I didn’t leave the COJCOLDS because I felt deceived when I learned the truth about church history. For one thing, I grew up knowing a lot about church history because it was also my family history. When I was little, we used to go to family reunions for all the descendants of all seven wives of one of my maternal great-great-grandfathers. (One very memorable year, that family reunion was held at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon at the same time as the Hells Angels’ convention, so the park was overrun with Mormons and bikers.) My ancestors worked in the church’s winery in Toquerville, Utah. I knew about the Mountain Meadows Massacre because I heard my grandmother talk about how one of my other maternal great-great-grandfathers left the church when he learned of it.
I left the COJCOLDS because its god was a moral monster and I didn’t want to spend eternity with him. I left because LDS theology was morally objectionable. I didn’t feel I had been “misled and lied to” by the leaders of the church the way John Dehlin describes in a recent podcast as much as I felt misled and lied to by Joseph Smith himself. I felt exploited. I felt morally injured. I felt spiritually, morally, ethically, intellectually, socially, and financially defrauded by Joseph Smith and by a huge web of abstractions and concepts and relationships and people that sought to determine my actions and demanded that I “consecrate [my] time, talents, and everything with which the Lord has blessed [me], or with which he may bless [me], to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for the building up of the Kingdom of God on the earth and for the establishment of Zion.”
My recent post and commenters on that post have analyzed some of the problems in John Dehlin’s recent defense of the lies told by COJCOLDS leaders. But as is my wont, I’ve continued to mull the conversation, and I’ve finally articulated a really big problem that John hints at but doesn’t admit to himself when he says things like this: “There are these moments in church history where they could have come clean then, and for good, understandable reasons, they said, ‘We don’t feel ready to be transparent in our history.’ And then the internet happened.”
One of the “good, understandable reasons” the brethren didn’t “feel ready to be transparent in our history” is that they’ve known that if they admit how many of Joseph Smith’s claims were fraudulent, people will feel defrauded. People will unconsecrate “their time, talents, and everything with which the Lord has blessed” them, and go. People will stop spending their weekends cleaning meeting houses. People will stop paying tithing.
I really wonder if John doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that lying to cover up the immorality and dishonesty of Joseph Smith makes every single man who did so complicit in Joseph Smith’s immorality and dishonesty. It makes them unworthy of the roles they claim as spiritual, moral, ethical, intellectual, political, and social leaders. It makes them frauds. To be clear: I’m not saying their fraud is criminal (although Utah is a hotbed of criminal financial fraud, even if it’s not always the affinity fraud capital of the world). But I am saying that their fraud is unrighteous. And I don’t say that on my own authority; I say it by the authority of Doctrine and Covenants Section 121:
34 Behold, there are many called, but few are chosen. And why are they not chosen?
35 Because their hearts are set so much upon the things of this world, and aspire to the honors of men, that they do not learn this one lesson—
36 That the rights of the priesthood are inseparably connected with the powers of heaven, and that the powers of heaven cannot be controlled nor handled only upon the principles of righteousness.
37 That they may be conferred upon us, it is true; but when we undertake to cover our sins, or to gratify our pride, our vain ambition, or to exercise control or dominion or compulsion upon the souls of the children of men, in any degree of unrighteousness, behold, the heavens withdraw themselves; the Spirit of the Lord is grieved; and when it is withdrawn, Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man.
38 Behold, ere he is aware, he is left unto himself, to kick against the pricks, to persecute the saints, and to fight against God.
39 We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.
40 Hence many are called, but few are chosen.
In other words, the injury people feel is not just “feeling misled and lied to.” It’s thinking, “What the hell have I been doing, looking to a bunch of liars and deceivers for guidance on how to be a good person? Why have I been following a bunch of geriatric gits in Utah who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries because they’re too busy exercising unrighteous dominion to get any sort of inspiration from the Spirit?”
The remedy for that is not simply more transparency, because that does not meet the sort of repentance the church claimed its members should practice. The remedy is reparations, including refunding everyone’s tithing, since it was obtained under false pretenses. The remedy is a kind of humility the brethren cannot even mimic.
And anyone who, like John, defends the unrighteous dominion of the brethren is complicit in that unrighteous dominion as well.