The biggest disaster of Correlation is getting rid of what made many LDS Wards and Stakes friendly and fun. Getting rid of most activities was part of the plan. A lot of what bound people together disappeared. From sports to road shows to 2 1/2 minute talks.
The reality that there was something most of the week for various ages was lost. Control became more important than participation.
It is a good idea to have all on the same page - and if they had just done that while retaining the actual "family first" feeling of whole areas it would have worked much better. But - Authorian types have taken over and no matter how hard they try to appear caring and helpful the rigidness comes out. From the top down.
Not only that, but correlating everything had the effect of dumbing it down. It all sunk to the lowest common denominator. No more deep interesting doctrine. The mandated manuals became unbearably bland and repetitive, until just about the only approved material are quotes from GAs and isolated cherry-picked scripture verses. Even mormons like occasional variety, and so correlation really ramped up the boredom factor.
The original concept was well meaning and to a degree already existed.
All wards would have the same lessons the same weeks with some limited regional variety.
But like a camel getting its nose under the tent, it grew into a monstrosity that took the very life and soul from the church.
Correlation eventually dumbed down the lessons. Strangled conversations in class. Killed the concept of exchanging ideas.
Eventually it led to the reduction of the head of the household from being the head of the most basic church unit to being nothing more than a common drone.
Anything unique was forbidden.
Eventually the cancer spread to sending all funds to Salt Lake. Leading to the demise of local programs that fostered non secular interactions between members.
Members went from social interactions with each other through ward dinners, sports, plays, parties, bazaars, dances etc. To only being together at meetings and as I understand it, told not to socialize during or immediately after meetings.
The Relief Society went from an independent organization, self sustaining its own budget through investments and fund raisers, setting its own goals and actually helping others to bei g nothing more than a second rate auxillary organization occasionally getting lip service by the patriarchs on their thrones in their granite palace.
If correlation had been limited to lesson plans and doctrine with meaningful lessons and activities it would have succeeded.
As it turns out, it was the rotting of the tree from with in.
Yes, I also agree, it’s too bad that there’s no turning back the clock.
‘funny’ how so many of these actions & circumstances are in focus at relatively the same time as external situations such as political polarization, economic challenges, and a uncooperative world loose-cannon in charge of Russia where ChurchCo saw a glimmer of hope with the dissolution of the Soviet Union…
Many LDS members, youth & adults loved the social aspects of Mormonism only to have the rug pulled out from underneath them.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/11/2022 03:22AM by GNPE.
>> Correlation eventually dumbed down the lessons. Strangled conversations in class. Killed the concept of exchanging ideas....Anything unique was forbidden.
The unique things were a feature of the church, not a bug. In their quest for tightened control, the Q15 failed to recognize that.
Correlation was designed to squash the frankly rather bizarre discussions of the ten tribes in a hollow earth, a 6,000 year old earth, Kolob, polygamy, United Order, yada yada. Just imagine how many Denver Snuffers or Chad Daybells or Ammon Bundys or Mark Hoffmanns or David Mitchells or Warren Jeffs or Birchers or One Mighty and Strong wannabes there would be if the church of the 1930s and 40s still existed today.
Even with their efforts to suppress the crazies, there is still an uncomfortably large collection of crazies. Correlation may have sucked the life out of Mormonism, but I don’t know that they had a lot of choice on reining in the “doctrine”.
As for the men making RS a men’s organization for women, that’s on HB Lee and the boys. Ditto turning the church into a money-making operation. It took all of the 20th century to fully corporatize the church, but it has unquestionably achieved that goal. Whether that will in the long run turn out to be good news or bad news for Mormonism remains to be seen. Mormonism is struggling, but so are the Catholics, Southern Baptists, Islamic theocrats in Iran, etc.
Religions in general are no longer in the catbird seat.
What could they do to rein in the crazy people who were sharing stuff based on their own "inspiration" and "revelation" and other problematic teachings? The church should have realized this would become a problem from day one when people were having their own visions and personal revelations using the church as justification. Now you are only supposed to get revelation for yourself and those below you. (I hope God remembers the confusion when people have revelations about what everyone else is supposed to be doing.)
I agree that the end result of correlation was the dumbing down of everything, making it uninteresting to most of us. When I was teaching the RS Cultural Refinement lessons, I remember reading that I was to teach with the lowest common denominator in mind. This meant that "uneducated" women of the world needed to start with the basics and not interesting fluff.
Even with Correlation, they still spawned the Lori Vallow types. Imagine how many more crazies there would be if everyone was encouraged to go rogue with their personal relationship with God.
I'm putting the point a little more starkly than would be accurate, but in the final analysis what did correlation really cost the church?
Yes, the social elements of the Mormon experience were lost and that did make church more bland. But the fundamental problem is that the religion is false. Bells and whistles don't, and didn't, change that.
Imagine that the church had never implemented correlation. Al Gore would still have invented the internet, google would still have informed millions of Mormonism's rotten core, the church would still have anathematized gay people and their children, and social media would still have provided defectors with a partial substitute for the church community. That doesn't sound much better than the present situation, frankly.
Sure, the decay would have started later and have occurred more slowly, but the tide of information would nevertheless have washed over Joseph Smith's little sandcastle and the structure would have eroded. Correlation might have accelerated the church's demise by a few years, maybe even five or six, but we would still be looking at basically the same trajectory.
To be sure, correlation looms large in the minds of those of us whose experience it devalued. But maybe we should be grateful for it inasmuch as it enabled us to escape Mormonism's tentacles a few years earlier. And when historians eventually write the religion's history, the program will probably merit no more than a footnote or two. For the real story is how science, information, and technology destroyed an enormous fraud.
I don't know. One of the things I've noticed is that a whole lot of people are not really interested in the truth of anything, especially nowadays in the U.S. What I suspect is that had Corelation not occurred, the exodus from the LDS church would have been quite a bit smaller than it otherwise has been. Why? Because people who are satisfied with the situations in their lives, for the most part, do not seek to find out if the religion or philosophy underpinning those lives is factual--they're happy with the status quo.
Fair enough. But could the church have stayed the way it was in the 1950s and 1960s?
It wasn't correlation that forced the retreat from the priesthood ban, necessitated the purges, put Mormonism in the spotlight over gay rights, or exposed the child abuse scandals. It wasn't correlation that reduced missions to social media posting and free yard work and hence sapped young people's will to serve. Those setbacks stemmed from external pressure and the progressively greater availability of information.
Furthermore, I doubt that ward dinners, road shows, and stake dances, even when energized by SD's adolescent discoveries, would appeal to modern teenagers and young adults enough to make them want to surrender their iPhones and video games and go on missions. The 1950s simply wouldn't work in the 21st century.
Correlation was an early form of mainstreaming, and mainstreaming had to happen in any event. It truly is a case of pigs and lipstick.
devastatingly accurate. Still, can't help but be wistful of those long lost church dances where SD discovered that he was definitely heterosexual. Those embarrassingly awkward attempts to continue dancing after discovering you had suddenly grown a third leg. Two left feet and one to trip over.