Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeWaters
My wife remarked that in a LDS FB group she is in, there was a lot of outpouring over Perry's death, but a much more muted reaction to Packer's death.
What does that say? Maybe nothing.
My thoughts are that we only get the barest glimpse into these men's lives. We don't really know them. We just see them give talks every year. And we form opinions and emotions based on that. Perry was largely affable. Packer was more serious, and even gruff at times.
If you are a Mormon intellectual (whatever that is), then you were well aware of Packer's very conservative leanings. But I'm not sure the average American Mormon was aware of that.
When I was young, I felt like there were two main veins in General Conference. There was Gordon B. Hinckley and Thomas Monson. I much preferred Monson and his stories. But now as an adult, I like Hinckley's sermons as prophet, more than Monson's as prophet. Not as a matter of belief. Style and content.
I noticed in the SLTrib article on Perry's death, Perry's son defended him by saying that the "alternative lifestyles" speech ought not define his inner character.
But yet here we are, with Packer's passing and Perry's passing, wondering if this might mark a future era where anti-gay rhetoric isn't a defining feature of Mormonism.
I'm not sure rank and file Mormon leaders are any less conservative than they. I just don't have a great grasp on that. But I do know that in general younger people are not as tied up in anti-gay politics as older people.
Time will tell.
|
I don't think even Packer was as anti-gay at the end of his life as he was a decade or two ago. Even he admitted in a documentary I saw a few years ago that his famous comment from 30 or so years ago about "feminists, intellectuals and gays" was a mistake. How far his thinking changed, who knows, but I think it did at least a little.
To me Elder Packer seems to represent the last of the Joseph Fielding Smith, Harold B. Lee, Bruce R. McConkie era of the church that had a lot of influence especially from the late 60s after David O. McKay, until the mid 80s or so. This era to me is where the church took a major turn toward the emphasis on administration, meetings, conformity (correlation), tons of manuals, missionaries memorizing discussions, everything scripted from the top down, etc. Before this era you had things like an independent sunday school that held its own meeting pretty much doing it's own thing, and the SS president was arguably almost as influential in the ward as the bishop. That idea is very foreign to church members today. IMO, Ezra Taft Benson was the last of the presidents of the church who were of that mold, athough he was less that way as a prophet than as an apostle.
Gradually much of the ultraconformist culture has been changing over the last several years. Missionaries have long stopped memorizing discussions word for word. The format for teaching the youth recently changed, or at least it was supposed to change to allow for more open discussion and addressing the youth's questions and to help them really understand our beliefs rather than just being dictated to by an authority. For the most part, I think what you would refer to as the "mullahs" of the church are of my mother in law's generation who grew up and became adults in the 60s and 70s when these changes to church culture were emphasized the most.