Posted by:
Cheryl
(
)
Date: November 14, 2010 12:27PM
I was there when this happened and it was of concern to *my* parents and the "apostate" groups who met in our living room. My parents were affiliated with several fundamentalist polygamy groups at the time and we were housing several wives of a plyg prophet in trailers on our farm.
This was in the early 1950's under Prophet Seer and Revelator David O. McKay's rule. There was a state wide law enforcement effort to curtail polygamist activity in an attempt to protect underaged girls and abused polygamist wives. The pr was terrible for the church. Everyone was buzzing about it and there were nation wide articles and news releases condemming Utah for allowing plural marriage.
The church reaction was to claim they'd cooperate and to prove it they added this apostate question to the list for bishop's to ask faithful members.
The net result was that polygamists who wanted to stay active in the mainstream church decided to lie because being true to the gospel trumped admitting the truth to these local rubes who in fundie minds were less than honorable although they were better than non-members.
The faithful members after being asked this question felt more obliged to shun outsiders. Almost none of them knew why this question had been added and assumed it meant they should give a wide birth to apostates, inactives, and antis, outcasts and other worldly riff-raff. I doubt that even most bishops knew fully why the top leaders had decided to include the new question. And after all this time, I would bet that not one in a thousand members or leaders know the history of this interview insertion.
I think it's like masturbation and oral sex. If a bishop grew up and experienced interviews where bishops interpreted "chasity" to mean the exclusion of these practices, then he would follow that example when he was in the interviewer role.
So now I think almost all members and bishops assume that mormons ought to take special precautions when they're forced to deal with non-mormons. In other words, mormons feel they should shun anyone who doesn't comply with mormon expectations.