There’s nothing relative about the truth. You can dress up strange philosophies in the guise of intellectual rationalism, and still, all you get is a pack of lies. The Lord doesn’t operate in shades of wrongness. He only operates in righteousness.

Just as you pointed out, “revealed knowledge does not come in shades of grey.”

I like the response given by either Blake Ostler or Kevin Barney when asked a similar question at the 2007 Sunstone Symposium. They were on a panel discussing the subject of “Inoculating the Saints” which deals with this very issue. When do you expose the members of the church to the difficult issues in our history? Is there a risk that testimonies will be damaged as you do?

One of the two responded this way: “I have little sympathy for those who cry foul when they discover things later in life about the history of our church that they were not taught when they were growing up in the church. If you want to hide something from the Latter-day Saints, just publish it in a book.” The question is then what is the right book in which to publish this stuff?

I believe your question is not hypothetical. From what I have read, the chapters dealing with plural marriage were indeed pulled from both the JS and BY books that were published by the church for use in our priesthood and Relief Society courses of study. That means that general discussion of the subject is not one that will be dealt with in any depth in our classroom study.

And, frankly, I believe that is as it should be. I mean, there has to be some level of personal responsibility for obtaining our own knowledge of the history and doctrine that goes beyond the basics that we receive in the official classroom curriculum. For some people, this can be very disconcerting because they feel deceived when they learn these things from unofficial sources.

Hidden? I don’t think so and have never thought so. As I have written on several previous essays here on Latter-day Commentary, I learned about most of this stuff when I was in my teens. I did not learn about it in the classroom, but from reading books in my family library. Kevin Barney also describes in the panel discussion that he learned it when he was young.

I’m talking specifically about the more difficult issues of the Mountain Meadows massacre, Joseph’s plural wives and polyandry, the seer stone in a hat, and many other troublesome items. John Dehlin did not share in my experience of learning these things in his youth. He says he was first exposed to them when he was thirty and was asked to teach seminary. That can be tough.

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you did not learn about these items until later in life, and that it caused you to experience a crisis of faith because you felt that you should have been told about this stuff in the church classroom. You are not alone in this experience as I have read hundreds of stories like yours on RfM, Post-Mormon, the Foyer and Main Street Plaza.

I believe the day will come when we will have a class on this stuff at the Institute level but probably never in Seminary or in the Sunday school curriculum. It may not happen until some of our current leadership has been replaced due to the natural process of time. I think the apostle you are referring had good intentions in wanting to protect the church from the problem issues.

The Internet sure changed everything, didn’t it? There is a very vocal group of Latter-day Saints at various levels of faith who are really a minority of the LDS community but whose voices are much more strident and vociferous in this medium. The conservative, quiet, faithful members who know about this stuff either aren’t on the Internet or just don’t express themselves well here.

So to be direct, yes, you could say that this apostle caused this material to be hidden from the classrooms of the church. Is that a good thing? I don’t think it would have bothered me to learn it there. And yet, I don’t think there has ever been any conscious effort to hide this material that can be found in numerous unofficial sources especially as those sources are all over the Internet.

Yes, there is lots of good in the gospel. The feeling of community that the church offers is good. The great atmosphere that my kids were raised in, the YM/YW activities. All Good. I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

(BTW, I’m still waiting for your reply to my comment in the Black/White thread (no Michael Jackson pun intended)

Closet Doubter

Good suggestion. Let’s start with the Mountain Meadows Massacre. That was bad. There is no way that anyone can possibly defend what happened as being good. More than a hundred men, women and even many children were murdered by Mormons doing what their leaders told them to do. That was just wrong. It was also wrong that some tried to cover it up and deny it for so many years.

I am grateful that Juanita Brooks had the courage to really dig into this and for publishing her groundbreaking book on the subject so many years ago. I am also grateful that the church openly acknowledged fault for the massacre and publically apologized to the descendents of those involved, both the children and the families who carried the guilt and shame for so many years.

Here’s another one that I think is bad. Many years ago, someone in the church wrote in the intro to the Book of Mormon that the American Indians are the principal ancestors of the American Indians. It now reads that the Lamanites are among the ancestors of the American Indians. For many years we were taught that all the American Indians are descendants of the Lamanites.

This was bad and wrong. I’m glad the church has corrected this. It was a commonly mistaken belief perpetuated by many years of ignorance. Even though the Book of Mormon teaches that there were others in the land besides the Nephites and the Lamanites, there were too many in the church who thought and taught that they were the only ones here at one time. That was bad.

I could go on and discuss the peepstone in a hat not being openly taught, Joseph’s plural wives and polyandry not being in our curriculum and several dozen other issues. I have written about most of these in previous essays here on Latter-day Commentary. I personally think that it is bad that we do not teach these more aggressively, but I simply don’t believe they have been hidden.

OK, your turn. Tell me some good things about the church, our history and our doctrine.

Sorry for not responding sooner. Sometimes what I do for a living each day leaves little time to respond in a timely manner to comments on my blog. No, Shades of Grey was just my way of pointing out that sometimes we just don’t know enough of the facts to be able to pass judgment or make a determined and conclusive decision as to the rightness or wrongness of some action.

I hated learning about what happened in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I especially hated learning that some within the church leadership were directly involved and that there was a cover-up for years perpetrated by some of the highest leadership of the church. But again, for me this is still shades of grey because I do not have a perfect knowledge of all the events.

I’ve thought a lot about why President Hinckley answered some of the media questions the way he did. Do I think he could have done a better job? With hindsight, of course I do. But I do not know what he was thinking or why he hedged a little when he responded. Perhaps he was afraid that he would be misunderstood if he said too much. Some of those questions were rather deep.

Nephi chopping off the head of Laban is something that has been debated many times over the years. All kinds of logical reasons have been put forth, some right there in the scripture, that make perfect sense to me, but in the end, it is still shades of grey because I do not know all that was involved in the decision making process. We only have to decide if he really was inspired.

And the charges of Joseph Smith being involved in Polyandry are way beyond my desire to want to be his judge. He is the one who has to answer to God and explain how he could ask another man’s wife to marry him. I’ll leave that up to Joseph and God. If he says God told him he had to do so, then I’ll let him sort that out with God in the hereafter. I just don’t know what he knew.

Life isn’t always black or white unless you have all the facts or have received knowledge from another source besides the five senses. There are very few things about which we have to be absolutely certain. For me, when I was younger, I had to be absolutely certain that God knew me and that he wanted me to go on a mission and that the Book of Mormon is what Joseph said it is.

I prayed for and received that knowledge and thus my testimony has always been based on deep, personal and sacred spiritual experiences. But it is service within the church over the years that has confirmed that testimony to me over and over as I have received additional revelation and inspiration in the course of performing my duties. I still have my testimony from when I was 17.

On those sacred occasions, after many hours in prayer, any doubts that I may have had about the reality of God and the fact that he authorized, even commanded Joseph to establish this church were removed in an instant. Even 35 years later, I can recall the power of that spiritual witness. It is that witness that inoculated me and allowed me to be unaffected by later events in my life.

I agree that we should not keep our heads in the sand about the history of our church. I was trying to point out that the things we learn about imperfect people in our history should not affect our testimonies if those testimonies are built on revealed knowledge through personal spiritual experiences. Knowing both sides of our history is a good thing and can help to strengthen us.

I think of those people who have shared how shocked they were to learn some of the difficult parts of our history later in life and how much it affected their testimony and commitment to the church. I know this subject has been beaten to death on the LDS blogs out there over the past few years, but even a little bit of inoculation goes a long way to protecting fragile testimonies.

Someone once said – I believe it was Brigham Young – that if a man joined the church because of a miracle that it would take a miracle to keep him in it. Joseph F Smith said, “It is not by marvelous manifestations unto us that we shall be established in the truth, but it is by humility and faithful obedience to the commandments and laws of God.” Do we need manifestations?

And from Heber J. Grant: “There is but one path of safety to the Latter-day Saints, and that is the path of duty. It is not a testimony; it is not a marvelous manifestation, it is not knowing that the gospel is true – it is not actually knowing that the Savior is the Redeemer; but it is the keeping of the commandments of God, living the life of a Latter-day Saint.” Do we need manifestations?

In spite of what I just quoted from a couple of prophets, I am convinced that we do need a rich spiritual outpouring from God in our lives to keep us firm in the faith. It may not necessarily be a manifestation in the sense of a vision or in hearing a voice from heaven. Spiritual experiences seem to be different for each person, but I feel strongly that we need them on a regular basis.

With testimonies built on those spiritual experiences, through which knowledge enters our soul by means of the Holy Ghost, we are inoculated from the doses of reality that we find when we get serious about our study of church history and the revealed doctrines of the restoration that came through the prophet Joseph Smith as faithfully amplified by each succeeding prophet.

I continue to explore my believe that those who were not exposed to some of the more difficult issues of church history early in their lives within the church, are prone to experience serious difficulties later in life as they discover shocking things and wonder why nobody told them. If you can believe it, I have heard of missionaries who did not know we once practiced polygamy.

So I do agree with you Crusty, I just wish that it didn’t affect some people so badly when they learn this stuff. If one has gained a testimony that the Book of Mormon contains material that God intended for us to have in our day, then why should it matter if he discovered later in life that Joseph sometimes used a peepstone in a hat to bring those words forth for Oliver to write?

Studying those things IS the very way you WILL understand the way God reveals his will to imperfect people like you and me. Ignoring real history, and intentionally blinding yourself to reality, isn’t going to bring you closer to understanding God. Conversely, studying real history, even when it’s uncomfortable, or it doesn’t coincide with our current understanding, is how we’re going to understand how God REALLY works with REAL people in REAL life. Knowing that J.S. screwed up A LOT, and God continued to work with him as the leader of the church, will cause you to have to reconsider what you previously thought about God and man, and it will cause you come closer to understanding reality.

Studying those things will help you understand that just because some of the things J.S. did or said were true, doesn’t mean everything he did or said was true. Understanding that, and accepting it, will help you understand that current prophets, even though they are called of God, don’t necessarily always do or say the right thing. The thing is…that’s OK…the church is still good, and there are still a lot of true aspects of the church. A person just needs to scrutinize each and every thing and decide for himself if each thing he is told is true.

To me, a comprehensive, REAL understanding of history leads to a much healthier and realistic understanding of God.

I agree that nobody has all the answers. The kind of knowledge that I have been trying to address in the last few essays shared on Latter-day Commentary is the spiritual kind – the kind that can only be received through revelation. I’m not talking about knowledge of church history or of any kind of speculative doctrine, no matter what authoritative source is considered.

I suppose we need to define mysteries. What is mysterious to many Christians outside the LDS faith, we find common and easily understandable, having been exposed to it all our lives. An example is the idea of a God who looks like us or rather, in whose image we are created. This is apparently a foreign concept to so many Christians, yet seems so basic and fundamental to me.

When I read of LDS people expressing the same confusion about the nature of God, I am simply dumbfounded. How can a believing LDS not know that God is our Heavenly Father with body, parts and passions and who loves us with all the feelings of a tender parent? And yet, there are so many who share that they do not possess even this most basic understanding of our doctrine.

Where did we go wrong? How can you grow up in the church and not know this? You see, there I go using the word “know” as if it were the kind of knowledge obtained in the natural course of human experience. I have to be careful. I am not referring to knowledge obtained through the five senses but through the revelations of the Holy Ghost directly to our spirits.

I continue to think that the difficulties I see with those who are members in name only, or those who consider themselves New Order Mormons, or whatever they want to call themselves, is that they are not familiar with revelation and how it works. I may be completely wrong here but it seems that every objection can be resolved by a discussion of how one gains personal revelation.

Our church leaders do encourage us to seek out and understand the mysteries, but again, we need to be sure that we agree on the definition of mysteries. To me, mysteries are not the historical facts of the founding of our church, not the obvious frailties of men, even prophets, when they make less than perfect expressions in speaking to the news media about our faith and religion.

My point in bringing up shades of grey was to illustrate that in some things there is so much room for interpretation because we do not know all the facts and do not have enough detail. The historical record of our church is an area where many people feel very strongly that what is discovered there can and will affect how they feel about the church today. I can understand that.

However, no matter what I have discovered about Joseph Smith over the years, that I did not know when I was younger, including Polyandry, peepstones, or the full story of what happened at the assassination, I have yet to find anything that has caused me to reconsider the validity of the revealed knowledge I have received when I prayed about the truth of the Book of Mormon.

That revealed knowledge is sacred to me and is not something that I can share with anyone else. I have tried to describe in several essays here, and I keep assuming that most LDS people have had the same or a similar experience with revelation. But apparently, it just isn’t so. That just floors me. I thought we taught all our youth the importance of receiving personal revelation.

Your grandmother sounds like a real saint to me. I love to read about people who aren’t at all troubled by the historical record and don’t need a deep understanding of the doctrines. Half my ward is the same way. There’s nothing wrong with that. They are faithful. They love one another and they serve each other. They are blessed and they are happy. It is a wonderful thing.

So to summarize, when I bring up the idea of grey areas, I don’t really mean doctrine or history, I mean the focus on what’s important. Of everything I have ever learned in this church the thing I value the most is the understanding I have gained or how personal revelation works in our lives. I have gained this mainly through direct experience as part of my callings in church leadership.

My own personal spiritual life has been so enhanced and enriched because of this knowledge of how God speaks to us to direct his church. I have experienced revelation over and over in the course of my duties in the many Bishoprics in which I have served. Because of that experience, I find it easier to obtain personal revelation in my own pursuits of sacred spiritual knowledge.

Focusing on the problems in our history and especially on the imperfections of Joseph Smith keeps us from understanding the way that God reveals his will to imperfect people like you and me. I just don’t see how knowing about polyandry or the MMM, or President Hinckley’s less than perfect interview with Larry King have anything to do with my personal testimony.

Sorry for going off and responding to a lot more than what you wrote. I very much appreciate your visit and your contribution to the dialog. I love what you are doing over on your blog and have enjoyed the faithful posts that I read there. I have added you to the list of blogs I follow and encourage others to visit you to add their comments to your essays.