A thought about priestcraft

The Book of Mormon has conditioned current and former Latter-day Saints to eschew the preaching of the gospel for money and also to think that all the competition to the “true church” only exists for filthy lucre.

““He commandeth that there shall be no priestcrafts; for, behold, priestcrafts are that men preach and set themselves up for a light unto the world, that they may get gain and praise of the world; but they seek not the welfare of Zion.” (2 Nephi 26:29)

It comes as a complete surprise to many Mormons that the apostles and the first presidency live off of a tithing-funded stipend. They have encounters with people who are skeptical of and even hostile to Mormonism who brandy this information about like a checkmate. We didn’t know how much it was, even, until MormonLeaks published some examples showing it’s about $120,000 a year. Apologists, profesional and amateurs alike, quickly pointed out that if the Q15 were doing it all for the money, the stipend would be a lot more than $120,000.

I don’t think that was the point of the criticism though. The main criticism is that the church doesn’t educate its own members about how its modern ecclesiastical affairs are managed and simultaneously indoctrinates them to see other churches taking tithes and offerings and to react to it with disgust. The modern church has many paid positions, because it has to. It’s just too big to function without people whose full-time work is church business, and so they’d obviously be employed by the organization. Even the general authorities get stipends some that they can dedicate their full attention to church affairs. Does anyone expect a global church to have no full-time employees at any level of the organization?

“At least the bishops and stake presidents and local callings are all non-paid,” the TBM mindset assures itself. Yes, those people sacrifice a lot of their time and talents for the church just like they covenanted they would because they just really believe in it or at least do not want to be the only one seen not doing their part. Mormon dedication to the LDS institution and teachings was never in question. The point is that the church holds a double standard when it conditions its primary kids to think their friends’ churches are corrupt because the pastor lives off of tithing money but then defends itself when it’s clergy get caught doing the same thing. President Eyering’s modest stipend should have been perceived by all as exactly what the apologists said it was: no big deal. The reason it wasn’t is because of the double standard and the resentment it creates, the tendency to dismiss all other religious competition and any organization critical of the church as corrupt for doing the same thing.

There’s this movie called Equilibrium that is loosely based on the concept of the novel Fahrenheit 451 where Christian Bale stars as a gun-slinging cop who punishes his fellow humans for having emotions and harboring contraband including all books, art, music, decorative furniture, and anything else of human craft that was designed to trigger emotion. This is a post-apocalyptic world, and to solve the problem of war society makes people take drugs nullifying all human emotions. To make a long story short, Christian Bale comes to appreciate what he is destroying at a purely intellectual level, experiments with not taking his meds, thinks he’s alone for a little while until he finds the underground, and then plots with the underground to take down the Equilibrium version of Big Brother. When they finally find the man pulling all the strings and benefiting from the social order, he is unmedicated and living in the lap of luxury with no expense spared on lavish furnishing, art, and music playing in the background. The hypocrisy is shocking.

I think that exmormons expect something like this to happen one day. Someday, we’ll have definitive proof of the man behind the curtain and we’ll yank the curtain off of its chains and show all of our TBM family members all at once and they’ll see the rank hypocrisy and finally talk about something else at family dinner other than church. That’s not going to happen, probably. Idk, it’s always possible that someone is secretly running the whole thing and benefitting from all of this church wealth in secret, but there’s no evidence of that.

Which is not to excuse the church when it refuses to disclose its finances and then uses tithes and offerings to buy stocks or start up a cattle ranch empire in Florida. What we’re seeing, I think, is the behavior of an institution, a self-important corporation, seeking to shore itself up against a world it holds in contempt and also to grow its political and capital power base that it might assert more influence on human minds in the future. That’s not negligible at all, but it’s also not the cartoonish Equilibrium kind of corruption or hypocrisy either, and yet it is also duplicitous in the extreme.

All of this drama comes because of the church’s original pretension taught to its primary children and reinforced throughout their lives that the true church does not have anything to do with “priestcraft.” It does, though, and we find that it commits this sin (as they define it) as much as any other religious organization. If that’s not a fair criticism, well then that exact hypocrisy is the whole point of bringing this up.

The church needs to pay people a full-time wage if it wants them to work for it full time. Likewise Mormon Stories and other organizations and podcasts need money to run, especially if we want them to do it full time. I love the work that John Dehlin does. I love that he has given his life to this. I will support him financially in it, because I know that he’s using those funds to take care of his family and his house (and I don’t care if he even buys a boat with it or something; his compensation is a matter of public record and if we decide that it’s fair and modest, then he gets paid and he can whatever he wants with it). If John Dehlin and others’ material needs are met, they can give their full energy and time to helping people recover from faith crises. There was nothing in place for him when he went through his, and he saw a niche and seeing no one else rising to the occasion filled it himself. If anything, the politically conservative TBMs ought to be applauding his capitalist initiative. Lol. But it’s not like that, the Open Stories Foundation is a nonprofit and it is far more transparent than the LDS church or even FAIR.

Jon Larson often lamented that exmormons were very stingy and distrustful of organizations and podcasts critical of Mormonism asking for financial support. Ya, that’s the result of how we were raised. And we’re all shell-shocked from our experience in the cult and desperate to prove to our family members that the things they believe about the outside world are not true, and so some of us see “professional anti-Mormons” making money off of it, and find it disturbing, because we know our families with use that against us.

Let’s all stop thinking like this, because it comes from the LDS church and the LDS church is a hypocrite anyway. If you like a podcast or an organization that helps to educate and/or provide a safety net for people like you, then think about supporting them. It doesn’t need to be much. There are a lot of us, and small bits accumulate. If it sounds like I’m a megachurch pastor asking you to plant a seed, you’re kinda making my point for me. I am a bug man; I literally exterminate scorpions for a living. No one paid me to say any of this. I’m just an exmormon who is as thoughtful out of the church as he was in the church. Stop being so paranoid about who pays who to do what. Stop having these debates with apologists on the church’s self-serving, duplicitous terms.

I would like the conversation to change and gain more nuance. Mormons are wound up their entire lives to pay 10% into an organization that is not transparent about what they do with it. Doesn’t that bother you, tbms? Did you know the church is worth $100 billion and would be just fine if you skipped a tithe offering once to feed your family instead? Does it bother you that you can’t see your own daughters or sons get married unless your spiritual protection money is all paid up? Did you have any idea that a lot of the things they do with your funds after overhead is paid are for-profit commercial ventures and not feeding the poor and sheltering the homeless, etc and etc? So then what right does this organization have to tell other people what they can and cannot do with the generous offerings of their donors? At least these other organizations tell their donors what the finances are and actually allocate funds on the things they led their donors to believe it was being used for.

I’m a socialist. I’m tired of living in a capitalist country where the religions are more capitalist than anyone else and who shame small donors who fund these mom and pop institutions critical of this giant behemoth into thinking that it’s wrong to spend their money that way. The Mormon Corporation just wants to be the only one at the end of the day; it’s jealous and greedy and power-hungry, just like the church of Scientology, or the Watchtower Organization, or the Munies.

I believe that Joseph Smith did not originally intend to start a church; he set out to sell a book, which is probably why he tried parting with the Canadian copyright. His book was nonoffensive in every way. Every teaching was within the Overton window of religious revival meeting, the harsh criticisms of the then-state of sectarianism would have reverberated well with people like his father, Joseph Sr., who wouldn’t join any church, and even the basic idea that the Indians are long-lost Hebrews was something everyone already believed at the time. In other words, it broke absolutely no new ground whatsoever except for maybe pretending to know exactly how to settle the doctrinal debates common at that time and in that place among Christians once and for all. He did not mean to start a church, even though he would later, so it didn’t bother him to take a hard stance against “priestcraft,” and when he started a church later the verses he penned against priestcraft did not stop his innumerable ways of milking people for money anyway. He was never bothered by contradicting himself.

Joseph Smith was the man behind the curtain, and he’s dead. The church today is, I believe, exactly what Jon Larson said it was: there’s no one to be mad at. All these people are victims of the institutional religious culture, seeking to defend its interests in the world while clinging to some version of its narrative at all costs and refusing to believe that Joseph Smith, a well-documented conjob, just made it all up. The organization holds you and I in contempt and seeks to exert undue influence in the world and expand its holdings in some culty-questionable ways, but we probably will never get photos of Rusty Nelson living in the lap of luxury at tithe payers’ expense. He’s just an old man who believed in Mormonism his whole life snd thinks the success of the dispensation of the fullness of times rests on his shoulders. I wouldn’t be surprised if his second anointing combined with his belief that he holds the keys of Peter and stands betwixt all mankind and heaven hasn’t made him a big of an egoistical, self-righteous prick kinda like some old high priests you and I have known.

The point of criticizing the church’s finances is that perhaps they would lose people if tithe-paying members knew all the particulars. If they wouldn’t lose anybody and their income wouldn’t dip, then just tell everyone. It’s legal enough, (that I know anyway). We’re only accusing it of brainwashing our family members into mindlessly paying their tithing on every penny and then keeping them in the dark as much as possible about all the things the Kingdom of God does with the funds behind their backs. This is what the mature version of this criticism has always been. The immature version is a thought-stopping behavior put in your head by a cult so that you don’t effectively organize with other victims to counter its bullshit and perchance prevent a few less LDS kids in the future from suffering religious traumas or humiliations like you did.

Two tangential points.

Capitalism is a means of generating wealth. The distribution of that wealth is a separate matter, a fiscal matter decided through the voting booth. There are plenty of capitalist societies that treat religion as any other form of civic organization. There are also capitalist countries (Scandinavia, Japan, South Korea) that do a much better job of providing a social safety net and a reasonable distribution of resources (itself necessary to preserve a capitalist system). So baby, bathwater: the US experience does not define capitalism.

Point the second. I disagree with Larson's position, which you summarize as "there’s no one to be mad at. All these people are victims of the institutional religious culture. . ." Yes, we are all victims of our past; we all carry damage that influences our present lives. But that does not obviate individual moral responsibility. If it did, you could never try, convict, and discipline a child molester who was himself molested as a child. As a moral principle, adults must not pass on the harm they suffered.

What that means for the church is that lifers do not get a hall pass. More particularly, every one of those old men in SLC make a choice to lie, to condemn children for their innate sexuality, to impose enormities on innocent families. The leaders bear both the universal duty not to transmit their own problems unto the third and fourth generation but also the responsibilities that come with power.

Don't shed a tear for the prophets and apostles, and their minions. They choose to commit their sins; they willfully use their power for evil purposes.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/24/2021 05:24PM by Lot's Wife.