Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Escaping the Destructionists

 

I grew up in a Republican family, although my parents were never very political. In their later years, though, they, along with millions of others in their generation, got caught up by the Fox News nostalgia dragnet. Fox’s strategy was to appeal to people who felt that the world was changing too fast and who yearned for the simpler society they knew twenty or thirty years before. I can still remember Mom complaining to me one day about “all of Obama’s czars.” I had no idea what she was talking about, so I assumed her worry was due to some imaginary crisis that Fox News created to scare its listeners and keep them coming back for more. “Mom,” I said, “you’ve got to stop watching Fox News.” But she didn’t.

As for me, I was a registered Republican and usually voted that way until partway through George W. Bush’s first term. The last straw for me was all the lies the GOP was telling about the effects of tax cuts. I can do simple arithmetic, and I knew that tax cuts never pay for themselves. I figured that if they would lie about tax cuts, they would lie about lots of other things too. As I recall, I had turned in my GOP membership card before George and Dick lied us into a long and expensive war in Iraq.

For many years, I was an unaffiliated voter. But several years ago, BYU Studies published an article by political science professor and BYU’s Maeser scholar that year, David Magleby. He pointed out that based on surveys he and his students had conducted, there were really very few truly independent voters in America. Most leaned strongly one way or the other. He suggested that if you were in that boat, you probably ought to join the party you leaned toward and work to improve it. His argument made sense to me, so I followed his advice. I was voting almost exclusively Democrat by then because the Democrats, for the most part, cared about the issues I found most concerning. The Republican Party, by contrast, seemed to be going further and further off the deep end. It has been a long path that has led the GOP from Ronald Reagan (who, by the way, also lied about tax cuts) to Donald Trump (who lies about everything), and I have watched it unfold.

So has Dana Milbank, political columnist for the Washington Post. But he kept notes. And he has documented the long and crazy decline of the GOP in a book I recently finished. It is titled The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party. If you are interested in how the GOP became what it is today, I highly recommend this book. Milbank doesn’t offer a whole lot of commentary. He mostly recounts the history of the GOP’s demise, complete with lots of quotes by the villains and lots of facts that document the decline and fall of this once-proud political party.

It all started, Milbank claims, with New Gingrich. But there were lots of other protagonists in this tragedy. It is a sad tale, and I recall pretty much all of it from watching it happen, but the book does an admirable service in chronicling the whole sordid affair. Toward the end of the book, Milbank offers a brief summary of the ground he has covered (and this is one place where he does do a little editorializing). Here’s a piece of what he said:

“[In November 2016,] some three hundred white supremacists and neo-Nazis gathered in Washington at the invitation of Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute to celebrate Trump’s victory. At the gathering, in the Ronald Reagan Building a few blocs from the White House, attendees shouted ‘Heil’ and “Lügenpresse,’ a Nazi term that means ‘lying press.’ Some of the few hundred attendees applauded mention of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer. Reality TV personality Tila Tequila tweeted an image of herself and others giving a Nazi salute and the misspelled words ‘Seig heil.’

“They clashed with counterdemonstrators in downtown Washington and again when they held a private dinner at a family restaurant, Maggiano’s, in residential Northwest Washington. . . . At Maggiano’s, Spencer proposed a jocular toast: ‘Let’s party like it’s 1933.’ The white supremacists applauded.

“There was truth in the jest. The Reichstag burned in 1933, bringing about the end of Weimar Germany and the ascent of Hitler. The blundering Trump was no Hitler, but he had the autocrat’s disdain for the rule of law, the autocrat’s instinct to blame minorities for the nation’s ills, and the autocrat’s embrace of violence as a political tool. And now this distinctly antidemocratic figure was the president-elect, enjoying the near unanimous support and validation of Republican officeholders.

“This moment had been a long time coming. Two decades earlier, John McCain had admonished the party, and the country: ‘Patriotism is another way of saying service to a cause greater than self-interest.’ But over and over again, Republican leaders chose self-interest over country. They abandoned their principles of limited government, of being international champions of freedom. They played on racial fears, they demonized opponents as un-American, they knowingly championed egregious falsehoods, and they sabotaged the smooth functioning of government—all because it suited their political self-interest. Gingrich impugned his opponents’ loyalty to country to gain power, Bush and Rove squandered the unity of 9/11 to expand power, Palin and the Tea Party crowd spread lies and racism and winked at violence to cut down their opponents. McConnell sabotaged the Senate and discredited the Supreme Court because it maximized his power.

“After so many years of choosing power over principle, self-interest of country, Republican leaders had lost their way. They stood for nothing but gaining and holding power. Then, in 2015, along came a man who showed them a way to gain and hold power. They swallowed what was left of their integrity, and they followed him” (pp. 276–77).

All of this and more is carefully documented (complete with source notes) in the pages that precede and follow this summary, but the whole sordid tale was familiar. This was not done in a corner or in darkness. This tragedy was performed out in the open, where everyone could see. I wasn’t surprised by anything I read in this book. But I was disgusted time and again.

No, the Democratic Party is not perfect. But it has not changed in the way the GOP has over the past 25 years. This is why so many current and former Republicans endorsed and voted for Kamala Harris. They disagreed with her on many policies, but they recognized that she and her party stood for the Constitution and for country above party and for the principles and standards of governing that their own party had long forsaken.

Do I ever regret leaving the Destructionist Party? Not for one second, especially as I have watched the unashamed and largely unchecked corruption of the Utah Republican apparatus. I just regret that I didn’t leave earlier.

Friday, December 6, 2024

Book of Mormon Questions (Introduction 4)

Observations and Ground Rules

The past two posts were intended to spell out as clearly as I can where I stand in regard to the central question of Mormonismnamely, is it from God? And my answer is a qualified maybe. I can’t deny the experience I had as a young missionary in Frau Rüster’s living room. It was overwhelming. But what did it mean? I have spent a good portion of the past 49 years exploring that question, both professionally and personally. Mormonism is a perplexing religion. The pieces don’t fit together very well, but some of those pieces are extraordinarily compelling.

Let me quote the “Nachwort” (Afterword) of my mission memoir, where I address what to me was a surprising insight that came some 40 years after I had returned home. It concerns the rather stunning spiritual experiences that four of my investigators had, two of which happened while I was present. One of the experiences was shared by a married couple, so it was three experiences in total, not four.

“For his part, Terry didn’t think deeply about the meaning of his mission experiences while he was so close to them—he was too busy experiencing them—but I have found it noteworthy that none of the rather remarkable spiritual manifestations he had been a part of included a directive from the Lord telling the person to be baptized into the LDS Church. This seems to me something more than an odd coincidence. Frau Richter had been privy to a spectacular spiritual outpouring, but the specific message to her that day—according to her own interpretation—was simply to repent, not to get baptized, although she reached that decision on her own afterward, for a short time. The voice that spoke to Frau Tiedemann in the silent watches of the night told her that Chatwin [my senior companion] was ‘right,’ whatever that meant, and to watch over her family—a wonderfully cryptic message—but it didn’t tell her to watch over them by being baptized a Mormon, although she too determined that was what she needed to do, at least until her tobacco-peddling husband put his foot down. The Ortmanns had been given a very specifically tailored and penetrating message suited to their needs. They were told to plant some seeds and look for a spiritual harvest in their lives, but not specifically to join the LDS Church. Oddly, Bruder Terry never noticed this pattern. He just assumed all of these spiritual manifestations were intended to convince people that the church established by Joseph Smith was ‘true,’ whatever that is supposed to mean. True can have all sorts of meanings. Of course, as a missionary, Bruder Terry was always focused on trying to nudge people into the water—that was the specific purpose of all those well-crafted theological expositions he had memorized—but the Spirit didn’t seem to be on quite the same page. It gave enigmatic or difficult-to-decipher missives, and most days it gave nothing at all. Many times Terry tried to conjure up spiritual experiences, but it never worked. The Spirit seemed perfectly content to just drop in unannounced and unexpected, like a summer breeze. On the final day of his mission, Terry wouldn’t have known quite how to respond to these observations. Likely he would have blamed himself for his inability to produce spiritual experiences and the resulting meager harvest of souls. But perhaps there is something more to mortality, in God’s mind, than joining a very tiny minority of his children in undergoing the ordinances and embracing the dogma and culture of Mormonism. There must be; otherwise, why would God send billions of his children to earth to live in countries or centuries where they would have no opportunity to hear about Joseph Smith and his ‘restoration’ of ancient Christianity (with a boatload of Old Testament stuff, Christian tradition, and nineteenth-century innovations tossed in for good measure)? Would it be that hard for him to send an angel or two to a handful of people in every country on earth to prime the pump? I have no answer for this, so I must assume he is just fine if most of his children live and die without ever hearing the particular gospel preached by the Mormons. If so, why?

“A sobering corollary to these observations is that the people Bruder Terry had a hand in converting [thirteen individuals] probably didn’t make much of a difference in growing the Church in Germany. It’s possible that Hans-Werner [the Rendsburg branch president’s brother-in-law] married and had children and perhaps by now has grandchildren who are adding to a gradual increase (or stemming the slow decrease) in membership in Germany. I have no idea. It’s also possible that Elsa Sievers’s [a woman who joined the Church years after I returned home] children have stayed in the Church, married, and had children of their own and that they too are mostly active. [Elsa herself left the Church.] Again, I don’t know this. All the others, though, left barely a trace of their brief membership. It’s as if they were never Mormons, other than to temporarily pad the inflated statistics the Church publishes (inflated because so many of the people the Church claims as members don’t themselves claim to be Mormons anymore). This is probably true for the majority of people who join the LDS Church worldwide. Most don’t last.”

And then there is the Book of Mormon. Another thing I didn’t notice as a missionary and that I didn’t notice 40 years later when I wrote the mission memoir was that the three spiritual experiences mentioned above had nothing to do with the Book of Mormon. Frau Rüster’s manifestation came in the context of the First Vision. Frau Tiedemann (not her real name) was awakened in the night by a voice that told her five times that my companion was right (about what exactly?) and that she should watch over her family. The Ortmanns (also a fictitious name) received a direct message where the Spirit took control of my mouth and taught them things I didn’t even understand. None of it mentioned the Book of Mormon. And so it went with all the others I taught. In my whole mission, I believe we had only two investigators who actually read the book cover to cover. One was searching for the true religion and was eventually baptized, although he and his wife left the Church in their declining years. The other was good old Mr. Frink (his real name), a retired American veteran who was married to a German woman. He sat around all day watching German TV while she worked. He could understand everything but couldn’t speak a word of German. He read the Book of Mormon out of boredom. When we asked him what he liked in the book, he said it was the part about Moses getting water out of a rock. We thought this just proved he hadn’t really read it, until we later discovered that it’s actually in the book (1 Ne. 17:29). But Mr. Frink wasn’t a religious man. He was just bored. Everyone else was either too busy or not interested enough to read it. Granted, it’s not an easy read.

Which brings up the question of why God would choose such an odd and difficult book as the foundation for his true church on earth in these latter days. And why does the theology in the Book of Mormon resemble Christian thought of the early 1800s (or the 1600s, if you believe Royal Skousen) rather than the “restored gospel” we associate with Latter-day Saintism today? I’ll have plenty to say about this in future posts, but I find it odd that Joseph Smith never really taught from the Book of Mormon. He reprinted it twice before he was killed (1837 and 1840), with numerous edits (none of them substantive), but he seemed completely uninterested in talking about Nephi or Alma or Mormon or their experiences. When he taught, it was mostly from the Bible or from his own revelations or his speculations.

The Book of Mormon seemed to serve a different purpose for Joseph. It was not the content of the book that seemed to matter but the fact that it existed at all and was evidence of his prophetic calling. And, oddly, after Moroni (or Nephi, as some early accounts have it) visited Joseph to give him the plates and instruct him in his mission, no other Book of Mormon character is reported to have visited the Prophet. If the Book of Mormon was so central to the Restoration, you’d think that more of its prophets would have come to visit the “translator” of their record. But no, all his other visitors were biblical figures. Go figure.

Still, the Book of Mormon has become the unmistakable centerpiece of Mormonism. Even though it is completely silent on such essential doctrines as the three degrees of glory, priesthood, vicarious work for the dead, and eternal marriage, we still claim that it contains the “fulness of the gospel.” And many a testimony is based on reading the book and praying about it. So we need to deal with the Book of Mormon. It is not going away. But it is a perplexing book. And that is why I am exploring various questions the text has raised in my mind. Before I start, though, let me lay down some ground rules for this exploration.

First, I insist on taking the text at face value. I will assume that means what it says. No reading stuff into the text that isn’t there, like the notion that the Nephites and Lamanites assimilated tribes of Native Americans who were already here, so that we can account for the large population numbers presented in the text. Also, the narrow neck of land is a narrow passage between two seas, not a narrow passage between a sea and, well, more land. And the Lamanites were cursed with a dark skin. Skin. Not some metaphorical darkness. The text is very clear about this.

Second, no convoluted explaining away of details in the text that are inconvenient. If you have to do mental gymnastics to try to make sense of something in the text, you’re likely out of bounds.

Third, modern science is relevant, including what it tells us about the Flood (which is accepted by the Book of Mormon writers) and horses (the two are inconveniently related).

Fourth, what Joseph Smith said about the book and its coming forth is fair game, even if it conflicts with what is actually in the book.

Finally, common sense should prevail in our reading.

Let me add here that Royal Skousen presents a lot of evidence that Joseph Smith was not the translator of the Book of Mormon. Eye-witness accounts of the dictation and plenty of textual evidence indicate that Joseph was looking in his hat at either the interpreters or his seer stone and reading aloud what he saw. Royal and Stand Carmack also present a fair amount of evidence that the text of the Book of Mormon didn’t resemble Joseph’s vernacular or the dialect of early 1800s Upstate New York or New England. It has way too much Early Modern English in it, but Royal admits that it is not an Early Modern English text. I’ll discuss this in detail later, but I have to accept the conclusion that Joseph Smith did not understand the characters on the plates and did not translate them, in the traditional sense, into English.

Which brings up the obvious question, if Joseph did not translate the text (assuming there was indeed an ancient record), then who did? Well, it wasn’t God. Not unless he intentionally made lots of errors, grammatical and otherwise. So, if the book is a translation, who did it, and what sort of translation is it? Royal is convinced, based on 35 years of careful attention to the text, that “the Book of Mormon is a creative and cultural translation of what was on the plates, not a literal one. Based on the linguistic evidence, the translation must have involved serious intervention from the English-language translator, who was not Joseph Smith.1

Royal refuses to hazard a guess at who might have translated the book, but I’m not so circumspect. I took a stab at it once in a book review, somewhat tongue in cheek, and Royal took me to task (without mentioning my name) in one of his critical text volumes. I asked the question, Who understood both the ancient Nephite language and English? Who could have worked on this project during the early modern period where much of the grammar, syntax, and semantics in the book finds a home? Who liked to quote text from the King James Bible, but with intentional alterations? Whose English would have been slightly off, if take my meaning, like a nonnative speaker? Well, only one name comes to my mind: Moroni, a resurrected being who could apparently appear as a normal mortal if he wanted to. Like I said, tongue in cheek, mostly.

Now, I am aware of a lot of the research that has been done by Book of Mormon apologists. Some of it is very compelling. There are things in the Book of Mormon that defy the critics. I’m fine with that, even if the apologists have a different agenda than I have. But that is only half the story. I’m not going to rehash all the BoM apologetics that have already been published elsewhere. I’m going to look at the other half of the story, the things that don’t seem to fit or that seem too difficult to reconcile. I will also not follow any sensible order—chronological, thematic, or otherwise. I’m going to explore my questions as they come to mind. At the end, whenever that may be, perhaps I’ll have arrived at some sort of conclusion about the Book of Mormon, but I sort of doubt it. It is, after all, a rather big puzzle. But we’ll see.

__________________

1. Royal Skousen, ed., The King James Quotations in the Book of Mormon, part 5, volume 3, The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, The Critical Text of the Book of Mormon (Provo, Utah: The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and Brigham Young University Studies, 2019), 6.


Monday, December 2, 2024

Book of Mormon Questions (Introduction 3)

 

Chapter 5

Frau Richter and the Cure for Cognitive Dissonance?

Published in Bruder: The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary (Salt Lake City: By Common Consent Press, 2018). This chapter is adapted from the essay I included in the last post, which was published 11 years earlier in Dialogue. I chose to use third person throughout this mission memoir so that I could comment on the experiences of Bruder Terry from my perspective 40 years later. That perspective is reflected in the changes I made to the account of my experience with Frau Rüster (here changed to Richter; all other names except mine have also been changed). BCC Press decided to eliminate the three footnotes that I included in the Dialogue essay. See the previous post for these references.

 

Terry’s first two weeks of “real” missionary work had been nothing if not discouraging. They had tracted for about six hours a day that first week. “Tract” is a purely Mormon verb, descended from earlier times when church elders would distribute “tracts,” pamphlets explaining various aspects of the faith. Missionaries still did this in 1975, especially in Germany, where other methods of finding people to teach were scarce and ineffective. Not that tracting was very effective either. Had it been more successful, they would have spent less time going door to door and more time teaching people.

Terry had heard stories about other missions, particularly those in Latin America, where missionaries taught and baptized so many people they hardly had time to tract. But he was not in Mexico or Brazil. He was in Germany, among people who were still close enough to the Third Reich to be suspicious of anyone offering a Utopian vision of Zion on earth or a thousand-year era of peace. They were also aloof, reasonably content with their materialistic lives, and certainly not searching for something new. Consequently, tracting could be a brutal experience. For Terry, the repeated rejections and slammed doors were softened only by the fact that he couldn’t understand most of what the people were saying to him. After a while, though, he learned several phrases very well.

When Bruder Terry arrived in Germany, the missionaries were using a door approach that went something like this. They would push the button next to the door, which was generally connected to a buzzer and not a bell. Sometimes no one would answer. If someone did answer the door, one of the two elders would say, “We’re representatives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often called Mormons. We have an important message we’d like to share with you.” Generally, before he could even get this much out, the person who answered the door would blurt out some excuse—“I’m not interested,” “I don’t have time,” “I already belong to a church”—and start closing the door. This happened a good 90 percent of the time. After a few hours of this, Terry understood all these excuses very well. It was when the person said something other than these canned excuses that Terry had trouble. When it was his turn and this happened, a blank look would cloud his eyes and he would turn to his companion. Hollington would then take over.

Every once in a blue moon, someone would actually invite them in for a Discussion. And sometimes they would make an appointment with a housewife for later in the week, usually on an evening when her husband would be home. Generally, about half of these appointments fell through. Hollington and Terry would show up punctually, push the buzzer, and wait on the doorstep outside a darkened house or apartment. These were discouraging experiences for Terry. For two reasons. First, because he enjoyed Discussions. Hollington was personable, knowledgeable, and a decent teacher, and Terry was pretty good at reciting his memorized lines. But that wasn’t really what made these experiences enjoyable. Most Germans were excellent hosts. They almost always fed their visitors crackers or chips and juice, or sometimes even a light supper. And Terry was always hungry. Hollington’s cooking repertoire was repetitious and not all that appetizing. They had mackerel sandwiches three times a week. They also ate Bockwurst (a cheap German imitation of the hotdog) three days a week. And on Sunday, Hollington boiled up some sort of meat-and-gravy-in-a-bag concoction and served it over noodles. This was the culinary high point of Terry’s week. Missionaries, like the German people, ate their main meal at midday. They would ride back to the apartment for lunch, then work the rest of the day until 9:30, ideally. But here I stray. The second reason no-shows discouraged Bruder Terry was that they usually translated directly into more tracting. Once in a while, when an appointment fell through, they would drop in unannounced on a member family, but they could do that only so many times before they wore out their welcome. And Hollington saved these visits almost exclusively for when the last appointment of the day was a no-show.

Most of the missionaries’ time was consumed with tracting, punctuated with spells of street contacting in the Stadtmitte. But one day was a break from the routine. They had an Austausch, which, Hollington explained, meant “switch out.” On this particular Austausch, the district leader, Bruder McCowen came to Rendsburg to work with Terry, while Hollington took the train to Flensburg to work with Hirsch. Because Hollington didn’t trust McCowen with his investigators, he made sure he didn’t schedule any appointments. So Terry and McCowen tracted and did a little street contacting for most of the day. McCowen was rather unorthodox, and it turned into one of the more unusual days of Terry’s mission. Needless to say, he was glad to have Hollington back the next morning, even if it meant long hours of tracting and street contacting, interrupted with tasteless lunches and an occasional Discussion. So passed the first month and a half of Terry’s sojourn in das Vaterland.

6

When Bruder Hollington and Bruder Terry leaned their bikes against the fence at Hermann-Löns-Straße 9 on the afternoon of October 2 and walked to the door, Terry had no idea that what was about to transpire would shape and anchor his soul for the rest of his mission and anchor my soul for the next few decades. When they left the house and descended the steps less than an hour later, Terry had no context for gauging the magnitude of the experience they had just shared. Now, four decades later, I’m still acquiring that context. And it is something of a moving target from this distance.

Six slow weeks had passed since Terry had arrived in Germany, and they had been some of the most difficult weeks of his life. He didn’t quite feel like an infant anymore, but even though he could understand a lot more of what was said, he still couldn’t express himself much at all, and the Work was discouraging. None of their investigators were progressing, except perhaps Frau Richter, but her progress came in fits and starts and was almost always canceled out immediately by her doubts. Herr Richter wasn’t on the same teeter-totter. He tolerated their visits and was cordial, but his search for religious truth was more hypothetical than it was either pragmatic or urgent. Frau Richter, on the other hand, wanted to know. Oh how she wanted to know. She was reading the Book of Mormon and praying about it. And her Reformed Lutheran pastor, Herr Kemnor, was so intrigued by her new quest that he decided to lend a hand. He generously transformed his weekly Bible study hour into anti-Mormon hour. These new lessons probably required far more preparation than his conventional treks through the New Testament. Such sacrifice on his part. Frau Richter, of course, was thoroughly confused. On one side she was hearing the missionary lessons and reading the Book of Mormon; on the other she was being exposed to every bit of dirt, credible or concocted, that good Pastor Kemnor could unearth.

Forty years have passed since Bruder Terry last saw Frau Richter, but hardly a week goes by that I don’t think about her—partly because the Richter family photo Bruder Terry took all those years ago has been digitized and now cycles through my screensaver at work every so often. When it pops up, I am reminded that Mormonism is a complex religion. Because of its truth claims, it also has many detractors, and its history offers additional fodder for its critics. On top of this, the LDS Church’s bureaucratic, hierarchical, corporate-style organizational structure is an unlikely receptacle for a religion that claims to be the latter-day re-establishment of Christ’s New Testament church. For almost a decade now I have worked as an editor in the field of Mormon studies, so I read a great deal and am fully aware of the controversies and sticking points for Mormons and non-Mormons alike. I have learned that, spiritually speaking, several of these difficult issues have blown some Mormons adrift and have blown others apart. I sense that the official Church is struggling more than a bit in this age of the Internet, when it can no longer control its own narrative. I have also learned that many intellectuals and individualists and iconoclasts feel enormous frustration and possess microscopic patience with the perceived inflexibility and irrationality of Church bureaucracy. I generally shake my head and roll my eyes at this last group. They have obviously never worked at Church Magazines, as I have. What do they know?

I have not been naïve for many years now, but all the reading I have done has opened my mind to the struggles of individuals as they come to see inconsistencies in the Church, its history, its founder, its scriptures, its theology, and its bureaucracy—as they shed their innocence and replace it with something that is far less comfortable for them and far less comforting. Most of the distress for thoughtful Mormons seems to revolve around Joseph Smith in one way or another. Rightly so. Historian Richard Bushman stuck it in the title of his famous biographical treatment of the Prophet where no one could ignore it, but Joseph really was a rough stone. His life was surrounded by controversy because he was controversial—audacious and imperfect and unconventional and incomparable. And neither his fellow Saints nor his enemies could go to the Church’s Legacy Theater inside the Joseph Smith Memorial Building in Salt Lake City to see his life portrayed cinematically with careful editing and majestic overtones. No, they saw him up close and personal, both the grandeur and the blemishes. Still, he himself had it so very right when he said to his followers shortly before his murder, “You don’t know me.” They didn’t, and we certainly don’t. Many of those early Saints were so bothered by what they did know that they left Joseph’s flock. Some turned against him. Others remained loyal to both his person and his vision. He elicits pretty much the same array of reactions today.

Some of the questions that perplex both Mormons and investigators of Mormonism concern the intersection of knowledge and belief. Is it really possible to know anything for certain in the field of religion? I’ve read essays by faithful intellectuals, rational arguments they have constructed to support their belief in the LDS Church and their dedication to its teachings. Others try to deflect the question. “The goal of religious development,” a social scientist once asserted, “might not be the serenity of certainty, an absolute acceptance on faith, but the capacity to sustain the tension of not knowing.” In other words, we should not seek to know with certainty but should embrace our uncertainty. A scientist reasoned, “It’s not too hard for me to translate ‘I know the Church is true’ to ‘I know I have had a burning in my bosom which confirms the goodness of the Church and the truth of the principles which it teaches.’” His argument, apparently, is that this warm feeling inside doesn’t really constitute knowledge. It’s just a warm feeling. Bruder Terry probably would have agreed with him. He didn’t want a warm feeling. He wanted to know. But the bigger question is, what can one know?

Frau Richter was certainly asking this question. And she was an enigma. She wanted so badly to learn the truth. She would read and pray and ponder and struggle. Never had Terry seen such desire. Even his own desires for that spiritual witness he lacked did not measure up to Frau Richter’s. Perhaps in a dark corner of his mind lurked a sincere doubt that God loved him enough to give him a witness. He had never doubted God’s love in general, only God’s love for him in particular. He never felt he was worthy of God’s love. But he had no doubt that God loved Frau Richter. How could he not love her? She fought and struggled so. And yet where Bruder Terry was, by nature, a believer in the simple (perhaps even superficial) doctrines of the Restoration, Frau Richter was a doubter. Persistent seeds of doubt sprang to life in her heart like weeds in a garden, and Pastor Kemnor watered and fertilized them. Repeatedly, she let them strangle her growing faith. She needed topsoil, for the earth of her spirit was baked and hard and coated with the alkaline of both misinformation and distasteful truth. Bruder Terry was yet another story. His heart had always been free of weeds, a believing heart, perhaps because he had never bothered to plant anything. Oh, he had soil enough. He lacked only seed. Perhaps the Supreme Planter knew the season was not yet ripe.

As mid-September wore on, Bruder Terry was gradually adjusting to his new environment. The long hours tracting, the periodic visits with members of the little branch, the frequent disappointments when some interested Frau would tell them her husband didn’t want them to come by anymore, the repeated first Discussions that never spilled over into second Discussions, the golden days and fragrant evenings, the trains rattling above and behind the Wohnung [apartment] in the dead of night—all these things became the signs and symbols of routine, and he drew his bearings and charted his days by their incessant flow. These formed a constant, dependable background that helped define the moving, shifting, never-repeating procession of lives and experiences that marched through his mission.

Unfortunately, Mandy [my girlfriend back home] was not a part of that background. She was one of the nonconstants of his existence, and this caused him grief. Her letters were sparse and superficial, and he began to wonder if her letters were but a reflection of her life. This suspicion was a crucible to him, because he somehow sensed the futility of placing his dreams where no future existed. And dreams—as all dreamers know—are property of the future. They have no being in the present.

Fortunately for Bruder Terry, the present was consumed by concern for the Richters. All thoughts, all prayers, all meaning seemed to revolve around this little family. Hollington and Olsen had found them and taught them for some time. They had made progress, albeit slowly, and they felt some pressure, particularly Herr Richter, who was beginning to rebel against the decision that stood before him and his wife. In mid-September, to relieve that pressure, Hollington and Terry tried a new approach. They took a game instead of their scriptures, and instead of conducting a religious discussion, they spent an hour playing together, the elders, Herr and Frau Richter, and their twin daughters. This seemed to help tremendously. The little family discovered that the two young men in serious-looking suits and ties could be fun-loving, normal human beings, something they had never supposed.

This seemed to appease Herr Richter, who had wanted a reprieve from the intense religious discussions, but for Frau Richter it was merely a momentary diversion from her burning desire to know the truth. So, partly to quench her thirst and partly to give Herr Richter some distance, Hollington and Terry began dropping in frequently in the daytime to answer her questions and respond to her doubts.

September gradually made way for October—the days were still sunny and bright and the nights cool and touched with a hint of autumn—and Frau Richter seemed to be making no progress. On October 1, the two elders traveled to Kiel on the Baltic Sea for a zone conference, a gathering of all the missionaries in Schleswig-Holstein at a chapel near the harbor. President Scharneman was there, as well as his two assistants and the zone leaders. These five instructed the missionaries in doctrine and new methods for achieving that ever-elusive success in the Work. During the classes, the president called missionaries out for interviews. When Bruder Terry’s turn came, he spent maybe five minutes with the president, didn’t really get to know him at all, and then it was the next elder’s turn. Just making sure there were no serious problems, Terry assumed. A nice byproduct of the conference was that he got to see some of the elders who had arrived with him in August and a friend or two from Weber High. It was a good day.

The next day at noon, Hollington and Terry made their way from their tracting area in Büdelsdorf to the house where the Beckers lived. They had been invited over by this sweet missionary couple for lunch. It was a fine meal and a nice visit, and when they finished they decided they would drop in to see Frau Richter, who lived only a few streets east of Beckers. Of course Frau Richter had a new question.

Where Pastor Kemnor got his anti-Mormon ammunition Bruders Terry and Hollington didn’t know, but as their Reformed Lutheran nemesis would sow the seeds of doubt, the missionaries would try to dig them up before they grew roots and sprouted. At least Bruder Hollington did. Terry was still struggling just to follow most conversations. He couldn’t have added his two cents’ worth at that point even if he’d had the correct change. But he wanted to know the truth almost as desperately as Frau Richter did. Almost.

As recounted earlier, I grew up in a traditional Latter-day Saint home, but I had been more interested in sports and girls than in deep religious questions, or even shallow ones. I knew all the Sunday School answers, but I had never asked any questions, particularly the one I should have asked. And so, when I made the decision to forsake my former life and become Bruder Terry, I passed on to him a distinct spiritual handicap. When Bruder Terry walked through the front door of the Mission Home in Salt Lake City, he became quite suddenly a stranger in a strange land. The spiritual atmosphere in the Mission Home and then the LTM was entirely foreign to him. He struggled. He prayed incessantly for a testimony, but no testimony came.

He arrived in Rendsburg without a testimony, and still he prayed, but the first six weeks passed slowly without any revelations from heaven. By the time Terry and Hollington leaned their bikes against Richters’ fence and approached the door, it was October and Terry’s hope was running low. Interesting thing was, he was praying for Frau Richter to get a testimony with more real intent than he was praying for himself at that point. He loved the Richter family because Bruder Hollington loved them. They prayed for the Richters morning, noon, and night, and he pled for them in his personal prayers. Terry wasn’t sure what sorts of information or misinformation Pastor Kemnor was feeding Frau Richter, but I can certainly imagine, and I know that the questions he raised lay at the heart of her struggle. But she wasn’t about to give in to either side so easily. She wanted to know the truth about Mormonism. She wasn’t about to get baptized into this “sect” unless she got an answer. Logic and persuasion were not going to work on Frau Richter. The Toblers may have been fellowshipping her and her husband, but that wasn’t going to make a bit of difference either. Only the answer to one particular question would do, thank you. And for some reason God wasn’t in any hurry to give that answer.

In the years since Bruder Terry’s mission, I have become well acquainted with all the questions surrounding Mormonism and its truth claims. At the end of this book, I’ll have more to say about that particular kettle of fish. But for now let me just say that the validity of the LDS Church is not to be determined with certainty by putting all the pieces of a theological puzzle together. It isn’t to be proved or disproved by establishing whether or not Joseph Smith was involved in folk magic, by showing scientifically that Native Americans are or are not descended from a band of wandering Israelites, or by exploring whether or not the politics and economics laid out in the Book of Mormon reflect Joseph’s concerns about nineteenth-century America. I think I understand the questions and reservations thoughtful people have about Mormonism—doctrinal, historical, ecclesiastical, cultural, and organizational. I have a host of my own—more, in fact, than any critic of Mormonism has yet come up with—but whenever they start to get under my skin, I always come back to what happened to Bruder Terry and Bruder Hollington and Frau Richter on October 2, 1975, in the living room of the house on Hermann-Löns-Straße, and wonder what happened exactly and what it means.

Frau Richter was home alone that day—her husband was at work, her twin nine-year-old daughters at school—but she invited the missionaries in. The predictable Pastor Kemnor had stopped by recently with a new piece of anti-Mormon propaganda, and she was perplexed. Terry didn’t quite understand Frau Richter’s particular question that day—it seemed she had an endless supply—but he would never forget Bruder Hollington’s answer. Maybe Hollington had it all planned out. Maybe the Spirit whispered something to him. Or maybe he was just at wit’s end over this exasperating woman and all her doubts. Whatever the reason, he pulled from his pocket a brochure in which Joseph Smith recounts his own story and simply read a couple of paragraphs to Frau Richter. Hollington of course read it in German, but the English original goes like this:

It was nevertheless a fact that I had beheld a vision. I have thought since, that I felt much like Paul, when he made his defense before King Agrippa, and related the account of the vision he had when he saw a light, and heard a voice; but still there were but few who believed him; some said he was dishonest, others said he was mad; and he was ridiculed and reviled. But all this did not destroy the reality of his vision. He had seen a vision, he knew he had, and all the persecution under heaven could not make it otherwise; and though they should persecute him unto death, yet he knew, and would know to his latest breath, that he had both seen a light and heard a voice speaking unto him, and all the world could not make him think or believe otherwise.

So it was with me. I had actually seen a light, and in the midst of that light I saw two Personages, and they did in reality speak to me; and though I was persecuted for saying that I had seen a vision, yet it was true; and while they were persecuting me, reviling me, and speaking all manner of evil against me falsely for so saying, I was led to say in my heart: Why persecute me for telling the truth? I have actually seen a vision; and who am I that I can withstand God, or why does the world think to make me deny what I have actually seen? For I had seen a vision; I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I could not deny it, neither dared I do it; at least I knew that by so doing I would offend God, and come under condemnation.

While Bruder Hollington was reading, a marvelous presence entered the room. How can I describe it? To Bruder Terry, it was like pure electricity. It was as if an almost suffocating cloud of power and light filled the room. Terry felt this power at other times during his mission, but never like this, never with this intensity or immediacy or purpose. It was perfectly overpowering, and it was the most pure and holy influence he had ever encountered. Hollington stopped reading, and none of them could speak for quite some time. Terry couldn’t tell how long they sat there in the throbbing silence. It could have been an eternity. One of Joseph Smith’s teachings about the Holy Ghost was demonstrated vividly by the presence that visited that day. It bypassed the body completely and communicated pure intelligence to the spirit. Imprinted on Bruder Terry’s soul during that encounter, at least as he remembered it, was a very specific and unmistakable message: “It is true! It is true!” To this day I can honestly say I know only two things with absolute certainty—that I exist and the truth of what the Spirit revealed to Bruder Terry that day. In my entire life, I have never felt a presence more real than the one that came into Frau Richter’s home that day. Mere flesh and blood pale in comparison.

Eventually, not knowing what else to do, Bruder Hollington handed the Joseph Smith brochure to Frau Richter, asked her to read it and pray about it, and the missionaries excused themselves. She didn’t say a word or even see them to the door. When they stepped outside into the thin air and walked to the gate, Hollington exclaimed, “Wow, did you feel the Spirit there?” Terry said, “Yes, it was thicker than fog.”

He had his witness. He knew. So, apparently, did Frau Richter. When they visited a couple of days later, she asked to be baptized. She said she had her answer. No more questions. Bruder Hollington told her no. He said they wanted her husband to be baptized with her. They wanted him to receive the same witness. They wanted a whole family to join the Church together. Missionaries tend to be idealists. Herr Richter was a bit shaken up by this new development, but he agreed to more seriously investigate the Church. He promised to read the Book of Mormon and pray. He never did. And this is the greatest regret Bruder Terry had on his mission, that they insisted Frau Richter delay her baptism. The doubts returned, and so, of course, did Pastor Kemnor. She eventually lost the very thing she had prayed for and had received in such spectacular fashion. Hollington and Terry were devastated.

A transfer took Bruder Hollington away soon after this experience. Terry and his new companion tried to teach Herr Richter. He was indifferent. Frau Richter faded. One day she told them that a famous Lutheran pastor was coming to town to preach. She invited them to come listen to him, insisting that they would feel the Spirit when he spoke, just as they had in her living room on that warm October afternoon. They went with her and her husband. The missionaries didn’t feel a thing. Terry didn’t think Herr Richter did either. Frau Richter, on the other hand, claimed she felt the Spirit there. Terry was not convinced, and by that time he was growing more conversant in German, so he asked her if it was the same spirit she had felt that October day in her living room. “No,” she confessed, “that spirit was calling me to repentance.” Terry had no response to this, but to my mind this was a fascinating comment. It appears that even though they had shared a very powerful experience, the message she had received was not the same message Bruder Terry had understood. What, I now wonder, was the Spirit telling her to repent of? Her doubts? Her questions? Hidden sins? Whatever the case, the Spirit didn’t tell her to get baptized, and she eventually decided to stick with her Reformed Lutheran congregation.

You must remember that to Mormon missionaries, Frau Richter’s decision was worse than death, and Terry mourned it appropriately in his heart. He and Hollington honestly believed that by rejecting their message and the opportunity to be baptized into the LDS Church, Frau Richter was sealing her eternal fate. Sure, she might make it to the terrestrial kingdom in the hereafter (the middle of the three Mormon heavens), but as wonderful as that might be, it was still a form of damnation. She and her recalcitrant husband could never be gods. In fact, they would not even be married in the hereafter, according to Mormon dogma. So, considering how much passion and effort the missionaries had invested in teaching the Richters, it is understandable how dejected they were over how the whole thing panned out.

I’ve often reflected on the experience Terry and Hollington and Frau Richter shared that distant October day. And I’ve come to two conclusions. First, I’m very grateful for Frau Richter and her sincere desire to know the truth of the missionaries’ message, even if she couldn’t be sure about what the manifestation meant. I’ve wondered whose prayer was really being answered that day. I don’t know. But I am fairly sure of one thing: Without her faith and persistence, I doubt that Bruder Terry would have received an answer to his plea. His faith was at low tide by that time. Like many people, because he had prayed long and hard and had received no answer, he was at the point of giving up. He was ready to just concede that he didn’t have the faith to get an answer to his prayer. If I am honest, I must confess that it was probably Frau Richter’s faith combined with Bruder Hollington’s love and prayers for her that unleashed the powers of heaven that day. And without that experience, I have no idea how the rest of Bruder Terry’s mission would have gone or how long. Could he have spent a whole two years teaching people things he didn’t feel sure of? He needed that experience to keep him going, and it did motivate him through all the ups and downs of mission life. But what exactly did that witness mean? In his enthusiasm and naivete, he interpreted it very broadly, assuming it verified the truth of everything in Mormonism. As time has passed, however, and as I’ve become intimately acquainted with the warts and blemishes and inconsistencies of this complex religion and its history, I tend to interpret Bruder Terry’s experience much more narrowly. In fact, I have to conclude that the spiritual witness that came that day could not have covered even the entirety of Joseph Smith’s account as recorded in the pamphlet Bruder Hollington was reading from, the 1838 narrative that is now canonized in the LDS Pearl of Great Price. For instance, the account of Martin Harris taking some characters Joseph copied from the gold plates, as well as Joseph’s translation of those characters, to a New York scholar named Charles Anthon, is inaccurate on several fronts. And Joseph told several versions of this story that changed and expanded over time as his theology did. So I have come to view Bruder Terry’s experience in a much more restricted fashion than he ever would have. But he needed that broad interpretation to keep him on firm footing as a missionary.

The second conclusion I have reached is that regardless of why the manifestation came or what exactly it meant, I’m grateful it arrived in the presence of two other witnesses and that it came in the manner it did. I’m grateful Bruder Terry didn’t have a warm feeling about the Book of Mormon some lonely night in the quiet confines of an empty LTM classroom. If this had happened, I could have easily passed it off in later years as some subtle change in brain chemistry caused by the intensity of Bruder Terry’s fervent pleadings. Let me be specific about this. What Bruder Terry experienced in Frau Richter’s living room was not a simple burning sensation in his heart. It was not just a warm feeling that their message was right. What he experienced was an outside presence that entered the room and filled it to overflowing. That it filled all three of them too was inevitable. But because two other people were present and felt the intense power that Bruder Terry felt, he was never able to talk himself out of the fact that it had happened—and neither am I—regardless of what the unspoken message actually meant. I have never been able to convince myself that it was all just in Bruder Terry’s head, that he imagined it. No, Frau Richter and Bruder Hollington have prevented that. Hollington’s exclamation as he and Bruder Terry walked to their bikes has been very significant to me. And so was Frau Richter’s request to be baptized, even though she was never quite sure what the manifestation meant. Those reactions convince me that Bruder Terry’s sometimes vivid imagination wasn’t very vivid that day. This was the most real thing he ever experienced.

I’ve often wondered why Bruder Terry was favored to have such an experience when others who pray faithfully for a sure witness find the heavens firmly closed. I don’t know. Maybe most of us need a Frau Richter. Bruder Terry certainly did. In fact, I’m reasonably sure, given what I know about myself and my particular bag of experiences and weaknesses, that without this overwhelming witness I would probably not be an active Mormon today, perhaps not even a member. I certainly wouldn’t be as perplexed as I am today.

Testimonies, I’m told, come in many ways, shapes, and sizes. Most often they probably come as a quiet feeling of confirmation and grow over time. More often than most Mormons would dare admit, for some reason they seem not to come at all. But now and then they come suddenly and with overwhelming force. This I know. And when I say I know, I don’t mean that I know Bruder Terry had a burning feeling within. What I know is that Bruder Terry knew with perfect certainty the truth about something central to Mormonism. In even its most narrow interpretation, this experience let Bruder Terry know that Joseph Smith actually did see a vision on that spring day in 1820. Now, what that means exactly regarding all that came after Joseph’s encounter with the divine is another matter, and I’ll have plenty to say about that as this narrative unfolds. But on this particular point, that Joseph (like many individuals in his time and region who reported similar manifestations) wasn’t lying about seeing a vision, Bruder Terry couldn’t ever deny what he learned for himself that October day on Hermann-Löns-Straße. And I can’t either. Now, what exactly Joseph saw, what he was told, and what it all meant—those are questions that may reach beyond Bruder Terry’s encounter with a spiritual power and his interpretation of its message. I’ve learned that spiritual experiences are often devilishly hard to decipher. All I know at this point is that a holy power overwhelmed the three of them that October day, and Bruder Terry’s mission would not be the same afterward. He had what he considered a sure witness of the truth of Mormonism.

 

Monday, November 25, 2024

Book of Mormon Questions (Introduction 2)

 

Frau Rüster and the Cure for Cognitive Dissonance

Published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 40, no. 3 (2007)

For the context of this essay and why I am including it as part of the introduction to this series, please see my previous post.

 

When Elder Callister and I leaned our bikes against the fence at Hermann-Löns-Straße 9 and walked to the door, I had no idea that what was about to transpire would shape and anchor my soul for decades to come. And when we left the house and descended the steps less than an hour later, I had no context for gauging the magnitude of the experience we had just shared. I’m still acquiring that context.

Herr and Frau Rüster were our best investigators. At least Frau Rüster was. Her husband tolerated our visits and was cordial, but his search for the truth was more hypothetical than it was either pragmatic or urgent. Frau Rüster, on the other hand, wanted to know. Oh how she wanted to know. She was reading the Book of Mormon and praying about it. And her Reformed Lutheran pastor was so intrigued by her new quest that he decided to lend a hand. He generously transformed his weekly Bible study hour into anti-Mormon hour. I’m confident these new lessons took far more preparation than his conventional treks through the New Testament. Such sacrifice on his part. Frau Rüster, of course, was thoroughly confused. On one side she was hearing the missionary lessons and reading the Book of Mormon; on the other she was being exposed to every bit of dirt, credible or concocted, that good Pastor Kühne could unearth.

 

More than thirty years have now passed since I last saw Frau Rüster, but hardly a week goes by that I don’t think about her. I’m quite sure she crossed my mind a few years back when a department reorganization moved me from my editorial post at the Liahona to the Ensign. I was somewhat surprised to learn that the Ensign subscribed to both Dialogue and Sunstone and circulated them among the editorial staff. I couldn’t help wondering about these subscriptions and the reasoning behind them. But then again, the Ensign subscribed to many interesting publications: Journal of Mormon History, BYU Studies, Pioneer, Utah Historical Quarterly, The Religious Educator, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Newsweek, Time, Reader’s Digest, Biblical Archeological Review, Desert Saints, the Seventh-day Adventists’ Signs, Billy Graham’s Decision, the Community of Christ’s Herald, and my own personal favorite, Vision, a magazine aimed at the restoration branches that split off from the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the ’80s. I figured somebody wanted the editorial staff to be informed. I wanted to be informed too. So I read all these periodicals. Took them on the bus with me as I commuted between Orem and the COB.

I learned a great deal. I learned that Tommy Lasorda coached in Ogden before he became famous in L.A. and that young Heber J. Grant had an affinity for beer. I learned that Seventh-day Adventists are saved by grace and so is Billy Graham. I learned that Newsweek has better cartoons than Time. I learned that the Community of Christ doesn’t like to quote Joseph Smith. In fact, to me they seemed a bit embarrassed at the uncomfortable fact that he is still considered their founder. I learned that, as of a couple of years ago, the restoration branches were squarely between a rock and a hard place. They believed their First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve Apostles had apostatized en masse a couple of decades ago. They wanted to organize a new Church, at least a stake, but they couldn’t because the revelations they still revere declare that only the First Presidency can organize a stake. I’m wondering how things will eventually shake out. I learned that the Garden Tomb really wasn’t the place where the Savior’s body was laid to rest. I learned that it was actually Sidney Rigdon who wrote the Lectures on Faith and that some of the “doctrine” in them is rather, shall we say, Protestant, and this may explain why they were eventually dropped from the Doctrine and Covenants.

But of all these publications I was reading, Dialogue and Sunstone were most informative. I learned that adultery may, in fact, not be the sin next to murder. I learned that Napoleon Dynamite’s Happy Hands Club represents the female cross-brain function. I learned that Noah’s flood may have submerged only the Black Sea area and may have happened about 5600 bc. I learned that the universe may be just a small portion of a more comprehensive multiverse. And I learned that in our corner of this hypothetical multiverse lives a whole host of very unhypothetical Mormons and former Mormons and half-Mormons and quarter-Mormons and quasi-anti-neo-post-meta-counter-pseudo-Mormons who wrestle with dozens of issues and questions—everything from Native American DNA and polygamy to priesthood equality and evolution. I learned that, spiritually speaking, some of these issues have blown people adrift and have blown others apart. I learned that many intellectuals and individualists and iconoclasts have enormous frustration and microscopic patience with the perceived inflexibility and irrationality of Church bureaucracy. I generally shook my head and rolled my eyes at this last group. They had obviously never worked at Church Magazines. What did they know?

I have not been naïve for many years now, but this new reading opened my mind to the struggles of individuals as they come to see inconsistencies in the Church, its history, its founder, its scriptures, and its bureaucracy—as they shed their innocence and replace it with something that is far less comfortable for them and far less comforting. Most of the distress for thoughtful Mormons seems to revolve around Joseph Smith in one way or another. Rightly so. Richard Bushman stuck it in his title where no one could ignore it, but Joseph really was a rough stone. His life was surrounded by controversy because he was controversial—imperfect and unconventional and incomparable. Neither his fellow Saints nor his enemies could go to the Legacy Theater to see his life portrayed with skillful editing and majestic overtones. They saw him up close and personal, both the grandeur and the blemishes. Still, he himself had it so very right when he said to his followers shortly before his death, “You don’t know me.” They didn’t, and we certainly don’t.

Some of the questions that perplex people concern the intersection of knowledge and belief. Is it really possible to know anything for certain in the field of religion? I’ve read essays by faithful intellectuals, rational arguments they have constructed to support their belief in the Church and their dedication to its teachings. Others try to deflect the question. “The goal of religious development,” a social scientist once asserted, “might not be the serenity of certainty, an absolute acceptance on faith, but the capacity to sustain the tension of not knowing. To be able to live with uncertainty, to be able to cope with the insecurities of an exceedingly complex world in order to control it would be a higher achievement religiously, I think.”1 In other words, we should not seek to know with certainty but should embrace our uncertainty. Another writer reasoned, “It’s not too hard for me to translate ‘I know the Church is true’ to ‘I know I have had a burning in my bosom which confirms the goodness of the Church and the truth of the principles which it teaches.’”2 His argument, apparently, is that this inner burning doesn’t really constitute knowledge. So what can one know?

It has been a long, long time since I could say with a straight face that the gospel is simply beautiful and beautifully simple. I’ve gone the rounds with Correlation more than once over nebulous doctrines and unusable sources. Yes, Joseph Smith restored the fulness of the gospel, but he died before he filled in all the gaps and answered all the questions. Perhaps this was intentional.

 

Where Pastor Kühne got his information Elder Callister and I didn’t know, but as our Reformed Lutheran nemesis would sow the seeds of doubt, we would try to dig them up before they grew roots and sprouted. At least Elder Callister did. I was brand spankin’ new in Germany and was struggling just to follow most conversations. I couldn’t have added my two cents worth at that point even if I’d had the correct change. You see, I wanted to know the truth almost as desperately as Frau Rüster. Almost. I had grown up in a traditional Latter-day Saint home, but I had been more interested in sports and girls than deep religious questions, or even shallow ones. I knew all the Sunday School answers, but I’d never asked any questions, particularly the one I should have asked—until I walked through the front door of the Mission Home in Salt Lake City and became quite suddenly a stranger in a strange land. The bar in those days, of course, was much lower. The spiritual atmosphere in the Mission Home and then the LTM (which, I was told, stood for Longest Two Months) was entirely foreign to me. I struggled. I’d had six years of German in school, so the language was easy. But spiritual things were near impossible. Most of the other elders were sure in their testimonies. They made me feel like a spiritual infant. But some others were in diapers too—to a degree. As the weeks passed, however, they would inevitably stand in testimony meetings and tell how they had gone to an empty classroom one night and prayed and received an answer. I tried that too. But my prayers bounced off the ceiling, ricocheted around the room for a few seconds, then faded quickly into an ever-deeper silence. I was so ignorant spiritually I didn’t know what a witness of the truth would feel like. If I received one, would I even recognize it?

I prayed incessantly. I pleaded. I probably made promises I knew I couldn’t keep. Silence. I read the Book of Mormon through in two and a half weeks. I took Moroni at his word. I asked with a sincere heart and with real intent. Silence. I did know what the Spirit felt like. We’d met in passing a couple of times, once very impressively during the sacrament meeting where Doug King gave his mission report. But I didn’t assume that encounter constituted a witness. It was a strong feeling, certainly a burning within, but it didn’t impart any knowledge to me, other than the rather obvious fact that I wanted to serve a mission and become the kind of person Doug had become. For some reason, I assumed a testimony was more than just a warm feeling. I’d had warm feelings about The Lord of the Rings, Charmian Carr in the Sound of Music, and Grandma’s pumpkin chiffon pie. Maybe I was naïve. Maybe I wasn’t. But even the warm feeling eluded me. I swore I’d never fly off to Germany without a testimony. But I was basically chicken. I didn’t want to endure the disgrace of giving up and going home. Eventually, I convinced myself that going to Germany, even without a testimony, was the right thing to do.

I arrived in Rendsburg, a small city in the heart of Schleswig-Holstein, in late August. Six weeks passed slowly without any revelations from heaven, and by the time we leaned our bikes against Rüsters’ fence and approached the door it was October. I’d been praying for a witness the whole time, but my hope was running low. Interesting thing was, I was praying for Frau Rüster to get a testimony with more real intent than I was praying for myself at that point. I loved the Rüster family because Elder Callister loved them. We prayed for them morning, noon, and night, and I pled for them in my personal prayers. I don’t remember what sorts of information or disinformation Pastor Kühne was feeding Frau Rüster, but I can certainly imagine, and I know the questions he raised lay at the heart of her struggle. But she wasn’t about to give in to either side so easily. She wanted to know the truth about Mormonism. She wasn’t about to get baptized into this “sect” unless she got an answer. Logic and persuasion were not going to work on Frau Rüster. A Latter-day Saint family was fellowshipping her and her husband, but that wasn’t going to make a bit of difference either. Only the answer to one particular question would do, thank you. And for some reason God wasn’t in any hurry to give that answer.

 

I’ve been intrigued recently as I’ve read essays and articles by Latter-day Saints of prominent (or at least assumed) intellectual stature. Sometimes I get the impression they can’t see the forest for the trees. Perhaps because they grew up with it they don’t see what Frau Rüster saw so clearly. The validity of the LDS Church is not to be discerned by putting all the pieces of a theological puzzle together. It isn’t to be proved or disproved by determining whether or not Joseph Smith was involved in folk magic, by showing scientifically that Native Americans are or aren’t descended from a band of wandering Israelites, or by exploring whether or not the politics and economics laid out in the Book of Mormon reflect Joseph’s concerns about nineteenth-century America. I think I understand the questions and reservations thoughtful people have about Mormonism—doctrinal, historical, ecclesiastical, cultural, and organizational. I understand them, but for the most part I don’t share them. I can’t. Whenever I try, I keep coming back to what happened to me and Elder Callister and Frau Rüster on October 2, 1975, in the living room of the house on Hermann-Löns-Straße.

 

Frau Rüster was home alone that day—her husband was at work, her twin nine-year-old daughters at school—but she invited us in. The predictable Pastor Kühne had been by recently with a new piece of anti-Mormon propaganda, and she was perplexed. I don’t remember Frau Rüster’s particular question that day—it seemed she had an endless supply—but I will never forget Elder Callister’s answer. Maybe he had it all planned out. Maybe the Spirit whispered something to him. Or maybe he was just at wit’s end over this exasperating woman and all her doubts. Whatever the reason, he pulled from his pocket a brochure recounting Joseph Smith’s story and simply read a couple of paragraphs to her.

It was nevertheless a fact that I had beheld a vision. I have thought since, that I felt much like Paul, when he made his defense before King Agrippa, and related the account of the vision he had when he saw a light, and heard a voice; but still there were but few who believed him; some said he was dishonest, others said he was mad; and he was ridiculed and reviled. But all this did not destroy the reality of his vision. He had seen a vision, he knew he had, and all the persecution under heaven could not make it otherwise; and though they should persecute him unto death, yet he knew, and would know to his latest breath, that he had both seen a light and heard a voice speaking unto him, and all the world could not make him think or believe otherwise.

So it was with me. I had actually seen a light, and in the midst of that light I saw two Personages, and they did in reality speak to me; and though I was persecuted for saying that I had seen a vision, yet it was true; and while they were persecuting me, reviling me, and speaking all manner of evil against me falsely for so saying, I was led to say in my heart: Why persecute me for telling the truth? I have actually seen a vision; and who am I that I can withstand God, or why does the world think to make me deny what I have actually seen? For I had seen a vision; I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I could not deny it, neither dared I do it; at least I knew that by so doing I would offend God, and come under condemnation.

While Elder Callister was reading, a marvelous presence entered the room. How can I describe it? It was like pure electricity. It was as if an almost suffocating cloud of power and light filled the room. I have felt this power at other times in my life, but never like this, never with this intensity or immediacy or purpose. It was overwhelming, and it was the most pure and holy influence I have ever encountered. Elder Callister stopped reading, and none of us could speak for quite some time. I don’t know how long we sat there in the throbbing silence. It could have been an eternity. One of Joseph Smith’s teachings about the Holy Ghost was demonstrated vividly by the presence that visited us that day. It bypassed the body completely and communicated pure intelligence to the spirit. Imprinted on my soul during that encounter was a very specific and unmistakable message: “It is true! It is all true!” To this day I can honestly say I know only two things with absolute certainty—that I exist and the truth of what the Spirit revealed to me that day. I have never felt a presence more real than the one that came into Frau Rüster’s home that day. Mere flesh and blood pale in comparison.

Eventually, not knowing what else to do, Elder Callister handed the Joseph Smith brochure to Frau Rüster, asked her to read it and pray about it, and we excused ourselves. As I recall, she didn’t say a word or even see us to the door. When we stepped outside into the thin air and walked to the gate, Elder Callister exclaimed, “Wow, did you feel that!”

I don’t know that I answered. I had my witness. I knew. So did Frau Rüster. When we visited a couple of days later, she asked to be baptized. She said she had her answer. No more questions. We told her no. We wanted her husband to be baptized with her. We wanted him to receive the same witness. We wanted a whole family to join the Church together. Missionaries tend to be idealists. Herr Rüster was a bit shaken up by this new development, but he agreed to more seriously investigate the Church. He promised to read the Book of Mormon and pray. He never did. And I believe this is the greatest regret I have from my mission, that we insisted Frau Rüster delay her baptism. The doubts returned, and so, of course, did Pastor Kühne.

I learned through this experience that another thing Joseph Smith taught about the Holy Ghost is true: “A man may receive the Holy Ghost, and it may descend upon him and not tarry with him” (D&C 130:23). “There is a difference between the Holy Ghost and the gift of the Holy Ghost,” the Prophet expained. “Cornelius received the Holy Ghost before he was baptized, which was the convincing power of God unto him of the truth of the Gospel, but he could not receive the gift of the Holy Ghost until after he was baptized. Had he not taken this sign or ordinance upon him, the Holy Ghost which convinced him of the truth of God, would have left him.”3

Frau Rüster did not receive the gift of the Holy Ghost in time. Perhaps someday we will be held accountable for our decision. We were both nineteen. I hope God takes that into account. But eventually Frau Rüster lost the very thing she had prayed for and received. We were devastated.

A transfer took Elder Callister away soon after this experience. Elder Blades and I tried to teach Herr Rüster. He was indifferent. Frau Rüster faded. One day she told us that a famous pastor was coming to town to preach. She invited us to come listen to him, insisting that we would feel the Spirit when he spoke, just as we had in her living room. We went with her and her husband. Elder Blades and I didn’t feel a thing. I don’t think Herr Rüster did either. Frau Rüster, on the other hand, claimed she felt the Spirit there. I was not convinced, so I asked her if it was the same Spirit she had felt that October day in her living room. “No,” she confessed, “that Spirit was calling me to repentance.” Fascinating, I thought, how the Holy Ghost could tailor a specific message for each person present.

 

I’ve often reflected on the experience we shared that distant October day. And I’ve come to two conclusions. First, I’m very grateful for Frau Rüster and her sincere desire to know the truth of our message, even if she did lose that knowledge. I’ve wondered whose prayer was really being answered that day. I don’t know. But I am fairly sure of one thing: Without her faith and persistence, I doubt that I would have received an answer to my plea. My faith was at low tide by that time. Like many people, because I had prayed long and hard and had received no answer, I was at the point of giving up. I was ready to just concede that I didn’t have the faith to get a witness. If I am honest, I must confess that it was probably Frau Rüster’s faith combined with Elder Callister’s love and prayers for her that unleashed the powers of heaven that day. Second, regardless of why it came, I’m grateful this manifestation arrived in the presence of two other witnesses and that it came in the manner it did. I’m grateful I didn’t have a warm feeling about the Book of Mormon some lonely night in the quiet confines of an empty LTM classroom. Let me be specific about this. What I experienced in Frau Rüster’s living room was not a simple burning in the bosom. What we experienced was an outside presence that entered the room and filled it to overflowing. That it filled us too was inevitable. But because two other people were present and felt the intense power that I felt, I’ve never been able to talk myself out of the fact that it happened. I’ve never been able to convince myself that it was all just in my head, that I imagined it. No, Frau Rüster and Elder Callister have prevented that. My companion’s exclamation as we walked to our bikes has been very significant to me. And so was Frau Rüster’s request to be baptized. Those reactions convince me that my sometimes vivid imagination wasn’t very vivid that day. This was the most real thing I’ve ever experienced.

 

I’ve often wondered why I was favored to have such an experience when others who pray faithfully for a sure witness find the heavens firmly closed. I don’t know. Maybe most of us need a Frau Rüster. I certainly did. In fact, I’m reasonably sure, given what I know about myself and my particular bag of experiences and weaknesses, that without this overwhelming witness I would probably not be active in the Church today, perhaps not even a member. So, I’m grateful for this tender mercy from heaven and for its timing.

Testimonies, of course, come in many ways, shapes, and sizes. Most often they probably come as a quiet feeling of confirmation and grow over time. Sometimes, for some reason, they seem not to come at all. But now and then they come suddenly and with overwhelming force, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with receiving this sort of witness. If God grants it, why should I be ashamed of it or suggest that others can’t have a similar experience? At least because of this encounter I understand the difference between the whisperings of the Spirit and the “power of the Holy Ghost” (Moroni 10:4), and the difference, to me, is both immense and important. When I say I know, I don’t mean that I know I had a burning feeling within. What I mean is that I know with perfect certainty the truth about something central to Mormonism. I know that Joseph Smith saw God the Father and his Beloved Son. Historians may squabble over the details of the story and the differences between Joseph’s various accounts. But I’m no historian. I don’t know how factual all the details are. All I know is that his story, the canonized version he recorded in 1838, is accurate enough for God to endorse it as truth. This I know. I know. I know.

Now, let me conclude with a disclaimer. This witness doesn’t qualify me for any great blessings beyond those directly associated with its reception. It certainly doesn’t make me a better Christian than the least of those who harbor sincere doubts. Many who wish they knew but don’t are far more likely to be exalted in the celestial kingdom than I am. This experience marks the beginning of my path, not the end. But it has kept me from wandering off and getting lost. It has also provided me perspective. The questions surrounding Joseph Smith and the work he started are both numerous and troubling. I acknowledge that. I don’t know the answers to very many of them. Some things I just have to put on the shelf for now. I really have no choice. Just because Joseph Smith and the Church he helped restore were and are not perfect doesn’t mean they are not true. They don’t have to be perfect to be true.

 

Notes

1. Clyde Parker and Brent Miller, “Dialogues on Science and Religion,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8, nos. 3/4 (Autumn/Winter 1973): 104.

2. Robert C. Fletcher, “One Scientist’s Spiritual Autobiography,” Sunstone, September 1985, 35.

3. Joseph Fielding Smith, comp., Teaching of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1972), 199.

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Book of Mormon Questions That My Teacher . . . Never Asked (Introduction 1)

 

With this post, I am beginning a long, intermittent series that will cover perplexing questions about the Book of Mormon. I’ve been thinking about this project for about five years now, but I figured I’d better wait until after I retired to tackle it because some of the questions I bring up will likely not please the powers that be (and that were signing my paycheck). Before I start on the questions, however, I need to explain why I am doing this, where the questions come from, and my rather unique relationship with the Book of Mormon.

Let me start by saying that I do feel uniquely qualified to pursue this inquiry, for a variety of reasons. First, I have always liked the Book of Mormon. It’s a fascinating and complex book. Second, I have put Moroni’s promise to the testI have prayed about the Book of Mormon off and on for almost 50 years nowbut I have never had any sort of spiritual confirmation that it is “true,” whatever you interpret that word to mean. Nothing. Oddly, the only spiritual feeling I have ever had about Mormon’s book came a few years ago. I had read a couple of troubling articles that made a good case in debunking one best arguments that BoM apologists have come up with for affirming the credibility of the book, and I was pondering this as I walked the dog one night before going to bed. As I walked up the dark sidewalk, a wave of peace washed over me along with the thought, “It’s okay if you don’t believe the Book of Mormon is an accurate record of a real people.” And that’s the question I have tended to pray about in recent years. I don’t ask if it’s true. True can mean so many things. Even fiction can be true. So, I have gotten more specific in my prayers. Is it an accurate record of a real people in ancient America? Crickets, except for that wave of peace while walking the dog.

Third, for the past 18 years, up until I retired this past spring, I worked as editorial director at BYU Studies. In that capacity, I read a lot (and edited several articles) about the Book of Mormon. And starting in 2015, when Royal Skousen had a falling out with the Maxwell Institute and moved his Book of Mormon Critical Text project to BYU Studies, I had the responsibility of being Royal’s final proofreader for almost all of volume 3 (eight hefty books), which deals with the history of the text of the Book of Mormon. This broad topic actually covered a great deal of very interesting research. After I retired, BYU Studies asked me to write a short article describing Royal’s critical text project. It will appear sometime early in 2025, if you’re interested. As I point out in the article, not only did Royal answer an assortment of questions about the text of the Book of Mormon, many of which you probably never thought to ask, but he also raised many questions that are difficult, if not impossible, to answer. Royal’s work is truly impressive, especially his analysis of what’s actually in the book. Some of it is highly perplexing. I’ll get into some of that in this series of blog posts.

Fourth, the last time I read the Book of Mormon cover to cover, I was intentionally looking for theological clues, and I was marking every verse that stood out. Still, I couldn’t help but read as who I am. I have been an editor for over 30 years, so I read with a critical eye. But I am also a novelist, although I haven’t written any new fiction for quite a while, so I also read with an awareness of things like plot and characterization. What I found is that by reading as both an editor and a novelist, I discovered a host of questions that the text raised in my mind. So instead of marking just theological anomalies, I started marking every verse that raised red flags for whatever reason, and when I finished the book and counted up my markings, I found that I averaged about one question for every page of printed text. That’s where the idea for this series of posts originated. It also suggests that this series could go on for quite some time.

Fifth, several years ago, I edited Larry Porter and Susan Easton Black’s biography of Martin Harris. In the process, I had to dig into the documents surrounding the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, including the financial arrangement Harris entered into with Grandin to finance the printing. Although I did have to correct a few errors in the history and add a few qualifiers here and there, I came away convinced that the eyewitness accounts regarding the dictation of the text; the appearance of the angel to Harris, Cowdery, and Whitmer; and the showing of the plates to the eight witnesses are accurate. It’s too hard to explain these accounts away. Most of the eleven witnesses turned against Joseph Smith at some point, but none of them ever denied seeing what they said they saw or handling what they said they handled. Which makes my task a conundrum of sorts, because what is actually in the text doesn’t always square with the history encompassing the book’s appearance in 1829 and 1830.

My purpose in exploring these questions is not to determine whether the Book of Mormon is “true” or not. My purpose, rather, is to try to figure out what the Book of Mormon is. The evidence suggests it is not an exact translation of an ancient record. Skousen’s incredibly detailed work casts serious doubt on that premise, which he readily admits. But the evidence arising from the actual text suggests that this book also did not come from Joseph Smith’s imagination, or the imagination of any of his contemporaries. It is far too complex. I have good reason to believe that God was definitely involved in the fact that it exists at all. But how do we reconcile the textual evidence with the accounts of eyewitnesses or even the claims the book makes about itself? In a book review I wrote many years ago, I made the statement that the Book of Mormon is like a million-piece jigsaw puzzle and that we haven’t even put the border together yet. Royal Skousen’s work is just the beginning, in so many ways, of understanding what this book is. I hope my modest stab at asking questions about the book will move us a few inches further along the path to understanding.

Because some of my questions will directly undermine the assumption that the Book of Mormon is an accurate history of a real people, I want any readers of this blog series to understand exactly where I stand on the central question of Mormonism. To do this, in the next two posts, I am going to present two different accounts of an experience I had as a young missionary almost 50 years ago. The first account appeared as an essay, “Frau Rüster and the Cure for Cognitive Dissonance,” in volume 40, number 3, of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. That 2007 version was written at the beginning of my work at BYU Studies, before I had really encountered much of the complexity of Mormon history and theology. The second account is a third-person adaptation of the Dialogue essay that I included as a chapter in my mission memoir that was published eleven years later by BCC Press. By this time, I was a lot less sure about what this experience with Frau Rüster (cast now as Frau Richter) actually meant and a lot less willing to make blanket assertions. The mission memoir explains both why I switched to third person in retelling the tale and how my work at BYU Studies affected my relationship with the LDS Church and its doctrine. The title of the memoir gives a clue about the path I walked in the intervening years between these two accounts: Bruder: The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary. It’s worth reading, if I may say so myself. And the title of the chapter about Frau Richter (Rüster) ends with a question mark. In the earlier version, it was a statement.

Mormonism is a complex religious and cultural phenomenon, and the Book of Mormon lies near the center of it. I believe most Latter-day Saints read it rather superficially, with untested assumptions guiding their understanding of the text. So, what will follow, after my two interpretations of an experience I had in 1975, is a sporadic and randomly organized look at the questions I have entertained as I have read the Book of Mormon. Maybe by the time I run out of questions, I’ll be able to make some sort of assessment of the book. But maybe not. That’s what I want to find out.