Monthly Archives: July 2023

ROCK SPRINGS Polygamy was renounced by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 1890. Since then, they excommunicate members if they supported the practice.

Rock Springs resident Clark Allred and local author was about 13 years old when his Uncle Rulon was murdered by a rival polygamist leader. His uncle was the leader of a Mormon fundamentalist polygamist group, the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB).

After the death of his uncle, Allreds father, Owen, became the leader in 1977.

Allred grew up in Bluffdale, a suburb of Salt Lake City, not far from Jordan River.

We were the only ones out there at the time, said Allred, mentioning the town had a one-lane road back then. It was just us.

Allred was aware that his father had many wives, even at a young age.

Dad was at our house once-a-week, so I grew up knowing about it, he said, noting that his father had eight wives and had even built the first duplex in town for his first four wives.

Allreds father had 23 children and over 200 grandchildren.

Allred began to get acquainted with his siblings by the time he was 7 or 8 years old. His brothers built their houses near Allred, making it easier to get to know them.

Outside of polygamy, we followed Mormonism to a T, he pointed out, saying that Owen was close friends with Spencer W. Kimball, who was the 12th president of the Mormon church.

Kimball and several other church officials were aware of AUB but overlooked it since the group adhered to local laws.

My dad was well-respected by law officials, Allred revealed. In fact, when other groups were giving law officials trouble, theyd ask my dad for help and advice.

He said that his father was best known for his outspoken criticism of child abuse and marriages of girls under the age of 18. He also opposed arranged marriages and marriages between relatives.

Allreds father was interviewed by The New York Times in 2002. During the interview, he said, People have the wrong idea that were old-time kooks who prey on young girls.

Allred said, Dad was the person couples had to get the blessing from. He wanted to stick with the laws of the land.

He mentioned that if a man married an underage girl, it was done without his fathers blessing.

His father hated the child abuse that occurred in many polygamist groups and encouraged members of the AUB to report abuse to law enforcement officials.

They didnt believe in receiving state assistance for financial or housing needs, as well.

Dad always believed that you need to work hard and take care of your family. He always frowned upon those living off the government.

Allreds education merely consisted of Book of Mormon lessons in private basements. He had to teach himself how to read and write.

I despised those teachings, he chuckled, explaining that eventually a curriculum was introduced. Now, theres three schools there.

One of his mothers, Ruth, pushed Allred to write stories.

I wouldnt have done it without her, he expressed, pointing to one of the latest sci-fi novels he wrote, Dracaeda.

Susan is Allreds first and only wife. The couple had courted a couple of others, but at the last minute, we decided against it, thankfully, he said.

He explained that part of their belief was If youre not part of the church during the Second Coming, you wont be risen off the Earth. Youll be killed along with everyone else.

He and Susan had spent time with a Mormon family. He recalls how good they were and thought it was unfair that they wouldnt be saved.

Right before her death, his mother, Anna, believed that if someone isnt part of the church, he or she will not be allowed into the Celestial Kingdom, which is the three degrees or kingdoms of glory in heaven.

Ultimately, he started questioning and realizing things werent adding up.

I told my dad I just didnt think it was right, referring to the fate of those who still do good deeds.

Allred said he and his father were sitting at the kitchen table, having lunch when he admitted that he couldnt live in polygamy. His father cried, thinking that he had lost his sons respect. Allred told him that the AUB lifestyle is just not for him.

I had once wanted to lead the church after he died, he admitted. I was his right-hand man. I wanted to take over. When I married Susan, I wanted to follow in his footsteps, but that changed.

He added, I was scared to death at first because I hadnt come to grips on whether there was a heaven and a hell. I was worried that the two, indeed, exist and I was worried that I was wrong.

It was a fear I carried for many years after we left the group. I kept thinking, If Im wrong, Im going to be in trouble.

After Allred broke away from the religion, he got a job at a bar.

The longer I worked at the bar, the further Susan and I got away from it.

Eventually, it was the excitement that fueled his days; it carried him through his new life more than anything else, he said.

He pointed out that when one is confined to a certain lifestyle and you have the world out here, suddenly, its opened to anything.

He said, Its like being a kid with candy for the first time. You just want to gobble it all up.

As he was growing up, members of AUB were taught to stay together.

You couldnt be too far away because you never knew when the end was coming, he said, revealing that their temples are also in other areas in the country.

He remembers the day he and Susan left their house in Bluffdale. By the time they were in Toole, he began to worry that the end was going to happen at that moment.

Will I be close enough to the temple and my family to survive?

Eventually, he learned that heaven and hell arent what his church said they were.

When I finally realized that, I was able to separate myself and be more comfortable, he said. The heartache of leaving my family is what took over next.

He expressed how much he misses his mothers and siblings.

My whole life was around my brothers and sisters. We did everything together. And my mothers. It didnt matter which house I went to; I would get a hug and a kiss. I had a huge family. All that is gone.

That was the hardest thing I had to work past.

He expressed that many family members did not accept their decision.

We were hated at first. Not only did I leave the group, but I was the prophets son so that made it worse.

Allreds father passed away in 2005 at the age of 91.

Regarding love, Allred said that he was taught that youre married for all time and eternity.

Polygamy was so hard on the wives but not on the husbands, he said. The husbands loved it. They had it easy. My mom even said once, I never want to live with dad in heaven.

Allred was confused because her statement went against everything he was taught.

It was a love-hate relationship, he pointed out. The wives were closer to each other than they were with dad. They loved dad and they respected each other.

When Allred wanted to live in polygamy, he had told Susan that its something youre going to have to deal with. She clearly told him that she wasnt comfortable with that at all.

I told her, If we want to get to heaven, this is what we need to do, he said. A lot of women hated it. To me, it wasnt love. They were living a religion. They had kids because they had to procreate. Love wasnt part of it. Romance wasnt part of it. How do you romance eight women?

He added, Theres so much under the skin hatred for the religion, but they do it because they believe thats how they enter heaven.

Allred expressed no regrets in leaving AUB, saying, I didnt love and understand my wife until we pulled ourselves away from the church.

Allred will be celebrating his 40th wedding anniversary in August.

Weve stuck it out through thick and thin. I cant imagine doing anything without her; our morning routines, our second job together. When Im in pain, shes the only one Id want to comfort me. Our relationship is better now than it was ten years ago. Were constantly making it better. It hasnt gone downhill and Im thankful for that.

Get any of our free email newsletters news headlines, sports, arts & entertainment, state legislature, CFD news, and more.

Continued here:

Living in polygamy: Local author looks back on growing up in ... - Wyoming Tribune

It's not easy being Sister Wives star Robyn Brown, and her recent shift towards monogamy will probably lead to even more shade from her haters, particularly if she was faking her passion for polygamy all along. Robyn's a catalyst for drama, despite a meek and mild demeanor that may cloak the steeliest resolve. Is Robyn the iron fist in the velvet glove? Maybe, but changing her opinions on plural marriage could lead to criticism that really hurts. While there may be those who respect Robyn for making it clear that she doesn't want to share Kody Brown, others are going to call her a hypocrite. She's been called worse.

The show launched in 2010, and over the majority of its 17 seasons, Sister Wives' Robyn Brown's been the show's primary villain. Before three wives fled, Robyn ruled the roost. Logic would dictate that Kody was the true "baddie" on the series, as his blatant favoritism gave Robyn her power. However, Robyn got most of the backlash. Her syrupy kindness to the now-former wives, Meri, Janelle and Christine Brown, didn't exactly ring true. The endless crying jags were a nightmare, along with the way she always had to be seated beside Kody, like the queen of cringe with her king. Now, she's trying to stop Kody from courting a potential new wife.

Related: Why Sister Wives' Robyn & Kody Brown Are Basically Monogamous

It's not impossible that Robyn was just playing a part, metaphorically stepping onto the stage when she began to romance Kody. While her parents were part of a plural marriage, that isn't proof positive that Robyn was fully onboard with the concept, as she would have seen the drawbacks up close, and those are considerable. If Robyn was faking her love of polygamy way back when, she might have had an endgame in mind, just like a Marvel movie screenwriter. The goal would be her and Kody together, and NO OTHER WIVES.

For whatever reason, when Robyn droned on about the wonders of polygamy, it wasn't totally believable. She'd give herself away with passive-aggressive actions that showed an ulterior motive. For example, she made sure that Meri would have to legally divorce Kody, so he could adopt Robyn's kids. That's quite a lot to ask of another woman.

Was adoption all that was about? There appears to be something decidedly icy under the surface, a flaw in Robyn's character that inspires her to say one thing and do another. The devout purity that Robyn espoused was like a flawless diamond, but the glittering gemstone that was her devotion to her sister wives (and her faith) might have been a rhinestone. Was she simply acting out what should be heartfelt and genuine?

Change can be grueling, but necessary and healthy. In a new Queens of the Stone Age hit, "Emotion Sickness," Josh Homme sings, "How we grow is so painful/believe me." Robyn's been through a lot over the years, and may be tired of being painted as a two-dimensional Disney Evil Queen, or polygamy's poster girl.

She's a real woman, after all - she has kids, she's getting older, and her relationship with Kody isn't perfect. However, it's obvious that her marriage is important to her. Whether she's making her kids by another man call Kody "Daddy," or sticking like glue to her guy during a worldwide pandemic, she's so often annoying. However, there may be a heart beating under those modest print blouses.

Robyn gets dragged, but upon careful re-watching, viewers may notice that she's usually the most polite of the wives. She treats Kody with the most respect too. While the tears are a nuisance, she often expresses opinions that show a fairly impressive level of smarts and common sense, except when she's getting kooky by putting her most extravagant magical thinking on display. At the outset, she did sweep in like a Disney Princess, rather than an Evil Queen. Petite and charming, she stole Kody's heart, but does that make her a bad person?

The Sister Wives saga has been long, with peaks and valleys, from the "war" over the choicest plots at Coyote Pass, to the sad acceptance that the plural marriage experiment was a total failure. Through it all, Robyn's stayed with Kody, and maybe not for the wrong reasons. While she may have faked her love of polygamy, or just changed, she's still interested in being Kody's wife, and the others just aren't.

Meri, Janelle and Christine might have left because of her, but Robyn is there for Kody. She's somewhat complex, and that's interesting. It's possible that Sister Wives viewers will never know her whole heart and mind, but maybe Kody does, or will.

Go here to read the rest:

Sister Wives: Robyn Brown's All About Monogamy Now (Was She ... - Screen Rant

Once this core democratic issue is sorted the rest of UCC shall follow more smoothly. Sequencing is the essence of good social reform

The discussions on Uniform Civil Code (UCC) are going sideways because of the reluctance in stating that the real aim is to ban polygamy, which allows a man to have more than one wife. The rest of UCC is really background noise. That the call for UCC only appears in the Constitution as one of the non-justiciable Directive Principles, makes it appear like a promise akin to jam yesterday, jam tomorrow but never today. Alice in Wonderland, once more. This positioning of UCC in the Constitution took away its urgency though it bobbed up, from time to time, in lazy, hazy conversations before it was patted back to bed. Its relevance gradually faded away, allowing polygamy to reset the alarm and go back to sleep. It was in the 1980s that it was rudely woken up when the Shah Bano case made polygamy among Muslims a national scandal; even so it did not really stir the entire UCC package.

Go here to read the rest:

First, make all polygamy illegal | India News - Times of India - Times of India

By Syed Khalique Ahmed*

The Mumbai-based International Institute of Population Sciences (IIPS), working under the Central government, has blasted the myth that Muslims are the only polygynous community, with males having more than one wife. IIPS recent research report, uploaded on its website, says that polygamy is the highest among Christians in India, followed by Muslims and Hindus.

The report comes amidst raging debate on the Uniform Civil Code(UCC), with many right-wingers, including BJP leaders, elected representatives to state assemblies, Parliament, and ministers throwing their weight around the demand for a UCC, particularly to ban polygyny among Muslims, as they believe that every Muslim man marries four wives and hold Muslim community responsible for growth of population in the country, a new research has exposed their claims.

The latest research on polygamy tendencies by IIPS, a deemed-to-be-university, and an autonomous organisation under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India (GoI), has concluded that Christians as faith group are the most polygamous in India, followed by Muslims and Hindus. The researchers who conducted the study are Harihar Sahoo, R Nagarajan and Chaitali Mandal.

The research is based on the data collected from the fifth round of National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) conducted between 2019 and 2021. NFHS data is based on the statements of married women who stated that their husbands had other wife or wives besides themselves.

According to the IIPS data, the rate of polygyny among Christians, as per the NFHS-5, is 2.1% against 1.9% among Muslims and 1.3% among Hindus. Thus, the difference between Muslims and Hindus polygyny rate is just 0.6 per cent.

Likewise, polygyny rate was found to be 0.5% among Sikhs during the period covered by NFHS-5, 1.3 per cent among Buddhists and 2.5 per cent among others (religion/caste group not stated).

According to the research, the national average of polygyny is 1.4%, indicating a declining trend, because it was 1.9% during NHFS-3 (2006-2006) and 1.6% during NHFS-4 (2015-16). The research says that polygyny decreased in almost every state from 2015-16 to 2019-21, with the exception of nine states (Chandigarh, Delhi, Punjab, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Tripura, Maharashtra, and Puducherry). Though the polygyny is not legal in India for any community other than Muslims, the IIPS research says it is still prevalent among non-Muslims in various parts of India.

Polygyny in India is more prevalent in Northeastern and the Southern states of India, as well Sikkim bordering Nepal. According to the report, Meghalaya (6.1%), Mizoram(4.1%) and Arunachal Pradesh (3.7%) in the Northeast have the largest prevalence of polygyny. The current rate of polygyny is 3.9% in Sikkim.

In South India, the highest prevalence of polygyny is in Telangana (2.9%), Karnataka (2.4), Puducherry (2.4%) and Tamilnadu(2%). In South India, practitioners of polygyny are generally Hindus. The districts with high rate of polygyny are: East Jantia Hills (20%), West Jantia Hills (14.5%), West Khasi (10.9%), South West Khasi Hills(6.4 %), Ribhoi (6.2%), East Khasi Hills (5.8%), all in Meghalaya. The other districts are: Kra Daadi(16.4%), East Kameng(10.2%), Papum Pare(6.9%), Kurung Kumey(6.6%), Lower Subansir(5%), Upper Subansiri(4.9%), all in Arunachal Pradesh. Then there are other districts with high rate of polygyny: Bijapur (5.9) in Chattisgarh, and Yadgir(46%) in Karnataka. Lowest polygyny in regions with Muslim concentration

What needs to be noted is that the states or regions with Muslim dominance are among the states with least prevalence of polygyny. For instance, Lakshadweep with almost 100% of Muslim population and Jammu & Kashmir with overwhelming majority of Muslims have only 0.5 % and 0.4% of polygyny, respectively, busting the politically-motivated claims of Hindu right-wingers that every Muslim man practices polygyny.

The rate of polygyny among Christians, as per the NFHS-5, is 2.1% against 1.9% among Muslims and 1.3% among Hindus

The study indicates that polygynous marriages are more prevalent among women who had no formal education (2.4%) than among those who had higher educational (0.3%) qualifications.

Polygamy was most prevalent among the poorest women and women who had no formal education. It is also most prevalent in rural areas (1.6%) than in urban areas (0.6%). Polygyny is also more prevalent among poorer people (2.4%) and very less (0.5%) among rich people.

Polygamy in other countries According the Pew Research Centers survey by Stephanie Kramer in 2020, polygamy is prevalent in several countries of the world like Germany, Russia,, China, Iran, Canada and the US where it is less than 0.5%. In Iraq, it is 2%.

West and Central African countries like Burkina Faso (36%), Mali (34%) and Nigeria (28%) etc. are the polygyny centres of the world, with people living with more than one wives. Religion wise, they are mostly Christians and Muslims. But even people belonging to folk religions or no religion at all in Burkina Faso practice polygyny (45 %).

The Pew Research says that many of the countries that permit polygamy have Muslim majorities, but the practice of polygamy is rare in many of them. The report says that countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran and Egypt are Muslim majority and polygamy is allowed there, but only less than 1% of men live with more than one or two wives.

The Pew Research is, however, silent on polygamy in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and their neighbouring Muslim majority countries because of lack of data from these countries.

According to Pew Research, one-in-five US adults consider polygamy as morally acceptable. The Pew report about the US is based on a Gallup Poll conducted in 2003. More than conservatives (9%), liberals (34%) see polygamy as morally acceptable.

Writer is Editor in Chief IndiaTomorrow_

The rest is here:

Polygamy going down among Muslims, says GoI supported ... - THE INDIAN AWAAZ

Following is another in a series of columns on The Baptist Faith & Message 2000.

Article XVIII of The Baptist Faith & Message 2000 reads:

God has ordained the family as the foundational institution of human society. It is composed of persons related to one another by marriage, blood, or adoption.

Marriage is the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime. It is Gods unique gift to reveal the union between Christ and His church and to provide for the man and the woman in marriage the framework for intimate companionship, the channel of sexual expression according to biblical standards, and the means for procreation of the human race.

The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in Gods image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.

Children, from the moment of conception, are a blessing and heritage from the Lord. Parents are to demonstrate to their children Gods pattern for marriage. Parents are to teach their children spiritual and moral values and to lead them, through consistent lifestyle example and loving discipline, to make choices based on biblical truth. Children are to honor and obey their parents.

Southern Baptists added Article XVIII to the Baptist Faith & Message in 1998, thus making it part of the 1963 confession and carrying it forward into the 2000 edition. Witnessing the erosion of our cultures view of marriage, family, and gender, Southern Baptists boldly reaffirmed Gods unchanging standards as revealed in Scripture and embraced by Christians throughout the centuries.

Today, the prevailing secular view is that marriage is an archaic, man-made institution in need of revision. Further, modern culture views the family as an evolutionary unit that may be restructured to meet changing societal needs, and gender as a subjective personal choice.

But the Bible says otherwise. Marriage, family, and gender are gifts from God. They are established and fixed for the good of all people, who are created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27).

Marriage is the first institution God ordains, and he does so before the Fall (see Gen. 2:18-25). The consistent standard of Scripture is that marriage is the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime. The gift of sexual intimacy is for pleasure and procreation within the confines of monogamous marriage, requiring unselfishness and purity (see Heb. 13:4).

When biblical figures even heroes like King David engage in sexual activity outside the bonds of marriage, it often ends badly. Polygamy proves no less a sin.

Further, marriage should be highly prized, for it is given to us as a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and his church. The Lord Jesus is depicted as the bridegroom, and his church is the bride (see Matt. 9:15; John 3:29; 2 Cor. 11:2; Rev. 19:7; 21:2; 22:17; cf. Matt. 25:1-13).

The apostle Paul develops this concept more fully in his letter to the Ephesians, where he instructs wives to submit to their husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He goes on to say, Husbands, love your wives, just a Christ loved the church and gave himself for her (Eph. 5:22-23, 25).

Paul links marriage and the church back to the garden of Eden and Gods creative intent for fidelity in covenant relationships: For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This mystery is profound, but I am talking about Christ and the church (Eph. 5:31-32).

Husbands are to provide for their families and protect them from harm. They also are to be the spiritual leaders in the marriage and family not in a tyrannical sense but on the basis of spiritual authority as demonstrated in the faithfulness of Jesus (see Col. 3:18-21).

Wives are equal partners in marriage, as both are created in the image of God. At the same time, a wife is to receive the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation (BF&M Article XVIII).

Biblically, a family consists of persons related by marriage, blood, or adoption. A family, consisting of a father, a mother, and their children, reflects Gods glory in the right ordering of civilization and society.

This means that family, like marriage, is central to Gods design for humanity. It requires love, order, intimacy, and unity qualities that have existed throughout eternity within the members of the Trinity.

All people, whether married or unmarried, are related to family through various ties of blood, kinship, or adoption. Yahweh is a relational God, and he made us to thrive in relationships, as well.

He even adopts followers of Jesus as his sons and daughters (Rom. 8:14-17; Gal. 3:26; 4:6; Eph. 1:5). This is good for us to remember. In the ancient Near East, a persons family of origin and ancestry formed his or her primary identity. This continued for first-century Christians with an important twist: their identity is now the family of God gathered around Christ.

As Jonathan Pennington notes, The most frequent metaphor used to describe Christians is brother and sister. This family language is very purposeful, teaching Christians to realign their allegiances around their new identity as the children of God.

Modern culture seeks to redefine the family and celebrate alternative expressions of it. Examples include same-sex marriage, cohabitation, polygamy, polyandry, and more. But as Charles Kelley, Richard Land, and Albert Mohler explain, The family is not a laboratory for social experimentation but an arena in which Gods glory is shown to the world in the right ordering of human relationships.

Children are to be welcomed as blessings from God. Parents have a God-ordained responsibility to raise them in the training and instruction of the Lord (Eph. 6:4). In return, children are to honor and obey their parents, which is pleasing to God (Exod. 20:12; Eph. 6:1-3).

Scripture is clear that God created human beings male and female, and he did so that we might be his image bearers (Gen. 1:26-27). This doesnt mean God, who is spirit, has gender, although the eternal Son of God became flesh as a man (John 1:14; 1 Tim. 2:5), and the other members of the Trinity are depicted in masculine terms in Scripture.

It does mean, however, that God created men and women in a complementary way for marriage and procreation. Further, their intimacy as husband and wife reflects the intimacy of the members of the Trinity, as well as the close bond between Christ and his church.

God defines gender. Humans redefine it at their peril. Gender may be confirmed through God-given physical evidence genetic, biological, and anatomical, for example. Humans are to celebrate gender as a gift from God.

At the same time, gender confusion including a condition known as gender dysphoria is nearly as old as the Fall. Because human beings created in the image of God live in a fallen world, the lines between male and female are sometimes blurred for example, in those rare instances when a person is born with both male and female features, and, more commonly, in those who feel intense emotional unease with their birth gender.

In every case, followers of Jesus are to treat those who struggle with gender confusion with compassion and understanding, knowing that we, too, are subject to frailties of our own. At the same time, we should help our friends rediscover Gods gift of gender, sharing a biblical view of what it means to be men and women created in the image of God.

Next: A 2023 amendment to The Baptist Faith & Message.

See original here:

Article XVIII of the BF&M: The Family - The Pathway

. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . .Sweet Spirit, what souls are these who run through this black haze? And he to me: These are the nearly soulless whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise. They are mixed here with that despicable corps of angels who were neither for God nor Satan, but only for themselves. The High Creator scourged them from Heaven for its perfect beauty, and Hell will not receive them since the wicked might feel some glory over them.

Lets start with Dante and his description of those souls who tried to be neutral on earth, neither good nor bad, just OK. For Dante, they were the most despicable people in the afterlife. They do not go to hell, per se, because they never embraced wickedness. But they dont go to heaven either. They just wander around miserably, not being anywhere or anything because, because they failed to commit to anything during their lives.

From Dante, we learn the crucial truth that not bad is not the same as good. A number of other statements flow from this understanding: not false is different than true; not wrong is different than right; and not worthless is not the same as valuable. The absence of a fault is not yet a virtue.

But I dont really want to talk about Dante here. I want to talk about apologeticsthat branch of religious writing that focuses on defending or explaining religious beliefs or institutions.

There is nothing wrong with apologetics. We struggle in English because the word sounds so much like apologize, and that, in turn, usually means something like make excuses for. And to be fair to the uninitiated, religious apologetics often does sound a lot like making excuses for religious problems. Latter-day Saint apologists, when not trying to overwhelm people with adjectives and advanced degrees, often fall into the trap of trying to excuse, rather than defend or explain, difficult things.

I recently spent some time with the Mormonr Hard Questions site, one of the newer such sites in the LDS apologetics world. There is a lot to recommend their approach. It has none of the combative ethos that often characterizes LDS apologetics, it answers a lot of questions with words like probably, and sort of that demonstrate epistemic humility, and it does a great job documenting issues and explaining them with timelines and helpful infographics.

Like several other sites, Mormonr is geared towards GenZ and younger Millennialsgenerations that appear to be leaving the Church in record numbers after they 1) encounter historical problem areas on the internet; and 2) find themselves increasingly in opposition to the church on social issuesespecially LGBTQ issues. Here are two examples of such problem issues, along with some excerpts from the Mormonr response:

ISSUE #1: Fanny Alger and Joseph Smith

The history of polygamy can be uncomfortable or frustrating, and even more so when it relates to Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger, the first polygamous relationship. Did Joseph make up polygamy to justify cheating on Emma? Was there a power imbalance with Joseph being her employer and a prophet? What about that age gap?

Unfortunately, there are very few contemporary historical records on this relationship and there are no historical records from Joseph or Fanny. This makes it difficult to reconstruct the story using historical evidence and makes it tough to answer the hard questions about Joseph and Fanny in a satisfying way.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

One reasonable interpretation is that the relationship with Fanny seems to be the first attempt to start practicing polygamy, one that appears to have been fumbled by Joseph. Though Joseph might have been imperfect in implementing polygamy, we can rely on a spiritual witness that comes by study and faith on Joseph Smiths role as prophet of God.

ISSUE #2: The Church and Proposition 8 in California

For many people, this is not a topic that will have satisfying answers. With the mix of political and social issues at play, theres not really a comfortable place to land.

Did the Church overstep its bounds by getting involved in this highly charged political issue? Was the Church doing the right thing to ask its members to mobilize and vote a particular way? These are difficult questions, and they may not have clear answers.

But one question that is answerable is whether the Church can legally participate in politics and influence policy. Since the Church is a non-profit, and non-profits can participate in politics that affect their interests, the Church was within legal bounds to campaign for Prop 8.

The Church doesnt usually give direction on how to vote (though in this case, it did), but it does encourage members to be politically active. Though faithful Church members may disagree on how the Proposition 8 situation should have been handled, each should remember to respect and love those on every side of political or social discussions.

I have spent a lot of time studying rhetoric and argument, and I recognize the argument style used here. It is a very effective style for dealing with concerns that includes the following steps:

These are all important skills to use when discussing potentially divisive topics. The Mormonr site is a master class in effective, civically responsible discussion of hard questions in a way that does not increase polarization or outrage. I like this site quite a lot, and I think that it does a lot of necessary work in the Latter-day Saint ecosystem.

But I also see a major problem with this entire approach to apologetics, and it goes back to Dante: this approach is designed to turn antagonism into neutralityto convince people that Joseph Smiths relationship with a teenage girl does not completely disqualify him from being a prophet, or that it is OK to be a Latter-day Saint and disagree with the Church on things like Proposition 8.

The problem is that neutrality is not enough to accomplish the goal of keeping peopleyoung or otherwisein the Church. People do not want to identify with institutions that are just not false, not bad, and not guilty. They need to understand the positive good that an institution does and the value that being a part of it can have in their lives.

I do not stay involved in the Church because I have satisfactorily resolved all of the historical problems that I have encountered. Nor do I stay because I have come to agree with the Churchs position on social issues that are important to me. I stay because I have discovered things in the Church that offset these very real problems and make it a net positive in my life.

The young people that I know who have left the Church (and a lot of the not-young people too) did not leave ONLY because of historical problems and social issues. They left because they could find nothing of value to offset their discomfort. It requires an enormous investment of both cognitive and spiritual resources to construct a nuanced position that accounts for these problem areas and still manages to celebrate faith and spiritual identity. People will only be willing to invest this effort if they see a substantial return for doing so. Not as bad as you thought is just not enough.

This, I think, is the real problem that apologetics has to grapple with: how to defend the Church by showing how it is good and not just how certain hard questions can be sort of answered. Absolute statements that the Church is true and this is what God says are just not enough. They have never been enough. They set up an all-or-nothing proposition for which nothing is quickly becoming the default setting.

The way to deal with the problem areas is not to provide lengthy explanations to mitigate their negative impact. Everybody who affiliates with any institution involving human beingsnations, universities, corporationshas to deal with problems, usually big ones, that do not have easy solutions. We remain connected because we perceive positive value in spite of the problems. For religious apologetics to matter, they have to spend less time establishing the not badness of the Church and more time identifying and exploring its goodness.

Like Loading...

See the article here:

Apologetics that (Might) Matter - By Common Consent