History vs. Heritage

While I like the trip down history lane given by the blog linked above, the individual writing leaves out some important moments in history

While the church is, without question, paying the price for promoting an overly-simplified “heritage” approach to history, I don’t think the motive was based in intentional deceptiionThat is to say, the author completely skips the formation of the correlation committee and it’s stated goal of making the manuals all tell the same story; and reducing “What it means to be mormon” down to 72 notecards.

In addition here are times the church and the leadership were intentionally deceitful. Anyone who gets this article as evidence that they shouldn’t claim lies can rebut with this post:

The count goes on and on. I could literally spend an entire 24 hours writing about specific lies told by leadership, passed off as revelation, or direct attempts by individuals within the correlation department to deceive members. I leave you with my own tale:

I was EQ instructor and prepping a lesson I turned to the Brigham Young manual. There I saw a quote that said something to the effect of “Celestial marriage … is the benefit of every man”. I forget the exact quote, but I remember the trail. I looked at the footnote for the quote and saw it point to a Deseret News article published in 1977. I remember thinking that someone must have miss attributed the quote; because Brigham didn’t live in 1977; and citing a source rather than a source of a source (Hugh Nibley’s big complaint about Fawn Brodie) is sloppy history/writing. So I looked up that news article and it cited a 1976 manual.

Geez, I thought, I don’t have time to track them all down. I pulled out my copy of “The Prophet Speaks”, published by the church and sold at Deseret Book; supposedly of every talk ever given by Prophets, and looked up the quote. It wasn’t there. Now I have a slew of 1970’s quotes of Brigham Young, and a clearly missing quote in a book published by the church.

So I went to the internet. Typed in the quote that I had and presto, I found the actual quote was “Celestial marriage, which is polygamy, is the benefit of every man”

It was very clear this was intentional deception. This wasn’t the history department trying, and having Leonard Arrington blah blah blah. This was someone who knew the truth and had control and power to alter what members thought, burying their tracks intentionally. And the deception covered a range of news articles, published works, and official church manuals. Finding another dozen or so of these led me to where I am today.

So I will keep saying the church lies, thank you. It’s not a simple matter of Heritage vs. History; this is outright deception, codified and incorporated on an institutional scale.