I was always brought up with the understanding that if two people think the same way then one of them is useless. I guess I think that it should be common sense that disagreements can develop and not be serious. I think that is how we grow: through opposition, challenging and testing beliefs and ideas.

I can’t see any reason why a church would be any different. The church is led by people, just like any other church or government. There are good people (even really, truly genuine and great people) that lead the church, just like there are crazy cats and unadulterated losers too. The leadership, I suppose, protect themselves in their position through a strong emphasis on obedience. Heck, running an autocracy is a lot easier than running a democratic organization. Governing by consensus (by common consent, if you will) is really tough, especially if there isn’t anything concrete that can bind the people together in a common direction. The way I see it, the leadership inserts obedience for its own sake to replace a common vision.

The emphasis on obey and obedience in church publications since 1970 and from 1993 is truly dramatic. I find it troubling. Granted, nothing in the governance of the church says anything about the foundational claims of the church being true or not. The main point is that there has been nothing (to me anyway) to really inspire me to become better, nothing that has helped me identify where to improve or even clarify the need for the church or even the gospel in my life. I have had much more success finding that inspiration elsewhere (in fact my wife never stops pointing out where I need to improve). The main message, aside from some quality talks by Eyring, Holland and Tingey, has been very proscriptive ‘thou shalt not’ sermons in the strain of the evangelicals among whom I served my mission. In any case I assume the emphasis on obedience is due to the lack of clear vision or inspiration (in a leadership and creative sense), but I haven’t got any of that since about 1990.

Also, the Church’s most recent news commentary doesn’t really bother me at all. And I read it very carefully. Word for word, in fact. Yet it didn’t bother me. Should I be bothered by this? Is there something wrong with me? What I’m reading here is that there is. I would acknowledge that abuses of power are common among all human beings and that Church leaders are, in fact, human. But I don’t think they’re guilty of the gross sins some people would have you think they are.

In a Church with a lay ministry, in which even the top leaders never asked for a calling, shouldn’t empathy go both ways? I know a woman who once got to interview President Hinckley back in the 1980s. She was researching a book about the history Young Women organization, and President Hinckley’s mother had been one of the leaders. At the time the media and anti-Mormon publishers were having a field day with the goings-on related to the Mark Hoffman affair, and President Hinckley was bearing the brunt of it, including some nasty comments from supposedly faithful Church members. When this woman entered his office, President Hinckley said with a laugh, “You aren’t going to twist my words and quote me out of context, are you?” She replied by expressing her sincere appreciation to President Hinckley and acknowledging how difficult and lonely it must be for him in his position. He became quite emotional and had to hold back some tears as he thanked her for her support. All I’m saying is that Church leaders are human—in every sense of the word.

All of which makes being one of “bothered” in a community of the “non-bothered” all the more maddening.

John asks if we can we do more than talk? Probably not. I don’t think there is a successful precedent for any other form of protest.

Still, talk is good, and can bring about change. Pressure, (in the form of talk), from inside and outside, lead to changes in our practice of polygamy, our prejudiced priesthood policy, our temple ceremonies, etc.

Outside pressure (from the world) is very important. The Church can only afford to be so many degrees removed from the general mores of the world and remain successful, as the polygamy and priesthood ban chapters of our history demonstrate. Armand Mauss, in The Angel and the Beehive, talks about an “optimal tension” between the forces of assimilation and respectibility on the one hand, and repression and separateness/peculiarity on the other.

This is why I believe the church will ultimately reverse course on the women and priesthood issue, and the Gay issue… it will HAVE to, to maintain that “optimal tension” with “the world.” Otherwise, in future generations the Church will be seen as barbaric and prejudiced, the same way churches that practice polygamy or exclude members based on race/color appear today. It is inevitable.

Whether or not such “civilizing” pressure, as Levi Peterson calls it, can lead to a reversal of the don’t-publicly-question-leaders issue is another matter.

I would like to believe that Elder Oak’s offer is genuine.

Not likely to be effective. Most of those letters simply get forwarded back to local authorities. Some probably get canned responses. Very few likely make it to the apostles themselves as any organization likely has filtering methods in place to make sure that the higher levels don’t have to deal with stuff like that.

You could have some sort of organized resistance/protest. However, unless you and the majority of your organization are willing to lose their membership over this it will not work. Excommunication is a very big trump card. By the way, I wouldn’t sign up for it, so don’t think I am volunteering.

If a few hundred or thousand Mormons simultaneously got themselves into excommunication proceedings, all over being critical, and made a huge stink about it, and made the church look really bad in the media, the authorities would likely back down permanently. It might work. However you would have to ask yourself 1) Could you live with the consequences if you were excommunicated? and 2) Would the church recover from such a stunt?

Darrell

I’m bothered. That’s why I talk to others about it. Can we do more than talk?

Besides the points made by John Hamer in #28, the major systemic “flaw” to me is in our inability to publicly question our leaders, or the church in general, (as evidenced, once again, by a recent church press release), without risk of censure or dismissal from one’s community and family. This seems like such a fundamentally important liberty for the self/soul, (to say nothing of its importance to the health of the institution itself), that its absence frankly shocks me. I don’t understand why more people aren’t bothered by this? When we hear of such a policy in North Korea or in Scientology, we shake our heads with with sadness and disgust. But we not only put up with it in our own community, we embrace it, and members act as co-conspirators with leaders to keep everyone in line.

We do this, in part I suppose, because contention is of the devil. But if contention is of the devil, what do you call a false, Stepford-like, sense of all-is-well harmony?

I’m not trying to be provocative, but what gospel principle outweighs the seeking soul’s right (I would argue “need”) to question God, let alone “men”? Why aren’t more people bothered by this?

Also, I didn’t really believe the test I took with the Scientologists and their interpretation of the results.

I agree. Compared to the Color Code and other simplistic personality models, the MBTI actually delivers concrete results which my students at the university can use to make sense of their major and career direction. I often interpret the Strong Interest Inventory first, and the MBTI if the Strong doesn’t provide a fundamental enough view.

If I had understood I had a sensing preference, I probably never would have wasted my time earning advanced degrees in the humanities in the attempt to break into an intuitive academic discipline. My current job allows me to function in an academic environment and also use my ‘S’. Although my ‘N’ is highly developed, knowing my preferences helps me avoid burnout.

MBTI is theoretically speaking very modest. It doesn’t claim to supplant birth order, environmental influences, or any other factor as the exclusive way to get at personality.

As far as I know, little has been done with LDS and type besides my presentation, which is available for a free listen at the Sunstone site. As I recall, I quoted from standard books by Isabel Briggs Meyers (Gifts Differing), Please Understand Me, Type Talk (particularly a passage on a study of what happens when types are concentrated. Blindspots are concentrated as well.) Plus there is a valuable book called Survival Games the Personalities Play. I have a couple of interesting studies on type preference related to spirituality. Worship styles. Tendencies in the four Gospels to emphasize interests relating to the four basic types. Matthew, SJ, Mark, SP, Luke, NF, and John NT.

Benjamin O. says “
The gross categorization of individuals into the types is a deceptive and simplistic way of examining personality that does a lot to perpetrate misconceptions about the complexity of human interactions.”

I don’t happen to think that MBTI is a gross characterization. I don’t find the claims excessive, deceptive, or simplistic. It doesn’t try to explain everything in the complexity of human interaction. It doesn’t try to diagnose illness, pass judgments, subvert culture, religion, or fully account for a range of biographical, developmental, or biological influences on behavior. It offers merely the pragmatic, observable tendencies that correlate with certain innate preferences. There is a very high correlation between Type and Career (Law, for example, being heavily TJ), particularly downstream in life, when more self-selection occurs, which makes it very useful. It could have saved me a lot of grief when I started at University, by steering me away from Business (heavily STJ), and into English, where I (INFP.. the opposite of the managerial type) eventually prospered and got my degree. MBTI simply describes general tendencies resulting from the interaction of preferences, akin to handedness, for Extraversion vs. Introversion, for getting information from Sensing vs. iNtuition, for deciding based on Thinking (logical) or Feeling (value based, including, but not limited to emotion), and living with Judging (liking to have things decided) or Perception (tending to put of deciding until there is more information).

When my wife and I were undergoing counseling while in California, many years ago, I took the MMPI, a more professional, broader, respectable, instrument, which took hours to work through. According to that instrument, I’m not assertive enough. Too deferential to other people’s feelings. I knew that already. I didn’t find it particularly useful on a day to day basis. Nor can I remember anything else about it overall. However useful the counselor found it, for me, in practical terms, it was a wash.

With MBTI, however, I do have 16 types to consider. It offers much more complexity than the binary “Men are From Mars/Women are from Venus” characterizations (really T versus F). It helps me to appreciate the talents and tendencies of people whose preferences, and therefore, whose gifts differ from mine. (My Bishops, for example). It urges me to consider how and why a minority type (ISFJ, abut 6-9% of women) comes to function as a stereotype for a gender. It urges me to consider the relation between a concentration of type preferences (NT among programmers) and the emergence of something like the “Hacker Ethic”, which struck me as correlating to type preferences. (Focus on sharing information, valuing competence over appearance and degrees, etc.) Plus I do recognize the implications of non-preference in complicating things. (My next older brother is xNTP, combining entrepreneurial and theoretical tendencies.) Plus, Eve Delunas’ interesting observations on what happens with the different basic needs of the types are not met. (Survival Games the Personalities Play, which I think neatly extends the use of type). Plus things like Joe Butt’s web research into the how types interrelate. (My INFP to Shauna’s ENFP he has as “pals”, which I find spot on.) All of these things, I find helpful literally on a daily basis. For me, reading my own INFP type profile was profoundly liberating. It validated who I was, and provided a reason for my oddities. I participated on an INFP mailing list for a couple of years, and found that I had much in common with those people. Yet the differences were also apparent. Type is clearly not everything. That is why I also mentioned the Perry Scheme for Cognitive and Ethical Growth. I recognize that Type is only one tool, only one perspective. Yet I don’t think it criminal to benefit from what it provides me. I’m not about to stop using it.

Kevin Christensen
Pittsburgh, PA

“Life is not intended to be lived in an idyllic Eden” (Neal A. Maxwell, “Not My Will, But Thine.” (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1988), 8.).

One can argue about whether humanity could have persisted in Eden but for the Fall, but since the Fall happened, Eden has never been a destination for the bright ship Humanity, sailing far away. Eden is the naive past. We are now reflective beings, having obtained an awareness of good and evil and, as we choose the good, we strive for a home on a plane far above Eden, where our fulfillment will be complete because we will have chosen it.

#Steve-O….thank you for your post. Through this post I hope I havent given the impression that I didnt enjoy most of my mission. It was a blast most times and I have fond memories. The “abuses” were not bad enough for me to not finish my mission. And to be honest I am not trying to make my mission into a sob story because it wasnt for the most part. It was painful…but growing up is painful!!? Cheers again for your kind words Steve-O.

I am not saying that you fell into this category I am describing. I bet you cared and wanted to serve as well. But were the abuses so bad that you couldn’t chalk it all up to a few immature 20 year olds or a bad President?

I definitely had my own pity party from time to time. But my mission was great because I wouldn’t let anyone ruin it for me.

Instead I made a concious shift to a focus on fidelity or commitment to God, which certainly is volitional;

Faith isn’t knowledge; people who “know” by definition lack faith. Being faithful doesn’t necessarily mean to be believing, either. In our case (for I am in the same boat as you) it can mean simply a commitment to follow the principles we’ve learned.

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Which is a more effective government for individuals and for a nation-state long-term: constitutional democracy or arbitrary dictatorship? The answer’s a no-brainer. For individuals, taken at random, liberty is only guaranteed insofar as the rule of law functions. Under dictatorships, some individuals profit, of course, and most can often be fine, but none are actually as safe from arbitrary whimsy as the average person who lives with legal guarantees. (For nations the picture can be slightly more mixed: democracies are capable of exceedingly stupid acts, and smart dictators are capable of making smart choices that sacrifice a nation’s short-term comforts for the sake of its long-term goals. However, while dumb democracies are unfortunately common, smart dictators with their nation’s interests at heart are extremely rare. Also, even dictatorships with smart dictators have a host of stability problems that are bad for everything.)

The corollary to your truism above is that “In order to be exercised with maximal justice, power needs to operate within the bounds of checks and balances.”

You can call these principles “nature” or you can call them the “human condition,” but if you believe in God, it stands to reason that these are divine principles. I presume that the theistic universe functions in concert with God. God isn’t making individuals who live under dictators suffer in order to illustrate that God loves dictators. Democracies are more effective because leaders operating with checks and balances are more in harmony with God’s plan than leaders who are unchecked.

You’ve heard that it’s the gospel that is true while the church is fallible because it is made up of fallible humans. True enough. But what is not said is that the church is clearly functioning out of harmony with divine principles. That democracy is more in harmony with God’s plan than dictatorship or oligarchy is just as true for a church as it is for a nation or the universe. If it were in harmony with God, inspiration would flow directly from God to the membership, which would use theo-democratic principles to discern God’s will for the church and also to select its leaders. And the membership, through the medium of personal inspiration, would exercise oversight of the leaders, in harmony with the divine principle of checks and balances.

My first year at college at a public university was pivotal in my overcoming the mixture of the good and bad elements of local church youth leadership and the good and bad mixture of LDS youth I was thrown in with during high school. Bonding with a group of true blue LDS college students that I who lived in but not of the world anchored me. They lived their standards not because of any school honor code, but because they believed their lives would be better for it. I was never that rebellious as a youth, but liked to have fun and be sarcastic. The mission experience was a return to some of those good and bad leadership elements that I had known and learned to make the best of. I was blessed to avoid mission leadership positions and was able to do my missionary work and exist fairly naive to mission politics. In spite of the potential to become disaffected, I think of those great college roommates and the individuals in every ward I have been to that are just the salt of the earth. Isn’t developing our “nature and disposition” a major purpose for the gospel? Isn’t overcoming the the tendency to abuse power a theme of the Book of Mormon? There will always be past events in any religion or organization that do not show the organization at its best. I guess I don’t need to be able to justify every questionable act by past church leaders, because I look at the fruit of the people I identify with in my own congregation. (Granted I don’t identify with everyone). In my professional dealings, people generally report favorably from their interactions with me, but there are always some that will think unfavorably with me even though I have provided the same general type of interaction that I have with everyone else. I realize that my best effort to be congenial won’t be enough to secure the trust of someone who doesn’t hit it off with me. I also see “anonymous” #3′s point, as there are some who will be in the Bishop’s position that I may not feel the connection and may not share certain things that I would with another Bishop. I guess I have that kind of wall inside me too. I know that God’s answer for certain problems may not come for a few years or, perhaps, may not be explained in a full during my lifetime. That is where the principle of faith works for me.

Not my experience, but to each his or her own. I would note that I did like Californians and Mormons but wouldn’t consider it anti.