One of the oft-expressed late 19th century/early 20th century charges about the Church’s “un-American” nature centered on the Church’s involvement in politics. When the man who spoke for God, the argument went, directed you to vote in a given way, the pressure to protect your eternal salvation was too great for mortal man to resist.
My standard answer is that nobody claiming such a thing could possibly know much about Mormons or Mormon history. If we did everything we were told to do, why do we have to be told the same things at every General Conference? Why don’t we have a higher volume of fast offerings, perfect home teaching numbers, and Sunday lessons that always follow the manual?
Continue reading Dictating Politics: The Election of 1912 →
In a day when new temples are being announced by the handful, it’s easy to forget how far we have come in making priesthood ordinances available, convenient, and even non-life threatening.
For the first hundred or more years of the Church’s history, baptisms were performed out of doors, in natural bodies of water: Joseph Smith was baptized in the Susquehanna River. Old residents of Marysvale, Utah, have pointed out to me the spot on the banks of the Sevier River where the bishop would periodically round up all the 9- and 10-year-olds in town who hadn’t yet been baptized to conduct a massive catch-up round. The elders who baptized Tsune Nachie were pleased by the privacy of the day – “[we] were not disturbed or looked at during the service” – while the 1901 New Jersey baptism of a popular Christian missionary convert was followed at a distance by a crowd of newspaper reporters who expressed surprise that polygamy was not discussed during the service.
Continue reading Dotting the Earth with … Baptismal Fonts →
Have you ever collected sets of things? A new state quarter from every state in the U.S.? An autograph from every member of your graduating class?
In Mormon circles, those collectible sets might be a Book of Mormon in every language in which it has been published, or photographs of you shaking hands with each member of the Quorum of the Twelve in a given year.
Or a set of documents containing the signatures of every First Presidency throughout the span of the Restoration?
Continue reading A Mormon Collectible, 1901 →
There appears to be, among some of our people, an inadequate conception of the sanctity attending certain of the ordinances of the Holy Priesthood. True, the ministrations of those in authority amongst us are not attended with the pomp and worldly ceremony that characterize the procedure in other so-called churches, but the fact that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is in possession of the Priesthood is sufficient to make any and every ordinance administered by due authority within the Church an event of supreme importance.
In performing any such ordinance, the one who officiates speaks and acts, not of himself and of his personal authority, but by virtue of his ordination and appointment as a representative of the powers of heaven. We do not set apart bishops and other officers in the Church, with the show and ceremony of a gala day, as do certain sectarians, nor do we make the ordinance of baptism a spectacular display; but the simplicity of the order established in the Church of Christ ought rather to add to than take from the sacred character of the several ordinances. Continue reading The Repetition of Sacred Ordinances →
Where our past is never very long ago