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The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 23

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Part 23: CES Letter Polygamy & Polyandry Questions [Section D]

by Sarah Allen

 

There are some heavy, complicated topics on the agenda for today, so I’m just going to dive right in. Again in big red letters, Jeremy Runnells continues:

JOSEPH’S POLYGAMY ALSO INCLUDED:

Dishonesty in public sermons, 1835 D&C 101:4, denials by Joseph Smith that he was practicing polygamy, Joseph’s destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor that exposed his polygamy and which destruction of the printing press initiated the chain of events that led to Joseph’s death.

First, it’s not as simple as just Joseph and some of the other early Church leaders lying, the way Jeremy tries to make it seem.

It’s incredibly difficult to boil down 15 years’ worth of religious, historical, political, and societal events down into something that makes sense for the average person who isn’t familiar with any of it, so I’m not even going to try. But we have to understand the climate these people were living in—they’d been shunned by family members for joining the Church; they’d been prevented from voting; they’d been driven from their homes at gunpoint without anything, more than once; they’d been blamed for all of the local unrest simply because they moved into an area and built a farm or city; they and their friends and family members had been starved, robbed, beaten, raped, and murdered; they were held under siege by the state militia; they’d had an extermination order placed against them; and their current situation was beginning to mirror that of Kirtland and Missouri. They were terrified of what might happen to them next. And Joseph and the Twelve were responsible for keeping all of them safe. They knew that if they publicly announced the plural marriage doctrine before they were in a position of relative safety, the Church would be destroyed—literally. The members would all be massacred and the Church would die out because there was no one left to carry it forward. That’s what they were facing, and they knew it.

In this article, Gregory Smith tries to put it in some context by giving an analogy: [Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 23

“The keys whereby he may ask and receive” (D&C 124)

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Doctrine and Covenants 124 includes instructions to the prophet Joseph Smith to “show” selected others “the keys whereby [they] may ask and receive” blessings (D&C 124: 95, 97). This seems to be an allusion to “the key words, the signs and tokens, pertaining to the holy Priesthood” that are taught in the endowment (Brigham Young, Discourses of Brigham Young, sel. John A. Widtsoe [1941], 416).

As recently reaffirmed by President Russell M. Nelson, although temple procedures and presentations are adjusted from time to time to clarify meaning, the “temple ordinances and covenants are ancient” (The Temple and Your Spiritual Foundation).  This statement raises the question: Is there any evidence of such ancient ordinances and covenants?

What follows is a very brief overview of some of the historical evidence.

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 22

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Part 22: CES Letter Polygamy & Polyandry Questions [Section C]

by Sarah Allen

 

Before we dive in, I want to talk about something personal. When I originally wrote this post, it was with a very heavy heart. A few days before I sat down to write it, a woman who was a former acquaintance and coworker of mine—a part of my larger friend group at that job but not someone I was particularly close to personally—was abducted and murdered by a man we vaguely knew, another coworker of ours from a different department. Obviously, I was pretty shaken by all of that, and that friend group and I were shocked and devastated. She was a very kind, generous woman, and she will be missed.

The reason I’m sharing this personal information is because this is the part of the Letter that starts getting a little more vicious with its allegations of mistreatment and abuse of women. As a woman myself, I find these accusations particularly offensive when compared to actual violence toward women, such as what my old coworker suffered that week.

I have been sexually harassed in the past at school and at work. Over the years, I have been catcalled. I have had multiple customers hitting on me while I’m just trying to do my job. I have had men get mad at me when I declined to date them. I have been followed by strange men on the street, all the way up the block to a corner market and then all the way back down into my hotel, to the point where I had to get the front desk clerk to get rid of them for me. I had a complete stranger fixate on me over a Facebook post, find my personal information, and call me at all hours of the day and night. I have been forcibly kissed and groped in an elevator by a stranger in a foreign country where I had no way to fight him off. And I am no supermodel. I am an introvert who blends in with the crowd. Most of you wouldn’t look twice at me if you saw me walking past because I don’t stand out. Even my name is so blandly generic that you can’t Google it without further information. But even I’ve had my fair share of mistreatment, and I know many other women who have had similar experiences.

[Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 22

Come, Follow Me Week 45 – Doctrine and Covenants 125-128

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By Cassandra Hedelius

It’s difficult to write this post, because the subject is baptism for the dead, and my grandpa is dying, and I love him, and he’s never accepted the gospel. His death from old age isn’t tragic, but it would be if we didn’t have so much revelation from God about His plan. For this, I thank God for prophets.

When Joseph’s older brother Alvin died, a minister preached at his funeral and “intimated very strongly that [Alvin] had gone to hell, for Alvin was not a church member.”[1] This was obviously a tactless thing to say to a grieving family, but based on the knowledge that minister had, he wasn’t really wrong! The Bible is pretty clear that baptism is an eternal necessity. What that minister needed wasn’t sensitivity training, but more revealed truth. Let’s take the charitable view that he would have been ecstatic to learn that Alvin was not in fact damned, and that God is perfectly able to overcome paltry obstacles like people dying before having a chance to accept the truth.  [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 45 – Doctrine and Covenants 125-128

FAIR Conference Podcast #64 – Jeffrey Thayne, “Worldview Apologetics: Revealing the Waters in Which We Swim”

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Podcast: Download (10.9MB)

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This podcast series features past FAIR Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2021 conference held in August. If you would like to watch the presentations from our 2021 conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.

Jeffrey Thayne, Worldview Apologetics: Revealing the Waters in Which We Swim

A transcript is available here.

Jeffrey’s book, Who Is Truth: Reframing Our Questions for a Richer Faith, is available from our bookstore.

Dr. Jeffrey Thayne graduated from BYU with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in psychology. He completed his doctorate in Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences at Utah State University. He runs the popular Latter-day Saint Philosopher blog, and spends time engaging in worldview apologetics (articulating and exploring the worldview assumptions that inform our faith). He currently resides in Washington state with his wife and two children.

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 21

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Part 21: CES Letter Polygamy & Polyandry Questions [Section B]

by Sarah Allen

 

Polygamy is probably the single biggest issue that people have with the Church, more than the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham, other aspects of Church history, living prophets today, the rejection of the common model of Trinity, the lack of allowances for LGBTQ+ relationships, etc. It is, without a doubt, the #1 topic of jokes relating to the Church and to Utah in popular entertainment. It is a big stumbling block for a lot of people…including the early Saints who were taught it and who lived it.

That was by design. The idea of polygamy as an Abrahamic sacrifice to test the early Saints is a fairly common one, and for good reason. Sacrifice is the ultimate test we’re called to give on this Earth, because that’s how we exercise faith. It’s how we grow. It’s how we prove to God that we know what’s truly important. It’s the refiner’s fire that purifies us and sanctifies us. The Savior was sacrificed for us at His Father’s behest, because that what was necessary to bring about salvation, and the Savior was devoted to fulfilling His Father’s work. Can you imagine what that must have been like for Him, knowing what was coming and what He would have to do? And yet, He did it anyway. The courage, faith and love that must have taken is astronomical. And that same courage, faith and love is what is required of us, only on a smaller scale.

[Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 21

FAIR Conference Podcast #63 – Carl Trueman, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution”

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Podcast: Download (12.6MB)

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This podcast series features past FAIR Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2021 conference held in August. If you would like to watch the presentations from the conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.

Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

Carl’s book by the same name is available from the FAIR Bookstore.

Carl R Trueman is a graduate of the Universities of Cambridge (MA) and Abderdeen (PhD) and formerly served on faculty at the Universities of Nottingham and Aberdeen and Westminster Theological Seminary (PA).  Before joining the Grove City College faculty in 2018, he was the William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University.  He is married with two adult sons and is also an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.  He is the author of numerous books, including Histories and Fallacies and The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, both from Crossway, and joint editor (with Bruce Gordon) of The Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 20

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Part 20: CES Letter Polygamy & Polyandry Questions [Section A]

by Sarah Allen

 

I have to admit, of all of the different sections in the CES Letter, polygamy is the one I’ve been dreading. It’s such a messy subject, and there are going to be high emotions over it no matter what. The “questions” are angrier and more slanted, and everything is twisted to such a degree that it’s just not going to be particularly pleasant. I’m also not as well-read on this subject as I am on some of the others that interest me more, but I’ve still done a fair amount of research and I do have a testimony that plural marriage was instituted by God. That might be controversial to some people, but it’s true. I got my answer on that a long time ago. Regardless, this should be an interesting set of questions/concerns for all of us.

One of the things that also truly disturbed me in my research was discovering the real origins of polygamy and how Joseph Smith really practiced it.

So, right away, this is an interesting comment. We hear online all the time that people had no idea Joseph ever engaged in polygamy until they finally learned the truth. I assume that’s at least similar to what Jeremy means here when he says he discovered “the real origins.”

That’s honestly something that I just don’t get, particularly when those people further claim that the Church was hiding it from them or lying to them. It’s in the D&C, it’s in multiple fiction and nonfiction books published by Deseret Book and the Church itself, it’s been discussed in Church magazines and manuals, it’s been on Joseph’s Wikipedia page for twenty years, etc. I realize that not everyone has the same experiences growing up, and some people are taught more than others. It happens with a lay ministry. And it’s true that during parts of the 20th century, this aspect of Church history was deemphasized and some sources were harder to find before the internet was a thing. But even then, it was always available information. I understand that discovering something you didn’t know can be a blow. I really, truly do. However, you can’t accuse a church of hiding something from you when it’s in multiple public, official publications up to and including their canonized scriptures.

Just some quick background on this, at least as far as my experience goes: like a lot of us whose ancestors were early members of the Church, I have polygamists in my family history. I was also taught in Primary that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both had multiple wives. Again, I realize that wasn’t the case for everyone, but it was for me. Additionally, I am a single sister who has never been married and who has no children at this time. In at least two of my neighborhoods growing up in Utah, there were polygamists living nearby, both several blocks away on my same street.

[Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 20

Come, Follow Me Week 44 – Doctrine and Covenants 124

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By Cassandra Hedelius

In 1840, John C. Bennett was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ. His wife and children didn’t come with him to Nauvoo, and it’s not clear what his original motive was for posing as a bachelor instead of being truthful about his family status. His eventual motive was extremely clear: as Bennett ingratiated himself to Joseph and other leaders, and gained high religious and civic positions, he lied to women in order to take advantage of them sexually. Bennett is one of the earliest and most egregious cases of a conundrum we’re each likely to sometime face: if the church is guided by revelation, how do bad people fool its leaders? [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 44 – Doctrine and Covenants 124

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 19

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Part 19: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section J]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

This has been a long section of “questions” and we’re not quite done yet, but I think we’ll be able to wrap up the Book of Abraham section this week and move on to the next set of questions next week. I’m sure everyone’s getting ready for a change in topic by now, so it’ll be good to dive into something new.

This entire post may as well be about source bias as anything else. To start the ball rolling on this week’s group of accusations (they are less actual questions this week and more biased statements masquerading as facts), Jeremy Runnells links to a commentary video about an interview Elder Holland did for a BBC documentary (which aired in the US on PBS) on our church during Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run.

As some quick background, John Sweeney, a reporter for the BBC, put together a documentary titled The Mormon Candidate that was…well, to put it bluntly, it was insane. It was like something out of the National Enquirer. I remember watching it and thinking, “Wait, isn’t the BBC supposed to be reputable?” You can watch the full documentary here, but I couldn’t find any clips of just Elder Holland’s interview without slanted commentary insinuating that he was lying.

The documentary was full of errors like repeatedly confusing chapels and temples, interviews with polygamists (whom we are apparently “afraid of”) and crazy ex-members who made claims about the Church having them followed, “Mormon spies” who are trained by the CIA to keep tabs on the members who are “considered dangerous,” and a very heavily edited interview with Elder Holland. Sweeney repeated the claim from The Godmakers that we believe we each get our own planet when we die, as well as that we believe we are the only chosen people of God. He claimed that the Church is in charge of the Utah state school system. He highlighted the re-drawing of Facsimile 1 by Charles Larson that a noted, non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologist called “seriously flawed.” He claimed that Joseph Smith was convicted of being a fraud in New York, which there is no evidence of. Joseph was charged, yes, but the supposed victim of his fraud, Josiah Stowell, testified in Joseph’s defense (as did several of his family members) and Stowell later joined the Church, in which he remained a faithful member until his death.

[Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 19