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No, sir, that’s not doctrine
• “There is no harmony between the truths of revealed religion and the theories of organic evolution.”
• Latter-day Saints “should neither play cards nor have them in their homes. …To the extent that church members play cards, they are out of harmony with their inspired leaders.”
• “The partaking of cola drinks … is in violation of the spirit of the Word of Wisdom.”
Although the above decrees — and numerous others — appear in apostle Bruce McConkie’s landmark “Mormon Doctrine,” they are not, as the title suggests, Mormon doctrine.
For decades, the late apostle’s encyclopedic volume — loved by many and loathed by more than a few — held a cherished spot on members’ bookshelves as the definitive exploration of the church’s teachings. In the 14 years since it quietly went out of print, the book has continued to generate discussion, debate, even division.
‘”Mormon Doctrine’ had been giving the church fits for a very long time,” historian Matthew Harris says in a “Mormon Land” podcast, especially McConkie’s writings on race. So, with “no fanfare,” church leaders yanked it in 2010.
For his part, Joseph Spencer, a philosopher and an assistant professor of ancient scripture at church-owned Brigham Young University, sees plenty of “deeply problematic” pronouncements within “Mormon Doctrine,” but the scholar argues its passionately orthodox author, criticized by many Latter-day Saint intellectuals for being more authoritarian than authoritative, too often is not given his due — especially in setting a lofty standard for the faith’s standard works.
“No one before him, and no one since, has done more to convince the saints that they ought to consecrate their intellectual faculties to the study of scripture,” Spencer says in a June “From the Desk” interview with Kurt Manwaring. “Whatever faults he may have had, that one success … makes him among the tradition’s most important voices.”
Adds Spencer in a June article in Wayfare magazine: “McConkie, whatever else one wishes to say about him, more or less single-handedly convinced two or three generations of Latter-day Saints that their faith had to be worked out through an unswervingly dedicated study of the unique set of scriptural books embraced by the saints.”
The BYU academic also points to the apostle’s final sermon, delivered at the April 1985 General Conference, as a “classic of Latter-day Saint devotional oratory.”
“I am one of [Jesus Christ’s] witnesses, and in a coming day I shall feel the nail marks in his hands and in his feet and shall wet his feet with my tears,” a weeping McConkie declared just two weeks before cancer claimed his mortal body. “But I shall not know any better then than I know now that he is God’s Almighty Son, that he is our Savior and Redeemer, and that salvation comes in and through his atoning blood and in no other way.”
Another big buy in Florida
The church’s real estate handlers continue to take a shine to the Sunshine State.
They recently bought an eight-story, 315-unit apartment building in Plantation, Florida, for $133 million, according to The Real Deal news outlet, or about $422,222 per unit.
The purchase in the southern part of the state by Property Reserve Inc., a commercial real estate arm of the church, comes on the heels of its acquisition last December of large swaths of an industrial park in the Miami area for $174 million.
The Utah-based faith already has vast landholdings in northern and central Florida, including hundreds of thousands of forested acres in the Panhandle and an expansive collection of pasturelands outside resort-rich Orlando.
The latest ‘Mormon Land’ podcast: Joseph and polygamy deniers
Joseph Smith, top left, and some of his wives, clockwise from top middle: first wife Emma Hale Smith; Eliza R. Snow; Martha McBride (Knight Smith Kimball); Marinda Nancy Johnson (Hyde Smith); and Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs (Smith Young).
The church, in an official essay, and most historians, in numerous scholarly works, agree that Joseph Smith married multiple wives. So why are many followers of the church founder arguing that he didn’t practice polygamy?
Listen to the podcast.
Imagining God
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Dan Reynolds sings at Rice-Eccles Stadium in 2022. The Imagine Dragons frontman recently discussed his struggles with praying to God.
Imagine Dragons’ vocalist Dan Reynolds recently told NPR about the song “Gods Don’t Pray” on the band’s new album, “Loom.”
“I really struggled a lot with religion — you know, Mormonism,” Reynolds said. “It was — even when I was 14, 15, I just couldn’t — I couldn’t find my place in it, and I couldn’t find kind of a sense of self in it, and so that lyric kind of had come to me just randomly in the studio. You know, I always — I spent 25 years of my life praying and asking for forgiveness and asking for guidance and then feeling like I wasn’t hearing anything, and that was really hard for me. And once I accepted that I didn’t need to do that, my life became a lot simpler.
“So the song is about trying to find God in yourself and not needing to find it anywhere else,” he added, “and I don’t even know that I fully believe in a God, but I hope for beautiful things after this.”
From The Tribune
• In a new book, Latter-day Saint politicians from around the world discuss the tensions they sometimes face balancing their faith with their governmental duties.
• A titan in Latter-day Saint arts and letters — author of a 1970s play that honored a brave German member who, as a teenager, took on Hitler — has died.
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