The Week in Mormonism, 2/28/16: Historical Relief Society Documents, Ballard Calls for Innoculation

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Church historians released The First Fifty Years of Relief Society, which includes unabridged minutes and other original documents relating to the Relief Society. BCC has an interview with the editors.

The Deseret News applauds this as “a signal that a current era of bold transparency about the church’s history is still in full swing.” Which it absolutely is. But at the same time, it appears that old habits die hard. In their introduction to this new work of transparency, Church historians can’t resist the urge to distort history just a little to give it a more palatable gloss. Explaining why the Relief Society was disbanded in 1844, co-editor Matthew Grow said that after the martyrdom,

Brigham and other church leaders decide that safety for the church will necessitate a move somewhere in the West. As part of that they make a number of changes in church activities, including suspending the Relief Society. They suspend missionary work for a time. We have to see it in that context, that other things are being suspended, closed in at the same period of time so that there can be this focus on moving to the West.

But that’s not actually how it happened: the Relief Society was dissolved in March, before the June deaths of Joseph and Hyrum, before competing motivations of caring for church and family drove a rift between Brigham and Emma. The motivation was to stop the Relief Society, under Emma, from asking awkward questions about polygamy.

Joseph was never entirely open with his first wife about his plural marriages; notably, his lack of candor extended to the fact that he had taken her first counselor in the Relief Society presidency, Sarah Cleveland, as a plural wife, despite her existing marriage to nonmember John Cleveland. Joseph also polygamously married Relief Society secretary Eliza R. Snow. (Some articles report that Joseph had married both counselors in the presidency, but second counselor Elizabeth Whitney was not one of his plural wives. These articles are either mistaking Snow’s position for that of a counselor, or confusing Elizabeth with her daughter Sarah, who Joseph did take as a wife.)

For more details on early Mormon polygamy, see my recommendations for essential readings on the subject.

Elder M. Russell Ballard spoke to CES educators about the need to change how we teach Church history:

It was only a generation ago that your young people’s access to information about our history, doctrine and practices was basically limited to materials printed by the church. Few students came in contact with alternative interpretations. Mostly, our young people lived a sheltered life. Our curriculum at that time, though well-meaning, did not prepare students for today — a day, in which students have instant access to virtually everything about the church from every possible point of view. Today, what they see on their mobile devices is likely to be faith-challenging as much as faith-promoting. Many of our young people are more familiar with Google than with the gospel, more attuned to the Internet than to inspiration and more involved with Facebook than with faith…



You should be among the first outside your student’s families to introduce authoritative sources on topics that will be less well-known or controversial, so your students will measure whatever they hear or read later against what you have already taught them. You know, we give medical inoculations to our precious missionaries before sending them into the mission field, so they will be protected against disease that can harm and even kill them. In a similar fashion, please, before you send them into the world, inoculate your students by providing faithful, thoughtful and accurate interpretations of gospel doctrine, the scriptures and our history, and those topics that are sometimes misunderstood. To name a few of such topics that are less-known or controversial, I’m talking about polygamy, and seer stones, different accounts of the first vision, the process of translation of the book of mormon, of the book of abraham, gender issues, race and the priesthood, or a heavenly mother. The efforts to inoculate our young people will often fall to you CES teachers.



Master the content of these essays. You should also become familiar with the Joseph Smith papers website and the church history section on LDS.org, and other resources by faithful LDS scholars. The efforts for gospel transparency and spiritual inoculation through a thoughtful study of doctrine and the history, coupled with a burning testimony, is the best antidote we have to help students avoid and/or deal with questions, doubt or faith crisis they may face in this information age.

Full video here.

Michael Barker and Daniel Parkinson have the most in-depth look to date at LTBT Mormon suicide. Excerpt:

When we put this data together we can’t know exactly how many suicides there are among Mormon youth and how many of these are related to LGBTQ issues.12 However, we have some extremely compelling evidence that allows us to conclude that there is a significant problem. The direct empirical evidence alone is enough to merit a public health response. The indirect evidence is also very compelling, because there are such close correlations between suicide and mental illness/mood disorders, as well as homelessness in general, and LGBTQ people have a higher prevalence of these, at least in homophobic communities. This truly suggests that LGBTQ suicides are higher in these communities. In the case of LDS youth suicides, we are forced to pay attention to indirect evidence and anecdotal evidence because it is so difficult to gather empirical evidence about any suicide cohort because of the stigma associated with it, as well as the intense grief experienced by these families. Some families are in denial that their family member is LGBTQ. Furthermore, those youth at highest risk are often the same youth who will hide their sexual orientation, so the family may not even be aware. As one Provo police officer said, “They don’t leave a note saying they died by suicide because they are gay.”

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