth that it only takes a generation to snuff out the light of liberty and limited, agency-based constitutional government for an entire society once grounded in liberal democratic principles, and the same is true for the Church. The Book of Mormon attests to the rapidity with which a culture can deteriorate, the Church fray and weaken, the prophets be "cast out" from among a people, and civilization unravel.
Most importantly, Holland did not say "the Saints" but only "the Church," the institutional vehicle or temporal means by which the Church grows, the gospel is spread, and the members gather in a community of Saints for these purposes.
Many faithful Saints would remain (and a fundamental doctrine of the Church is, after all, that there will never be another total apostasy before the second coming of the Savior - large, and perhaps even substantial, but not total) even if the institutional Church were to disintegrate due to large-scale personal apostasy and apathy (note: Holland was not claiming that this was, indeed in our future, only that there is nothing preventing this from happening if a large enough cohort of the LDS membership were to choose this path).
Brother Christensen said another thing which has impressed me for these many years and which I share with you this morning. It is the simple suggestion—in light of our schools and Education Week and why you're here and what it means to be a parent or a child in this Church—a simple reminder that this Church is always only one generation away from extinction. That does not change however many decades old we are now. It was true in 1840, it was true in 1891, and is true in 1981. We are always just one generation away from extinction. All we would have to do, I assume, to destroy this work is stop teaching our children for one generation. Just everybody stop, close the books, seal up your heart, keep your mouth shut, and don't bear a testimony. In one generation it would be 1820 all over again. We could hunt around and find somebody to go out and pray in a grove of trees. With the blessings of the Lord, we could get six people together to organize a church. We could hand Samuel Smith a Book of Mormon and say, "Go knock on the door and see if we can start somewhere." That could happen. It won't happen. It mustn't happen. It won't happen in 1981 or 1991, but it could if we ceased to accept the obligation upon us, always upon those who have known and believed the truth, to teach it, especially to their children. I am not minimizing other help. We think even BYU can help. But while there are other weighty matters in the kingdom for the disciples, parents and guardians must not wait.
