These guys
have a problem: the world they knew went away somewhere and came back entirely
different. Because, in the past, it was easy: you kept everybody busy and
isolated. So if you were in small towns in the American west, you devoted forty
to sixty hours to making the desert bloom—which they did—and twenty or thirty
hours going to church. That didn’t leave too much time for anything else but
sleep. Oh, and since everybody else around you was doing the same thing, there
was no possibility of dissent.
So that
meant that all of the rest of us could—in spare moments—chuckle snidely at the
more preposterous claims. Who can forget Mark
Twain, one of the
earliest and certainly one of the best critics, on
the Book of Mormon?
All
men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the “elect” have seen it,
or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt
Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet
so “slow,” so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is
chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle
— keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to
tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved
plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way
locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.
So all of
us could sit around and snigger when every other institution in the States had
to confront its own racism throughout the sixties and seventies, but the
Mormons? Still barring blacks from the priesthood, which is generally given to
every male child at age 12, until 1978. And then, as Wikipedia tells us, there came a little problem named Brazil, since it was no problem telling the women from the men. But the
blacks from the whites? Right—so Spencer W. Kimball,
the leader of the church, went off to his study, and guess what! There God
was—in all his white maleness—dishing up a revelation! Wow—all in a day’s work!
But the 70s
must seem like the most halcyon of days, since the most potent threat were
quaint little things like newspapers and magazines, as well as books, of
course. But all of that was easy enough, since it was easy to brand any
criticism as that ol’ debil, the Eastern liberal intelligentsia. Oh, and do you
think a librarian in Provo, Utah, is going to be putting seditious books on her
shelves? Not likely.
So change,
when it came, arrived as the gentlest of mists, not as a gale. And then?
Someone
invented the Internet.
Which one
person described as the gateway drug out of Mormonism, ‘cause how are you going
to keep them down on the farm, once they’ve clicked on Google? And there’s another problem: since all
the rest of us can fritter away the time with vices like drinking and smoking,
the Mormons? They’re grimly, and soberly, sitting in front of their computers,
writing blogs.
Yes—it
seems that the Mormons are writing blogs to such an extent that a term had to
be invented: the bloggernacle. Right, my computer doesn’t know it—nor will I
teach it—but Wikipedia
does:
The
Mormon blogosphere (often referred to as the Bloggernacle) is a segment of the blogosphere focused on
Mormon issues.[1] The term
"Bloggernacle" was coined by individuals within the LDS blogging community as a
play on the name of the Mormon Tabernacle
Choir; however, not all LDS-themed bloggers like or use the name
Bloggernacle, or even consider their blog to be part of it. Furthermore, not
all bloggers within the Mormon blogosphere are Mormons themselves.
So on 17
March 2013, Kate
Kelly, a lawyer and devout Mormon—she did her year of missionary service in
Barcelona, and why does that feel ever so slightly bogus?—created a website, ordainwomen.org.
Hmmm—let’s
see: who was it that said
there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come?
Answer—Victor
Hugo….
Astonishing,
really, how all the world’s media has followed this blog’s lead in championing
this story! Not just people like me, but little guys like The New York Times, and Yahoo, and even way down south in
Australia—anywhere, in fact, where they have Mormons (everywhere) and women
(also everywhere). So yesterday, we were all sitting around scratching the
collective head: some of us at home, but 200 people or so with Kelly in a vigil
in Salt Lake City. Oh, and there were vigils in seventeen other
countries—eighteen, if we count little Marc down here in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
And why were we all vigiling?
OK—return
to your seats, fasten your seat belts and lock your tray tables onto the seat in
front of you: it turns out that ordainwomen.org advocates for the—deep breath,
here—ordination of women! And that, to the twelve “apostles” of the Mormon
Church, is apostasy, another word for which is heresy. So Kelly’s local leaders
called her in for a trial yesterday.
Except
not—since Kelly is now living in Utah, and had requested that the church
transfer her records there. Here’s
what Kelly wrote in the first paragraph of her letter:
I beg of you not to
impose any form of discipline during the trial you will hold on Sunday. I also
request that you do the right thing and revoke the “informal probation” that was
placed upon me and remove the “move restriction” placed on my records so that I
can participate in the ward where I currently reside. Please reconsider this
punitive process and allow me to continue to worship in peace.
In
theory—and Salt Lake is playing this trumpet as loud as Gabriel ever
did—discipline is entirely in local hands, and the central hands have nothing, nothing,
to do with it. But it is
interesting that the big boys from Salt Lake had visited Kelly’s stake—the
words blogging teaches you!—and then, boom! Oh, and the same thing happened to
another blogger, John Dehlin.
Stay tuned—his trial is next Sunday….
Well, if
the French word for a bluffer is bluffeur, am I—on this issue—a scoffeur?
Because of course I know what has to be done. Tom Monson, the
current president, needs to be sent to his room, in order to be served up God’s
most recent revelation: the Internet, and especially Google, is the work of Satan himself, sent to
snare the faithful and lead them to perdition!
Easy for me
to laugh—but in one sentence, which of course I can’t find now, Kelly pleads
not to be excommunicated and deprived of spending the rest of eternity without
her family. Because that, you see, is what she / they / if-not-I believe. When
she dies, she will—if in good standing with the church—spend all eternity with
her loved ones. If not, not.
The church
asked her to take down the site and sit down and be a good girl, and in her
letter she makes it clear: no dice. So the trial was yesterday, and then the
three judges announced—they were stumped! So they fired off an email—guys, is
an electronic transmission an appropriate media to announce loss of eternal life?
Shouldn’t the local bishop drop by to break the bad news? Right—the judges
announced that they would sleep prayerfully on the matter, and let Kelly know
in a day or two.
Why do I
think there are a lot of calls to and from Salt Lake this morning?
---------------------------------
*Ever faithful
to my bloggerly vocation, I calculated the total years of the twelve, and guess
what? It’s 940, or almost halfway back to Jesus himself! Oh, and the average
age is 78.3….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_of_the_Twelve_Apostles_%28LDS_Church%29
