Boyd K. Packer's death

[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.

[BlueK]

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.

[MikeWaters]

That's a good point. They dumbed it down, made it uniform. Lowest common denominator.

But that method has led to mediocre results.

[BlueK]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

That's a good point. They dumbed it down, made it uniform. Lowest common denominator.

But that method has led to mediocre results.

I think they're on to that and are changing it. But changing our church is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier in a very small lake. Our members get very attached to doing things a certain way who often way too easily attach the current way we do things to some eternal order that can never change. A silly example would be a mission comp I had who at first was uncomfortable with the wards in Holland often or usually using other types of bread than the usual wonder bread white stuff he always remembered in church. Somehow he had personally attached some kind of meaning to something he saw just because it was always the same, even without that ever having been taught directly and despite what the D&C says about it not mattering what is used as long as it's done with the proper intent.

As a ward missionary a few years ago one of my responsibilities was to teach the investigators/newer members/Gospel Principles class. I figured out pretty quickly that I'm not really very fond of the Gospel Principles book. I was ok with teaching the topics and I was ok with the fact that each lesson listed a lot of scriptures related to it. But I still think the lesson text that supposedly tries to tie it together is terrible. It's written to be so simplistic to the point that it's actually confusing, IMO. Within the same lesson it jumps around endlessly and has no logical flow. To me that doesn't tend to lead to teaching real understanding of the topic very easily. Go pull out your copy and take a look and I think you'll see what I mean.

Right or wrong, I couldn't bring myself to ever read or refer to the lesson text in class. So what I did was take all the scriptures it listed, which usually was pretty substantial, and teach purely out of those. All I would do is re-order them in a way that made logical sense and flow, and we'd just go through them as far as we had time for and talk about what they said. That seemed to work well, and the members and non-members in the class seemed to like it. Over time I seemed to have more and more what I would consider "established" church members attending the class and actively participating every week instead of the main gospel doctrine class.

I don't really have a problem with emphasizing the basic elements of the gospel. They're important and are the basic principles for a reason. But I'm just not a fan of teaching those things really superficially and calling it good. I see little to no value in that. It reminds me of the numerous JW's I met in abundance on my mission (The Netherlands has a way higher than the population proportion of JW's for whatever reason) By the end of my mission it seemed like I knew more about their beliefs than many of them did, as most of them were extremely superficial and always repeated back to you the exact same things. It was like turning on a tape recording no matter what topic it was. After a few months I had it all memorized. As LDS we aren't that bad, but the heyday of the correlation era did push us in that direction. It's clear to me that they're trying to get us away from that now. But it will take more time. Maybe the pace starts to accelerate a little now though.