The church is playing a new game by new rules and most of the membership hasn't noticed yet.

Back in 2023 "Shane Reese, a vice president and statistics professor, will become BYU's 14th president, replacing Kevin Worthen, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles announced at a campus devotional on Tuesday."

Reese turned down a front office job with the Philadelphia Eagles. He also turned down offers from the Los Alamos Laboratory and even the US Government to stay at BYU. Holland said:
“I am told a statistician can have his head in an oven and his feet in ice cubes and say that on average he feels just right,” Elder Holland said jokingly. “Over the next several years, Shane, you will have plenty of fires to put out and cold-blooded decisions to make, so you should be ecstatic all the time.”

https://www.ksl.com/article/50605021/byu-names-new-president-to-replace-kevin-worthen

Let's find out a little about him.

"Reese has served as academic vice president since June 2019. During that time, he directed the BYU Committee on Race, Equity and Belonging, which found that the university needed to root out individual and systemic racism. The committee offered 26 recommendations, and Reese and others have begun implementing many of them."

Here's the report that came out of the RE&B group which Reese chaired

https://race.byu.edu/report

It's ironic that it is Elder Holland there announcing this new president, considering his 'musket fire' statements he made in August 2021 about BYU. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/elder-jeffrey-r-holland-2021-byu-university-conference

(From a memo he received) “You should know that some people in the extended community are feeling abandoned and betrayed by BYU. It seems that some professors (at least the vocal ones in the media) are supporting ideas that many of us feel are contradictory to gospel principles, making it appear to be about like any other university our sons and daughters could have attended. Several parents have said they no longer want to send their children here or donate to the school... I fear that some faculty are not supportive of the Church's doctrines and policies and choose to criticize them publicly. There are consequences to this. After having served a full-time mission and marrying her husband in the temple, a friend of mine recently left the church. In her graduation statement on a social media post, she credited [such and such a BYU program and its faculty] with the radicalizing of her attitudes and the destruction of her faith."

(Quoting Elder Oaks) "I would like to hear a little more musket fire from this temple of learning." ... specifically mentioned was the doctrine of the family and defending marriage as the union of a man and a woman."

How blind does someone need to be in order to not see a major contradiction between what these men say and what they do? Is that like when Oaks said that shock therapy for gays never happened under his watch while at BYU, yet it did the entire time he was there as president?

Yet at the same time Oaks makes these statements temples are having private LGBT which are reported in Deseret News

https://www.deseret.com/faith/2022/4/27/23034223/latter-day-saint-leaders-lgbt-advocates-common-ground-washington-dc-temple-faith-religious-liberty

The LDS Mormons have adopted a self protection agenda of "appearing to change" in carefully orchestrated bits and pieces when no substantial change is actually taking place.

Like Brigham was thrown under the bus without actually being thrown under the bus. Racism in the BoM explained in so many ways nobody is even sure what to think. Throw them off balance is the tactic.

This principle can work for a long time. As long as you appear to be "in the process of change" then no one can say you aren't changing, aren't adapting, growing. If this goes on forever, then the church will continue to shrink to a boutique religion, like, say Quakers and the like.

But, at a certain point, they have to make actual concessions to a kinder society or risk becoming obsolete, yea, even a joke. Not a funny joke, but still . . .


I was there when Oaks was doing the Shock Treatments on my friends. He is a liar. Mr. Reece sounds perfect for the position.

Oaks needs a Mini Me.

It’s called putting lipstick on a pig.

We'll know they actually care about race and equity when they repudiate the racist BoM and allow same roles for women for equality. Until then, they can sit down and shut the heck up.

He also turned down offers from the Los Alamos Laboratory and even the US Government to stay at BYU.
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Wow - Even the U.S. Government?

The need janitors and if he is active in MFMC he obviously has experience cleaning chapels at least one Saturday a month.

Did what’s-his-name ever meet with the Black Student Union?

BY has a Black Studen Union ??
ChurchCo HATES THE WORD "UNION"!!

Yet another apparatchik.

Excellent point, St Johns.

Whether the church actually changes, can we mostly agree that some of the recent church leadership choices are making the most conservative church members extremely nervous?

Absolutely.

The center of gravity in Mormonism used to be Romney-esque traditional Republican. In recent decades, however, conservatism has devolved into two camps: traditionalists and populists. That rift is largely concealed in Mormonism because of the overarching authority structure.

But there is no question that the populist wing of Mormonism--my guess is that it represents 25% of Mormons--is chaffing as the church struggles to maintain its traditionalist posture or even move towards the political center.

Gone are the days when Mormonism could safely take conservatives for granted.

Mitt Romney never really was a conservative. Look at his record in Massachusetts. The truth is the establishment Republicans today are your typical lifetime politicians. It’s all about gaming the system. Reagan Republicans are long gone.

I think the church got burned so bad on their involvement in Prop 8 in California I think they aren’t going to be very vocal in politics now. The real church will be in the temple where they can better control what goes on. The meetinghouse level church will appear to be more progressive.

> Mitt Romney never really was a conservative. Look
> at his record in Massachusetts. The truth is the
> establishment Republicans today are your typical
> lifetime politicians. It’s all about gaming the
> system. Reagan Republicans are long gone.

My heavens, you don't remember much of Reagan do you? He was firmly committed to Washington's alliance systems in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East; despised the USSR and North Korea; granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants; appointed a centrist Sandra Day O'Connor to the supreme court; opposed discrimination against gays; fought to lower tariffs rather than raise them; refused to profit from the presidency; and thought school boards and parents should determine local educational policies. As his daughter recently said, Reagan would not have recognized today's GOP.

What has changed is that over the last several years the GOP has moved radically to the right--actually, to the left on foreign and military policies; but to the right with regard to almost all domestic issues. So you can say that Romney is not a conservative by the definition du jour, but insinuating that there is anything remotely approaching a straight line between Reagan and today's Republican Party is, to put it gently, incorrect.


---------------
> I think the church got burned so bad on their
> involvement in Prop 8 in California I think they
> aren’t going to be very vocal in politics now.
> The real church will be in the temple where they
> can better control what goes on. The meetinghouse
> level church will appear to be more progressive.

Perhaps. But as you, messygoop, and others have recently noted, mainstreaming is by definition a political endeavor. The Mormon retreat from its past positions is offending the significant minority of the church membership who are cultural conservatives. For them there is no clear boundary between politics and religion.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/14/2024 03:34PM by Lot's Wife.

My mission was awful because my MPs were asshats and abusive with stupid policies. However, the AP's worked tirelessly to undue the constant messes created by the mission presidents. I was never in any missionary leadership, but my official district consisted of another set of missionaries (district leaders) and the AP's (I was the screw up assigned to another screw up missionary). We never had an actual meeting because the AP's were always on the phones or driving around the mission to put out "fires" Who caused these fires? The lord's annointed mission president.

Here's some examples of the MP's inspired fuck-up-aroos

-Being pissed at one set of elders for going over assigned miles. Result: all mission cars are parked, even on Sundays. No one walked 10 miles to church. Parents began calling to pick up their sons and daughters. AP's told the zones to start attending church in mission vehicles.

-The MP deliberately assigned elders (and some sisters) who did not get along with each other. They would often duke it out and the sadistic bastard seemed to delight in hearing about it. My previously mentioned screw up companion was assigned to the straightest arrow in the mission. They fought for days and the AP's had to intervene. The MP found out, berated the AP's for splitting them up. They were put back together and one elder beat the living shit out of the other. He ended up hospitalized for weeks.

-My screw up. I neglected to mail in the weekly missionary letters to the MP. Any companionship who failed to mail it in would be assigned push ups in front of the MP. It was an exercise in futility. He would restart the count every time your necktie touched the floor. This was done at zone meetings and the other missionaries were encouraged to shout out "losers" in between the accounts. I called the AP and they gave me their apartment address. I later learned that they told the MP that the postal service had been delayed with a phony slip. When my tardy letter (with my companion) arrived, they slipped it with the others.

What does this have to do with BYU and Q15?

I speculate that some lower level church leadership desire to make small changes, however they need some of the most irritable, antagonistic curmudgeons to pass on. And the church needs some key people who are more open minded to make needed changes (very minor ones).