Posted by:
Tyson Dunn
(
)
Date: June 29, 2021 02:07PM
This was the kind of ward with old-school members, where our scriptural expert in Sunday School had the same surname as one of the eventual prophets.
Of course, back then, they still hadn't gotten that whole correlation thing completely worked out with the lesson manuals, so Sunday School lessons tended to go off the rails into McConkie territory pretty quickly.
Once Salt Lake started gavaging the membership with pablum, however, the deep doctrine dumpster dives dried up. I think I heard some of the deeper stuff a few times in my student wards, then almost never in my singles ward. And certainly not when I visited my parents and their ward as an adult.
I think the LDS are wrong in not letting the members have arcana to learn, because if the members do learn the deep doctrine within the bounds of their faith, it both shakes them when they find it, but more importantly, they go looking for depth elsewhere.
As an example, I remember attending a student ward out west, where during an over-correlated Sunday School lesson, a member went off on believing in the Rapture. After listening to her prate on and hearing some other members - including the teacher - give their concurrence, I raised my hand and then explained that no, the LDS do not believe in the Rapture, that the Rapture was an Evangelical Protestant interpretation of the Bible that postdates the "restoration" of the church, and that despite its rising popularity (pun intended), it was non-doctrinal as far as the LDS were concerned. I got some mean hard stares from several members of that class that day, but I'm sure I brushed it off as the "guilty [taking] the truth to be hard".
The main point however is that the members had thin gruel to satisfy their need to enrichment, and they certainly weren't getting it within the faith, so they had turned to popular ideas in their stead.
When the LDS were proud to own their peculiarity, they certainly had people diverge into their own sects - as we see with the countless polygamous offshoots - but the members also believed the deeper stuff with greater fervency and frankly they *knew* it better.
Nowadays, they don't know this stuff, and it's far easier in my opinion for them to be turned on by non-LDS, generic Christian and other parareligious cults' fads and trends, e.g. the gospel of prosperity or raw jingoism and nativism.
Tyson