When will the LDS church cease to be driven by its fears and become an open and honest champion of Truth, instead of constantly obsessing over image?
Is it not entirely reasonable to expect the church to inform its young men and women about their church’s actual history before they are placed in the front line on streets around the world? Unless they know about these and many other critical issues, (which for the sake of brevity I will not detail here, though I have touched upon some of them in my previous letters), then how may it ever be said that these young men and women are legitimate representatives of the religious system they are sent out to promote? And if they are unfamiliar with the true nature of that system and the real history behind the ‘cure’ they believe they are taking to the rest of the world, then are they not by definition grossly misinformed, sweet pea and programmed to misinform others? Has their choice not been compromised, limited, or coerced in some degree by withholding from them what they really ought to know? Their ignorance, (and let’s be clear here, it is a wilful ignorance imposed upon them by the highest leadership of the church), is potentially a profound danger not just to themselves, but to others as well.
Following on from this is one of the saddest matters of all. It is a lamentable fact that not all those young people who enter the mission field starry-eyed and misinformed, will return home alive to their families and friends after serving their term. Missions are potentially dangerous enterprises, and too often, as you know, tragedies occur. Concerning those who do not return alive at the end of their service, the question must be asked whether they would actually have gone in the first place, had they and their families been properly informed about the real history. After all, it is a matter of record that many after completing their missions, for the first time do encounter authentic LDS history, and then leave in disgust. Might some already have been spared untimely deaths if church leaders had been open and honest with our young people all along? The stark and dreadful answer to that question unfortunately, is an almost certain ‘yes’.
The fact that some, after being advised of the historical realities, might decide to refuse a call to missionary service, should never justify withholding those realities from them
Some at least would not have surrendered their lives in promoting the LDS gospel if they had initially been told the truth: about Joseph Smith’s marital shenanigans; his evolving account of The First Vision; his proven inability to translate Egyptian; his readiness nevertheless to claim that an ancient papyrus which the church owned was a lost Book of Abraham, (whereas it was in actuality a pagan Egyptian funerary text which made no mention of Abraham); and the archaeological, textual and DNA advances in recent years, which highlight a series of anomalies which cast the gravest doubt upon an ancient origin of the Book of Mormon.
Despite these evidences, some, it has to be acknowledged, would still wish to serve LDS missions even having been made aware of the substantial challenges which now exist to the orthodox LDS narrative, but others, (perhaps many), you must equally acknowledge, would not. They would undoubtedly say, with a fuller knowledge available to them that they would invest their time instead in other pursuits. When a person places their life on the line for any cause, is it not their moral right to know every available detail about that cause? Who then is going to own responsibility for allowing ignorance to fuel these tragic losses? Do you really imagine that the Jesus of the New Testament would make light of such a situation? Dying for, or even just wasting one’s precious time in promoting what is subsequently found to be flawed tenets and false histories, is no trivial matter. Would careful avoidance of such (potentially fatal) ignorance not always be far preferable to accomplishing arbitrary missionary targets?