There is a risk that anything anyone says about apostasy this summer will be interpreted as not-so-veiled commentary on current events. Will you please believe me when I say that, although prompted by current events, nothing I write on Keepa is intended to refer personally to Kate Kelly or John Dehlin or any other individual? I’m only doing what I always do, looking to Mormon history for stories that we can relate to in the present. With all the clamor in the Bloggernacle about what constitutes apostasy, I’ve searched my memory for past instances where apostasy was a factor in Church history.
Here is one such instance.
The Church Welfare Plan was nine years old in 1945. The Plan had served the Church well during the last years of the Great Depression, and had carried on through the years of World War II, helping to support those whose lives were disrupted by military service and absent breadwinners.
But in April 1945, the end of the war was in sight. Some Latter-day Saints were saying that the end for any need of Welfare was also in sight.
What a myopic view from our perspective! We know that “when the boys came marching home,” the need for the Welfare Plan was not ending but was only beginning. Europe, the Middle East, Japan, many of the South Pacific islands, were in ruins – farmland blasted, cities in rubble, docks and roads and distribution points necessary to get commodities to desperate people were destroyed. People were demoralized, economies were in tatters, nearly an entire generation of young men, the backbone of labor, were missing or maimed or imprisoned. Latter-day Saints in much of the world were hanging on by their bloodied fingernails, and needed every ounce of help the Welfare Plan could provide.
But that April Conference, President J. Reuben Clark, Jr., addressed General Conference, saying, “Reports come to us that some persons, we hope not many, are carrying on what politicians call a ‘whispering campaign’ against the Welfare Plan, proclaiming it a failure.” The Plan was a cover for “some deep-laid political scheme,” they said.
World leaders were uncertain as to the prospects for crops in 1945. Some said the world was faced with the greatest food surplus that the world had ever known. Others said the food supply was short, and the world needed every mouthful that could be grown. “Under these circumstances,” President Clark said, “the only safe thing is to assume a food shortage and proceed accordingly.” He asked the people of the Church for their continued support in farming, canning, sewing, and storing commodities to meet the needs of the coming year.
“Of course, if the people will not support it, so that the Lord withdraws his blessings from it, the plan will fall. But to this time the great loyal body of the Church, following the inspiration of the Lord, has supported the plan.” He thanked those who had worked so hard, and asked bishops and stake presidents to fill their quotas for food and other goods, not by writing a check for the cash value of produce – the world could not eat checks – but by actually producing more food than would be grown without the Welfare Plan.
Then President Clark addressed those who were privately working against the Plan, those who would not labor for its success,d and especially those who discouraged others from contributing:
To those opponents who are Church members, I wish earnestly to say: We need you now; we have needed you in the past; we would welcome you amongst us.
Furthermore, we wish to say that if you desire or hope to keep the Spirit of the Lord and enjoy his blessings, you must cease your fault-finding and sometimes even your maligning of those doing their appointed tasks as servants of the Lord, and fall in and work with them, not against them. We need the aid of every member of the Church; we ask your help, but not so much on our account as on yours. This is a plea directed towards helping you to save yourselves from a threatened apostasy, which seems usually to follow fault-finding, disloyalty, and opposition to the Lord’s plans.
Some of us in the Bloggernacle have fallen into a trap in recent weeks of fault-finding and “maligning of those doing their appointed tasks as servants of the Lord.” Some few, I think – and I know this view will be unpopular – seem to have deliberately stirred up fear and promoted panic and distrust of male leaders beyond any justification of the facts. Others, out of loyalty to friends and genuine confusion or disappointment, have spoken and written intemperately.
But just as it did in President Clark’s day, the Church needs us, and needs us all, to keep the Spirit of the Lord and “fall in and work with” our leaders, and to avoid the consequences of “fault-finding, disloyalty, and opposition to the Lord’s plans.”
Here endeth the lesson.
Adding President Clark’s quote to my stickies lining the bookshelf above my desk. Thank you.
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“I’ve searched my memory for past instances where apostasy was a factor in Church history.”
Godbeites, perhaps?
Yes, certainly. And Kirtland and other earliest Church days. And individual fundamentalists or others, who didn’t consider their actions to be apostasy but which nevertheless took them out of the Church (and not because the Church was wrong, either; had they NOT been in apostasy, despite what the Church said, you’d think the Lord would have prospered their course anyway). If people aren’t sure what apostasy looks like, as some of the ‘nacle conversation seems to indicate, maybe these instances can illustrate it.
I thought about the Godbeites as well, but this is an interesting instance that I wasn’t previously aware of. In my research, I have run across one individual that I have written about who was excommunicated for actively accusing a president of the church of malfeasance in office, and misuse of church funds. It truly was a sad discovery, but based on what I saw, the charges of apostasy appeared justified. Still, it was an uncomfortable discovery.
I too have been concerned about some of the over the top rhetoric of folks on both sides of the current events, and echo a call for compassion both for the subjects of disciplinary councils, and those involved in conducting them. Any loss to the Body of Christ is a loss to all of us, and we are not relieved of our responsibilities to mourn with those that mourn, and comfort those in need of comfort.
Over at Jr. Ganymede, I copied a relative’s tale of his own apostasy. The particular act (selling liquor) wasn’t what we might think of as apostasy, but that’s what he called it under the general idea that he was in conflict with his priesthood leader.
(From a Keepa perspective, a nice thing about that story is that my wife’s aunt, now an old woman, wrote it in 1952 when she was 18, an interview with her 94-year-old great-grandfather. Enduring ties of the past to the present in remarkably few steps come from young people doing that with their old relatives.)
Thank you for a timely, fair, and sober reminder that speaks to current events as well as a general principle. I appreciate your blog for providing clear and historically sound information and would love to hear more. I wonder if you might consider occasionally post other historical instances where apostasy was a factor. It is helpful, I think, to hear reminders from the past to keep perspective in the future.