MARCH’S SALE OF THE KIRTLAND TEMPLE by the Community of Christ (CoC) to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has put me in a lasting, reflective mood about the history of my own LDS arrogance. It’s memory unsettles me and compels me, these many weeks later, to make a confession of my pride and apologize to Community of Christ members, as well as members of other churches I previously thought myself above.
Continue reading “An Apology to the Community of Christ for My Arrogance”Category: Temple
LDS Sr. Leadership, the SEC, and my Sustaining Vote
PUBLIC CHATTER HAS largely abated regarding the February 21 SEC order and its incumbent fines of $1 million against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and $4 million against church-owned Ensign Peak Advisors. You can read the specifics in the order by clicking the colored link above (its surprisingly easy to understand), but the tldr; version is that, between 1998 and May, 2018, the First Presidencies and Presiding Bishoprics (identified as “senior leadership” in the order) created 13 shell (or unfunded) companies into which they pretended to transfer portions of the Church’s billions in order to hide it from the public, and then they knowingly falsified documents (F13 forms) to cover it up. This is a civil* crime. The realization that our senior leadership spent two decades willfully committing crime ought to shock members to their core. It does me.
SEC orders are negotiated documents, which means the Church agreed with the accusations as stated in the Feb. 21 order. They did it. For 20 years, the First Presidencies and Presiding Bishoprics willingfully broke the law. The fact is, the following men, each of whom served in either a First Presidency or Presiding Bishopric sometime between 1998 and 2018, made hypocrites of themselves as they illegally hid the Church’s wealth from the SEC, the general public, and, most importantly, from its membership. They are:
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Advocating for the LDS Advocates Within
ASPECTS OF THE LDS TEMPLE experience have, once again, been modified. The endowment ceremony now features prominent images of Jesus and the witness couple is reportedly eliminated. Most interesting to me, however, is the addition of an introductory film that identifies the covenants that supplicants will be asked to make, seemingly to address the lack of informed consent that LDS and former LDS have been advocating for. I’m not sure that learning of these covenants just before the ceremony reduces peer pressure or clarifies much about them, but this shift tells me the men in charge are recognizing that informed consent is something members must be able to make. They’ve been listening, just as they (eventually) listened to women who spoke up about the way the previous endowment script disconnected them from a direct relationship with God. Other changes in the last 50 years include the removal of blood atonement penalties from the endowment and shields in the initiatory. Each of these were aspects of the temple experience that advocates justifiably asked be modified.
Advocacy from within the Church has helped bring many changes in recent history. Protect LDS Children and Ordain Women had members and leaders re-examining policy and perspective. I won’t enumerate the many positive changes each movement helped the Church achieve, but the impact of member advocacy is clearly seen in both movements and brought about celebration from the rank and file.
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Polygamy Culture and Temple Rites
In my previous discussions of polygamy culture, I mentioned that the 19th century practice of Mormon polygamy has had a lasting impact on the emotional health of contemporary LDS women, but I shied away from a detailed discussion of how the still-present practice of sealing multiple women to one man negatively impacts LDS women. At its core, polygamy culture continues to thrive because of this issue. And, in reality, the ways the current practice of temple-authorized polygamy (geared, to be clear, for the next life) are so numerous that I can only scratch the surface here. But it’s a surface that must be scratched until the problem is clearly exposed. Continue reading “Polygamy Culture and Temple Rites”
Life Outside The Book of Mormon Belt 