LDS history

Mitt Romney's speech, which I didn't bother to watch, has opened the floodgates for the journalistic deconstruction of Mormonism. Everyone who had an article in development is trying to get it published before Mitt vanishes after Iowa and New Hampshire choose Huckabee and who-the-hell-knows-who.

This piece makes the LDS (say "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" and you'll know why the abbreviation is popular) sound similar to Scientology when someone crosses over the line into saying what really happened with Joseph Smith/L. Ron Hubbard. Sure, LDS is not as imperialistic with nonbelievers, nor as likely to sue, but both want to keep the curtain closed on the Wizard.

I would really like to read a secular explanation of how a cult grows large enough to graduate to mainstream religion. Paul had something really powerful going on inside him. What was it? How did he pull in other people as fervent believers? The official line of the Catholic Church and indeed of its Protestant sects is that Christianity is the one true religion. That's explanatory for a believer but loses its probative power in light of all the other cases from other religions. What did Muhammad have that Mitt Romney would love to have a little of?

What gives a person the charisma to attract disciples, not just fellows? Sure, most people have a desire to believe, and many of them want to retreat to childhood's refuge in a dominating parent, but this is not just a few quirky personalities. This is practically everyone, leaving unbelievers like me to be the quirky ones.

I'd really like for some astute psycho-socio-histo-genius to explain it to me because I haven't met an explanation that satisfies me. Of course, I'm not going to become the genius's disciple; I just don't have the personality for that.

What struck me most about the article was way down in p. 3:

But these books and articles also worried conservatives within the church. In 1981, Mormon apostle Boyd K. Packer, a leading conservative, famously cautioned: "Some things that are true are not very useful." Mormon historians who do their work "regardless of how they may injure the Church or destroy the faith of those not ready for 'advanced history,' " he said, may find themselves in "great spiritual jeopardy."

There's a critical conflict inherent in this that I've noticed for a long time, though I'm just recently beginning to appreciate its central importance.

When my sixth grade teacher, a sweet pious woman no bigger than I even though I was just eleven, said to me, "You can believe evolution if you want, but I just don't think it's nice," I didn't understand at all what nice had to do with anything. Yet here a Mormon elder is dressing up essentially the same ordering of the universe, albeit in more threatening terms.

For me, what's actually true about the world takes precedence over what I want to be true about the world. The fact that one girl or another didn't actually love me mattered much more than my fervent crushes on them. Even if I would be happier as a Christian, I can't believe myths about the universe to sustain the faith. It's not just ridiculous Genesis-literal creationism I can't believe. The myth of Jesus's uniqueness in the vastness of the visible heavens is too much to swallow, too, now that we know what the firmament of stars really is.

I was thinking along these lines recently about the First Amendment, which guarantees our free exercise of religion and our free speech. These two rights can coexist only if those who freely exercise their faiths do not as part of that exercise arrogate the right to suppress speech on the ground that their religion is more important. To say the least, their coexistence has been uneasy.

Of course, Boyd Packer is not bound by the First Amendment inside LDS. But I have to wonder just how eternal a religion can be if it requires suppression of the unkempt and inconvenient truth. Aren't we adults? Shouldn't the first assumption in all cases be that we can handle the truth?

That's what I think even on the face of it. Never mind that the consistent pattern throughout history has been that the suppression of evidence is a matter of self-interest, often lamely rationalized as the common good, but nonetheless dressed up in a raiment of lies. What I want to know is how the charismatics get away with it.