[SeattleUte]

I admit this post is to some extent conjecture, but I am basically just connecting dots. (No, I haven't read McKay's biography, no doubt written by an apologist, and don't intend to.) This is not intended as a mean post. I think this subject is quite facinating and serious.

Remember that anti-Mormon film Waters linked awhile back? I thought there was an element of craft to it that was in its own right admirable, the way the narrator just flatly summarized "Mormon doctrine," without any editorializing, with visual aids that were not intended as characatures but appeared as good faith depictions of what was being said, and it all came across as so wierd and primitive, and, I'm sure, alien to your average Christian. And then to top it off Waters posts he doesn't believe that stuff.

Anyone who was born in the LDS Church, raised an active Mormon, and is over 40 certainly, but probably more like 30, and says that film isn't 90+ percent accurate in describing mainstream Mormon beliefs through the past century and a half would be lying or kidding himself. It's all there; the Mormonism I grew up with and even taught. Where did the maker of the film get that material? From Mormon Doctrine, I'm sure. Why not? What more handy source is there? And Mormon Doctrine backs up virtually everything in that film.

So what's going on with the new villification of McConkie is a sort of book burning. He's the fall guy for the LDS Church's jettisoning of many of the doctrines--yes, creeds--that set it apart. They just don't sell anymore. Go to Temple Square and you won't even find Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon tales highlighted as they used to be. They're confined to a fairly small area in the basement.

I bet that if you parced through those thousand-plus "errors" Mark E. Peterson and others identified in Mormon Doctrine they don't have much in common with what many Mormons find offensive about the book today. They were probably minutiae, and to call them errors, well, who says their errors? As many here have noted, it's not part of the Church's tradition to issue encyclicals or the like clarifying doctrine.

The thousand errors are just a convenient means to trashing McConkie and his book by innuendo, when really what they are appalled at is core Mormon beliefs over the past century and a half that are now being jettisoned. Waters is correct to worry about death by assimilation, because it's happening. But what was the altrnative? Death by marginalization.