Changes in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
161

This actually makes me feel better because I really had thought it was in the text somewhere and I was weirded out by not being able to find it when I wrote that earlier post – which was because I skimmed the first half of the chapter quickly, as most of the polygamy stuff is in the last half of the chapter. Thanks, and I feel appropriately chastised for not reading the whole chapter carefully :slight_smile:

I didn’t hear that as a child (my parents were not particularly into doctrine) but did as an adult – people saying that they were glad that polygamy wasn’t mandated right now and that we would all know how to deal with it in the Celestial kingdom but we weren’t gonna worry about it until then. My mom did point out to me that men could get sealed to multiple women in this life but women couldn’t.

Wow. Median of 48 and retirement at 74? I’m… kind of envious.

Though isn’t it also true that the CoC is much smaller and cash-strapped?

Wow. Okay, I never learned THAT.

We had a copy, and I’m surprised I never read it. (I read basically everything in the house that was within my reach, including the family home evening manual (we never had FHE) and romance novels.) I wonder whether my parents still have it and if so which edition it was.

to be honest I didn’t even know that Blacks were not allowed to attend the temple! (To be fair to myself, I don’t know much about the temple, somewhat by design, and never looked too much into it.)

I was at the tail end of this and I hated it and would probably be out of the church if they hadn’t managed to change this around. I hated the surety about things that didn’t make sense. At least if the answer is “I don’t know” or “The Lord hasn’t revealed that” then, like, you have an out for it not making sense!

162

Today I was trying to find out something on the internet about my great…grandfather and found letters that he had written.I found out he was put in prison for polygamy. I either wasn’t told or forgot. It would have been the same time as the picture that was in the post about polygamists being put in the Utah State Prison. Maybe he’s in that picture. More investigation coming…

163

What, the government threatened to bite the church in the neck? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

164

OK, we’ve already established that I do a horrible job posting from my phone.

But I did leave the Church when I felt it had become a pain in the neck., or the ass. :laughing:

I grew up in a more innocent era, before DNA studies had conclusively proven that the American indigenous population could not have been Jews who had been cursed with darker skin for wickedness, and other such teachings.

To slightly misquote Lord Tennyson:

Ours not to make reply,

Ours not to reason why,

It was ours not to have things that didn’t make sense.

Growing up, anything that wasn’t pro Church was anti, and we just dismissed it. Then not only did science catch up, Mormon history did as well.

Growing up, we learned the sanitized version but the events happened too recently so the unvarnished stories came out.

Quite a few former members have left over these issues, but a fewer people take them literally, it will be easier to remain a member.

165

They have always been much smaller. Wiki gives their membership at 250k, while the LDS church claims 17.5 million members. Online sources suggest the the CoC numbers are as wildly inaccurate as the LDS ones, but as a rough guide they are 70 times smaller.

Apparently they are bleeding cash, and it looks like the members who pay tithing are becoming increasingly older.

Last year, they sold their most valuable asset, the Kirtland Temple, to the LDS Church for $192 million, which was reportedly the equivalent of 15 years of tithing.

The LDS church is extremely wealthy, with some estimates of over $290 billion net worth, tithing income of $7 billion (against $6 billion in expenses) and investment income of $10 billion and on up from there.

The LDS church doesn’t make its finances records public so it’s all estimates.

166

Yeah, this was a Big Deal. And my friend (who is an older lady and pays much more attention to this kind of thing) speculated to me that they must be really hard up, as according to her I guess no one really thought this would ever happen.

167

When I did a bit of googling into the CoC, membership, etc., a comment really stuck out.

The CoC went mainstream just as mainstream churches were starting to lose membership.

168

The proverbial burning the furniture to stay warm.

An org (of any nature) in that spot might be able to continue functioning as a more guerilla version of themselves, but they sure can’t keep the trappings of an organized hierarchy and headquarters, a brass band, fancy uniforms, etc. Darn few orgs successfully make that transition because the skills needed to be in charge of the latter pretty well preclude succeeding at the former. So instead the org dies.

169

Just looking at it briefly, it looks like that. The average age of their tithe payer is insanely high.

They bought some time but there isn’t any real way forward.

170

Yeah. I spent a lot of time, particularly when I was younger, wishing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would be more mainstream and less weird and all-encompassing, but I think it’s actually both the weirdness and the all-encompassing lifestyle that have let it survive so long and do so much better than the CoC. It’s that I have a calling and fill in regularly for music and have a ministering assignment (which, okay, I’m kind of terrible at, but most people are much better!) and my kid is asked to participate a bunch in various youth things – all of that is what builds up that community where I feel like I know at least something about a lot of people, and where I feel needed and seen at the same time. And because the theology is kinda weird, it’s not like I could decide, nah, I’d rather go to the church down the street (which is what my husband would do if he didn’t like his church). And – Joseph Smith wasn’t wrong when he said “a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has the power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation” – it’s all those little sacrifices (and big ones, for some people) that really tie people into the Church. Like your point about the kids sports teams. (I actually think that a lot of what the Church does is good psychology. I was discussing with my (inactive/non-member) sister the other day that it teaches a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy principles.)

Of course being as weird and all-encompassing as we used to be wasn’t a tenable position forever in the modern world for reasons you’ve gone into, so now our church is having to plot a middle road in between of where it used to be and a mainstream church. I think it’s actually doing a pretty good job, just in terms of how I feel about it (and also I have got to believe that they have insane levels of PR people working on exactly this), but I have no idea what the numbers are like since like you say, they don’t publish real ones.

171

Everything you say also applies to the more Orthodox flavors of Judaism and arguably to some of the more extreme Christian fundamentalist groups that aren’t simply “prosperity” scams.

The insularity, the non-mainstream beliefs, the sacrificing of otherwise normal behaviors for the group, etc., are all psychological “tricks” (even if sincere) that create strong, or even fanatical, levels of group cohesion.

172

I don’t know the actual numbers but the RLDS Church was always smaller. It also didn’t directly split off at the time when the other branches separated, but rather was reorganized several decades later from disillusioned members of other branches.

Organized religion in general is taking a hit and the growth rate of the LDS Church is declining.

There used to be a number of sites that analyzed church membership (many from a pro Mormon perspective) and then when the decline became more pronounced, the church restricted the kinds of information it had previously released. A couple of the main sites actually took down the information about previous years.

Like other religions, most of the growth now comes from Africa and other developing regions.

European countries were showing an actual decline in attendance (as measured by a net decline in wards and branches, because the Church does release these numbers).

Because of the incredible wealth of the LDS Church and the relatively low amount of money spent on charity, there doesn’t seem to be any financial threats similar like those facing the CoC.

173

Yeah, both of these.

174

Because of this thread I’m learning things about my great…grandfather. A section of this seems to apply. https://historyofmormonism.com/2012/04/11/romneys-and-other-mormons-in-arizona-history/

While this is about Mitt Romney’s great-grandfather it has:

t was at this time that Miles Park Romney, Mitt Romney’s great-grandfather was arrested for practicing polygamy. After witnessing his fellow Saints’ unfair trials, Romney fled to Mexico along with hundreds of other Mormons, trying to escape religious persecution.

“The Mormons were subject to land-grabbers, cheats and deceivers, denied the right to vote, harassed by the local law enforcement, and involved in gunfights where one bullet went through Miles’ home while his families were in it,” said Larry Romney of Chino Valley, another great-grandson of Miles Park Romney.

In addition to the charges drawn up against practicers of polygamy, many Church leaders were accused of perjury. Though many were arrested on these charges, a grand jury would not indict them. However, after a few men were convicted on polygamy charges, some federal authorities decided to revive the perjury charges and brought them against Romney, Joseph Crosby, and David King Udall in 1885. While Romney escaped to Mexico and Crosby was acquitted, Udall was convicted. He was crushed. He said he would rather have been convicted on a polygamy charge, because the charge of perjury attacked his character. He was worried that his family was languishing without his financial support.

I was told about my ancestor fleeing to Mexico. This week I learned that he was put in prison. Apparently the charge was perjury. From what I can tell the perjury may have been because they weren’t allowed to vote and other things without stating they were not polygamists. .I’m doing more research. If anyone has more information to share I am interested.

175

Yes, because Utah was still a territory, the Federal government had broad powers over the area. The Edmunds Act, one of a series of anti-polygamy laws, made polygamy a felony in US territories. It also made unlawful cohabitation a misdemeanor, since proving that actual marriages took place was difficult.

In addition, it made it illegal for polygamist or cohabitants to vote, hold public offices or serve on juries. They enforced these restrictions against people who stated a belief in the doctrine regardless of whether the person was actually practicing it or not.

In one famous case,

During the late 1880s, when the federal government was very active in prosecuting polygamists, Brown attempted to get himself seated on a federal grand jury. Brown was never himself a polygamist, but as a devoted member of the church he could try to ensure a sympathetic voice was present on the grand jury. As part of jury selection, he was asked if he believed in polygamy, and he said that he did not. This resulted in him being tried for perjury, where in his defense he said that he had a knowledge, not mere belief, that polygamy was a true principle. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison and a $1000 fine.

Trivia time: The prison at the time was the Sugar House Penitentiary, located at what in now Sugar House Park.

One of the famous cases of men convicted of polygamy was Rudger Clawson, who became an apostle and later the President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

As an apostle, he married his third wife in 1904, after not only the 1890 Manifesto but also after the Second Manifesto promising that the LDS Church really, really, really isn’t practicing polygamy.

That same year, Clawson secretly contracted a plural marriage with Pearl Udall, daughter of David King Udall and Eliza Stewart Udall.[3][4][5][6][7] Because they married after then-church president Joseph F. Smith issued a manifesto expressly prohibiting plural marriage among Latter-day Saints,[8] their relationship was a “clandestine marriage of secret meetings and long absences”, and they never shared a home. After discussing their marriage across several rendezvous held in the three-month span of October 1912 to January 1913, Clawson “released her [Pearl Udall] from the marriage”, and they ceased to live as spouses.[9]

As an apostle, he was in the senior leadership and yet took a polygamous marriage in direct defiance to a direction from the president of the church.

At this stage of Mormonism, polygamy was its defining doctrine. It had been openly taught for 40 years and the covertly taught for another 10 that they must practice this here, on Earth in order to become gods and goddesses in the next life.

Mormons had gone to war with the US government over the issue. They were supposed to be all in, and they were expected an appocolypse and the second coming Christ to come any day, and it was their job to prepare the world for His return.

It would have been like the US going communist in the 60s. Absolutely unbelievable and unacceptable.

Some people couldn’t accept the end of polygmany and broke off, becoming the fundamentalist movement that later gave the FLDS and other sects. Many of those joining were for members of the first or second tier of leadership, so they would know or hear about continued polygamy at the top.

Dissenters pointed out that the Manifestos were never presented as revelations and also claimed there were secret revelations commanding them to continue. In particular, there was one from John Taylor, the successor to Brigham Young, in which is said that God would never revoke polygamy.

And as I have heretofore said by my servant Joseph: all those who would enter into my glory must and shall obey my law [of polygamy] and have I not commanded men, that if they were Abraham’s seed and would enter into my glory, they must do the works of Abraham? I have not revoked this law, nor will I, for it is everlasting and those who will enter into my glory must obey the conditions thereof.

While the LDS Church long denied the existence of this revelation, they quietly added it to the archive of digitalized records this summer.

176

I don’t think I remember Sugar House Park. I looked it up and see that it was about 3 miles from where I lived for a short time. I missed that park.

A couple days ago I happened to run into a couple sister missionaries at the local park (I’m in the eastern part of US now). I guess they now have something like “split missions” (if I remember the term correctly). One of them has served in multiple mission locations. I guess that’s a new thing.now. It would have been nice to experience different parts of the country. Or maybe they are serving in different countries now?

177

So… The number of men and women is approximately the same. But if every good man needs to marry more than one wife, and every good woman needs to marry a husband who has at least one more wife (or will have another wife) in order to make it to the best heaven… What happens to the extra men? Because surely that means there’s are leftover men who don’t get to marry any woman at all, let alone multiple women.

178

I thought it was that a man had to have THREE wives to get to highest heaven, not one or two.

Yes, the problem of the sex ratios continues to be an issue. Back in the day there were a certain number of Mormon men (including Joseph Smith) being murdered by mobs which might have skewed Mormon membership towards being majority women but I’m not sure the male attrition rate/woman conversion rate was high enough even in those days to have three women for every Mormon man. Then to top it off some of the leadership (including Joseph Smith) married many more than three wives, further depleting the pool of available women.

So it really never made sense. Babies have always been born at about a 1:1 ratio of males to females (actually, a teeny bit more boys than girls at birth). While there are “assisted reproduction techniques” that could produce a 1:3 ratio of males to females they’ve only been available since the latter half of the 20th Century and to the best of my knowledge no one is using them for that purpose (which is probably a good thing, and the exceptions seem to lean towards producing more boys than girls, which only exacerbates the problem)

In some (not all) practicing LDS-related sects still promoting/doing polygamy one “solution” to the male:female ratios is to simply expel sufficient young men that the old farts with 20, 30, or more wives don’t have competition for the girls.

Although I think our modern society would survive just fine with the occasional plural marriage (just as it survives having some people not marry at all) having a situation where every single man felt compelled to acquire three (or more) wives is just not a practical way to structure things. The only way that could be sustainable at large would be something that eliminates 2/3 of adult men (eww), vastly increase the number of women born vs. number of men (theoretically possible now but almost certainly not practical), or leave a large group of men with no wives at all. That would in fact, be a majority of men in such a society. Having a large group of sexually frustrated presumably young men in society is a recipe for revolution or worse - hence why the Fundy LDS types expel such young men. If the mainstream Church of LDS still had a “all men must have three wives” policy and felt the need to boot 2/3 of their young men (or more) that would not be sustainable or, likely, tolerated within the larger societies in which they dwell.

Which might have been recognized by the Mormon leadership around 1890 or 1900, even if they continued with polygamy in secret.

I’ll just point out the Islam, which is probably the largest religion in the world today that allows polygamy, limits a man to four wives, and he is required to treat all equally. But it doesn’t compel polygamy. Most Muslim men only have one wife at a time - a quick google indicates it’s only 1 or 2% of Muslim men world wide with more than one wife. The ones who have multiple wives are wealthy - which is the normal state of affairs in human history. Either kings or the rich, not the poor guy laboring to feed his one wife and the kids. That level of polygamy is sustainable in a large society. Not the sort promoted by Fundy LDS and its cousins.

179

Yes, and in Muslim societies that practice polygamy, where there is typically a substantial bride price, it’s quite common for a moderately wealthy man to help his less wealthy male relatives obtain a first wife before he seeks a second. Allowing a few very wealthy/powerful men to support multiple wives is fairly common in non-Christian cultures, and is clearly sustainable. (Polyandy is sustainable, too, in some implementations.) But suggesting polygyny as a norm to which every man and every woman should aspire?

180

It’s sufficiently clueless about the realities that @Broomstick so ably explained that it sure calls any divine origin of the idea into question.

If the world was such that ~3/4ths of males died of natural causes by age ~20, then sure; their god has balanced its books. As the world really is? NOPE!