Posted by:
derrida
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)
Date: December 31, 2011 12:30PM
I think what's great about this thread, this topic, is that it invites posters to consider both, the role and the individual men, as they are intertwined in our experience of the church. Note the contradictoriness of that very problem: He's some dude in your neighborhood; he's Bro. Soandso. Now he's The Bishop, the BitchMaster, the Feared Judge of Israel, the Chosen of God, the Inspired Prophet for Our Ward Family, etc., etc. There are a lot of messed up feelings that need sorting out b/c of that bit of condensation the church pulls on its members. Clearly I have strong feelings about the men who were my bishops. I think all of them were good men, able men, and yet here they were the face of a known evil on earth, men I trusted, worked with for years, and looked to for advice. Betrayal is one word that starts to cover some of the feelings, feelings of anger and hurt that have to be connected to recovery. (I recall a consummate blowhard in our ward, called to the EQP after I was released, and how self-preening he was, how seriously he took the calling, how he conferred in hushed tones with his wife, etc. The church must get lots of buy-in from the able (and not so able) men that it seduces into these oversized, self-important, strait-jacketed authority roles.)
As to the assumed importance of the phrase, yes, it's an interesting point. I remember a second counselor referring to our bishop not just as "the bishop," although he did that too, but often he would just say, "Bishop wants us to go do X," or "Bishop says we can't do that," or "Bishop told me Y." No definite article at all. Just the noun, like the guy was a god or something. Talk about assumed importance.
To these Mormons their Bishops are the Lord's spokesman here on earth. Of course they are going to venerate them and talk about them the same way other devoted religious folks talk about their leaders, e.g., "Our preacher said," "The priest told us X"; though I have to admit that when my Catholic sister talks about her priest, it's "Father Tim," and not "the Father" or "the Priest." And my protestant relatives will talk about "Our pastor," or "Pastor Roberts," but not "the pastor," although their saying that wouldn't throw me. Seems like the move in mainstream Christianity is not to automatically venerate the title so much without filling it with an individual name, a person, an identity beyond the title.
Mormons will speak of "Bishop Thomas," "Bishop Jones," but they will slip all too easily, eerily so, into saying "the Bishop." I think their frequency of doing this is an indicator of their lack of individuation, their reliance on an outside authority to tell them what to do. The more likely they are to refer to "the Bishop" as just that phrase, the title itself being enough to invoke all the powers of the church in their ward, the more likely they are, and to that degree, "church broke," brainwashed in fact into the authoritarianism that rules their lives. Those of us who have shaken off that programming, who are able to view the church critically, see how odd such veneration of just a title is. These people venerate the title so much, invest so much into it, that merely by saying the title, they believe they have spoken the whole truth and authority of the church, and they expect you, us, their audience to respond accordingly. It's a way of assuming what needs to be proved; i.e., that "the Bishop" has extraordinary powers of discernment and insight and is a force to be reckoned with on par with the powers of Heaven and God almighty.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/31/2011 12:32PM by derrida.