Damage Done to/by the Church or the "church"

Someone on Twitter posted a complaint about a quote from the then-president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Ezra Taft Benson, in the October session of the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Specifically, he said the talk did him and his a lot of damage -- misguided advice kind of damage, the kind that can be very hard to quantify and thus very insidious.

(Ezra Taft Benson was later the President of the Church. Wikipedia has an article on him.)

The talk in question was at the end of the Relief Society session of Conference.

Here's the quote, 21st paragraph if I counted it right:

It is a misguided idea that a woman should leave the home, where there is a husband and children, to prepare educationally and financially for an unforeseen eventuality. Too often, I fear, even women in the Church use the world as their standard for success and basis for self-worth.

Here's my response to the tweet, a little more carefully stated than originally tweeted, and without the artificial length limit on tweets:

I would say far more damage was done by leaders and teachers who failed to read the whole talk, who failed to pray while preparing and giving lessons – who would basically grab this one quote, present it to the class, and then spend the rest of the time talking about other things -- shooting the breeze about sports, cars, work, fashion, academics, laundry, cooking, ..., anything but the Gospel, all sorts of things that would lead the unsuspecting member to apply the standards of the world when interpreting even this one quote -- instead of hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit teach what it means.

Yeah, if you pass over the first part where Elder Benson acknowledges that many members have non-ideal situations, and then take the rest according to the standards of the world instead of God's standards, the quoted part will do damage. 

Any single part of the whole thing will do damage. It should be taken as a whole and read/listened to/parsed carefully according the Holy Spirit.

Truth is like that. Half-truths can do far more damage than outright lies. 

Follow-up thoughts, also a bit more carefully stated, and without the tweet length limits that make it impossible to converse coherently (I'm pretty sure that these follow-up thoughts will not be more palatable to some, for being more coherent):

1. The president of the Quorum of the Twelve is not the prophet as long as there is a living president of the First Presidency -- different callings, different blessings. The prophet has some specific blessings and restrictions about what he should say, especially at conference. Others, even the next guy in line, do not have the same blessings and restrictions, and may well speak to specific contexts. That is the case here.
   
   
2. You've heard it before, and you've heard that people use it as an excuse to quit listening at all and therefore say it must not be correct, but from Joseph Smith to the present, every prophet has reminded us to study and follow faithfully and prayerfully, to get our own testimony, to get our own instructions from God.
   
   It is true that the counsel we receive from God will not contradict instruction from the prophet, but it may well contradict what appears to be instruction and counsel from others besides the prophet. It may even appear to contradict counsel from the prophet, when the prophet gives counsel to people in situations not our own.
   
   Borrowing from the language of mathematics, when we start implementing things, context is very important. That's why we need that Holy Spirit to guide us in our implementation, and all the general counsel in the world is not enough to tell us every little thing about specific implementation. We need the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
   
   It remains true, and when the outward church – the social church – teases members for getting their own instructions because, oh my goodness, we can't be THAT different, the social church partakes of the spirit of the great and abominable.


3. What Elder Benson said was not exactly wrong. He mentioned, didn't he, that Adam and Eve labored together? Both labored. Together.
   
   Maybe he seems to have failed to emphasize enough that a man should not be leaving the home entirely to the woman, but at least he repeats and emphasizes the necessity for cooperation.
   
   In not just a metaphorical sense, neither one should be leaving the home.
   
   In a more literal sense, the woman will naturally and generally be the one to be more directly responsible in the home -- that is, in the statistically usual case. The general case is theoretical. Actual particular cases vary from the general case in different degrees, and variance from the hypothetical general case is not a sin in and of itself.
   
   But if either the man or the woman sets the responsibility for the home aside in trade for the things of the world, they are choosing the lesser thing. They are choosing the world over God.
   
   
4. So much of the semantic burden of the metalanguage Elder Benson uses here has since been turned backwards and/or upside-down by changes in common English usage.
   
   Specific to this case, interpreted according to current common usage, it may seem like he is advocating for self-forced subservience for women.
   
   But he says both parents should be sacrificing for the family. Not just one.
   
   And self-forced subservience is at total odds with the Gospel. God will forgive people who make this mistake concerning themselves, who try to force themselves into a subservient position, when they learn and accept the teaching that service is usually not really the best kind of service when it is subservient or forced.
   
   God will not easily forgive people who make the mistake of deliberating pushing others into subservience, especially into self-reinforced subservience. But if they sincerely turn back to Him, they can be forgiven, too.
   

Jesus explained something relative to this to the twelve when James and John asked to be allowed to sit on His right and left:


And whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all. (Mark 10: 44.)


I'm not making this up. It is repeated elsewhere in scripture.

If we understand this principle, it is easier to understand what Elder Benson is saying in this talk. If we don't understand that priesthood is not supposed to be about personal glory and pomp, it may well be easier to misread this talk, precisely because, in the meta-language of the world, priesthood is about aggrandizement and the trappings of power, not about service.


Too much of the outward social church accepts the metalanguage of the world, in spite of all the cautions we receive against that twice a year in conference talks.

Hey. Elder Benson cautioned about this very thing in at least two specific places in this talk.

I'm not saying anyone is to blame for misunderstanding this talk, although a man who uses it to try to put himself above his wife will be under condemnation from God for other reasons, if not for deliberately misunderstanding this talk. That may be why it was given in the Relief Society session instead of the general session, so that the men who wouldn't listen carefully would be less likely to be tempted to abuse themselves and their wives by it.

[Adding a bit after the initial post:] More to the point, it was in fact about this time that women in the Church began to be counseled specifically to prepare for the unforeseen. Not to "leave the home ... to prepare educationally and financially for an unforeseen eventuality", but to take advantage of opportunities to develop marketable skills in case something untoward happened. 

There is a reason for the timing here. The context of the "average Mormon" family during the sixties through mid-eighties was an unusually stable context. That stability started to crumble in the mid-eighties. [End of addition.] 

[It's after one in the morning here, I should be hitting the shower and getting to bed, but I think I need to add just a little bit more:] There have been several points of inflection in my life, where I could accuse myself of allowing outward/social church teachings to influence me to be lazy and take the easy way out, to the detriment of my (then-) future career, which have (theoretically) left me less able to be a "proper" bread-winner for my family.

One is when I let the understanding that rock concerts tend to be a type of idolatry, and the understanding that trying to be a non-idolatrous pop star would take more experience and wisdom than I had as a teenager in the 1970s, to influence me away from trying to learn an instrument and form a band. (Should I note the errors in logic in such thought processes? I'm sure they're fairly obvious.)

Another is when I chose physics over football in high school. (But, for the record, I think I learned much more important things -- for my own health -- by then filling the gap left by lack of football with modern dance. I'm still a fan of American football, but the things I learned from dance would not have been available to me in West Texas Football programs.)

Yet another is when I let my decision to serve a mission turn me away from attending MIT on scholarship in the late 1970s. My high school counselors were seriously frustrated with me on that point. (Again, what errors in logic are there in asserting that it was a mistake for me to go to Japan in 1979 instead of MIT in 1978?)

Many such inflection points.

The football decision may be a little easier to look at because it does not directly involve over-the-pulpit or by-the-book Church teachings. Each person makes trade-offs in the decisions we make on our way through life. Those trade-offs do us "damage", I suppose. But it would be more accurate to say that closing one door opens another. [End of second addition.]

Anyway, yes, if you want to be saved in the kingdom of God, your testimony of the Gospel has to go beyond your testimony of the truth of your fellow members' testimonies. 

Just because everyone in the Relief Society or Priesthood lesson seems to agree that a particular conference talk means X does not mean that any member of the Relief Society or Priesthood quorum should accept X without prayer, especially when it runs against conscience.