Lying for the Lord?

One common argument against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that Mormons are encouraged to deceive others if it is for a good cause.  The claim is that we are taught to protect the image of the church, even if it means we need to resort to lies and deceit, a practice called "lying for the Lord."

The truth is that we are regularly taught to be honest, and have integrity in all that we do.  If enemies of the church can convince others that we are all liars, then they will have convinced them to automatically dismiss anything that we say, no matter what.  However, Mormons are still human, and anyone looking for examples of lying will be able to find them.  Those against the church use these examples and remove the context and circumstances that led to the lie, or misunderstand the statement and treat it as a lie, and at the same time ignore similar examples of deceit in their own beliefs.

I was recently shown a video that gives many common and more obscure examples of "Lying for the Lord."  I will be discussing my opinions on the statements in the video, point-by-point.

• Boyd K. Packer, an Apostle in the church, once taught, "There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful"  Isn't this telling Church historians to leave out history if it isn't faith-promoting?

This is a statement from the talk, The Mantle is Far, Far Greater than the Intellect.  Elder Packer was not speaking to Church historians.  He was speaking to members of the Church Educational System.  These are the seminary and institute teachers, whose purpose is to teach the doctrines of the gospel.  They will teach the history of the church, too, but with the purpose to show the hand of the Lord in the church.

The same principle applies to those in other faiths: nobody demands seminary teachers of other religions to only speak about what contemporaries said about Jesus Christ.  Even in secular schools, people understand that some things that are true are not very useful.  Nobody gets upset when a teacher leaves out laws of relativity when teaching Newtonian motion.  These are left out because they aren't useful in this context.  But a church historian will be able to use historical statements in their historical context, and a physicist will use relativity in its context.

• Church lesson manuals are written in such a way as to hide or rewrite embarrassing teaching or facts to make in order to make the doctrine of the church look as if it has always been consistent with the current teachings.

Church lesson manuals are not history books.  Again, they are for teaching doctrines of the gospel.  The lesson manuals themselves make this quite clear-- In the Introduction to the Teachings of Presidents of the Church books there is a section called "Teachings for our Day" that explains that it uses the teachings that are applicable to our day, and leaves out plural marriage and other things that don't apply to our day.  (Example)

• Paintings show Joseph translating the golden plates as he runs his fingers over the characters imprinted on them.  However, every eye-witness account states that the translation process did not involve the plates.  Instead, Joseph would gaze into his magic seer stones, which were placed in a hat and dictate the text.  The plates were usually in another room, hidden in the woods, or somewhere else.

It is true that artistic license can give people unrealistic perceptions, but is the artist intending to deceive us?  Thanks to CSI, people have unrealistic expectations of actual crime scene investigation, but I don't think anyone would accuse CSI of trying to deceive us.  When artists use artistic license, they are trying to send a message that will relate to their audience.  This is especially true in religious art, where the spiritual aspect is emphasized from what would otherwise be the mundane.  The religious are not the only ones accused of distorting facts using art.  Artists are no more historians than historians are artists.

But the real complaint is that the Church is trying to hide this history.  The FAIR wiki article on accuracy of Church art contains references to church publications that talk about or mention the stone in the hat story.  If the church was trying to hide this story, it wouldn't appear in the Ensign.

Here I want to interject something.  The problem with the idea that the church encourages us to lie is that the church is entirely a lay ministry.  So if the claim that the church hides history from us is true, then we are all hiding history from each other.  The narrator says he wishes he knew this story before his mission, presumably because he felt like he had lied, and was upset that he had been lied to.  If he didn't know about this story of using a hat in the translation, isn't it reasonable that those who taught him didn't know the story either?  I also didn't know this story with the hat until after my mission.  When I did learn it my younger sister was surprised that I hadn't heard it before.  Is it really hiding the truth if you don't mention something you've never heard of?  I don't think so.

Also, if the reason for "Lying for the Lord" is to remove the "weird" things about what we believe, why do we teach anything unique to our faith?  Pretty much everything we believe is considered "weird" by those of other faiths.

• Mormons claim to know the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith's experiences with the divine, and many other things they cannot possibly know.

God reveals His truth to mankind through the Holy Ghost.  Atheists discount our experiences (and those of other faiths) as impossible, based on the assumption that there is no God.  We can know the things we "cannot possibly know" only through revelation from God.  (More on this under the next bullet.)

• Elder Oaks taught that members of the church should bear their testimony, even if they don't have one.  This is an excellent way to make yourself believe just about anything, by generating an artificial emotional experience.  However, it is not a way to gain knowledge, as much as it is a way to fool yourself.  Oaks is encouraging people to lie in order to make themselves believe in the church.  He is literally encouraging people to bear false witness.

Elder Oaks begins this talk by talking about what it means to know the gospel is true: "What do we mean when we testify and say that we know the gospel is true? Contrast that kind of knowledge with 'I know it is cold outside' or 'I know I love my wife.' These are three different kinds of knowledge, each learned in a different way. Knowledge of outside temperature can be verified by scientific proof. Knowledge that we love our spouse is personal and subjective. While not capable of scientific proof, it is still important. The idea that all important knowledge is based on scientific evidence is simply untrue."

This teaching that one can gain a testimony from bearing it comes from a 1982 talk from Boyd K. Packer, The Candle of the Lord.  This has been repeated in general conference since then.  Those who have taught this consistently teach that we gain this revelation as we testify of things that we already believe.  Elder Packer said in his talk, "It is one thing to receive a witness from what you have read or what another has said; and that is a necessary beginning. It is quite another to have the Spirit confirm to you in your bosom that what you have testified is true." (emphasis added.)  This isn't a "fake it 'till you make it" method of gaining a testimony, but instead testifying of what you know, and from there what you know will grow.

Relevant to this and the previous bullet, Elder Packer began his talk by describing the difficulty of explaining to atheists this revelation from the Holy Ghost, comparing it to trying to describe salt to someone who has never tasted it before.  It is one thing to study salt, but we will never know what it tastes like until we taste it ourselves.  Just because someone hasn't tasted salt doesn't mean that they can tell me that I haven't tasted it.

• Joseph Smith started taking secret plural wives sometime around 1833. He publicly denied that he practiced plural marriage his entire life.  In May 1844, Joseph was accused of being a polygamist by William Law.  Joseph publicly denied this accusasion, however when he made his denial, he was already sealed to over 20 women, about a third of whom were already married.

Yes, Joseph Smith lied about practicing polygamy.  This was not in an effort to make the church look good, even without polygamy the church had plenty of enemies.  In fact, Joseph was anxious to teach the principal of plural marriage to others.  But polygamy was so unacceptable to society that Joseph could introduce it only in absolute secrecy.  But isn't this an still an example of the ends justify the means?  Hardly.  This event ultimately led to Joseph Smith being killed in jail by a mob in June 1844.

The secrecy surrounding plural marriage contains legitimate examples of lying in church history.  But the reason for lying is because they were engaging in civil disobedience and protecting themselves.  It helps to understand the historical context surrounding the lying about polygamy.  The short version is that lying about polygamy was in answer to a serious moral dilemma that we do not face today, and polygamy was kept secret for the safety of those church members who were practicing it.

• In a well-publicized debate between John Taylor and a protestant minister in 1850, John Taylor denied the charge that the church practiced polygamy.  To prove to his audience that the church was not, he read from the doctrine and convents which said that strict monogamy was the law of the church.  However when he did this, Taylor was married to at least 12 women.

In the 1950 debate between John Taylor and three ministers in France, Mr. Robinson made several other accusations along with the accusation that the Mormons were practicing polygamy.  John Taylor said, "these things are too outrageous to admit of belief," and just reads a scripture.  So while he's not lying, it's true that he isn't telling the whole truth.  Polygamy was kept secret until it was publicly announced in 1852.  Though some practiced polygamy in secret, monogamy was the standard before it was taught publicly.  While there is disagreement on  how many wives these early leaders had, it is clear that they were practicing polygamy.

• The section of the Doctrine and Covenants that Taylor read from was added to the cannon in 1835 while polygamy was being practiced in secret by Joseph.  Even after Brigham Young publicly announced that the church was practicing plural marriage, it remained in the LDS scriptures for a couple more decades before being removed and replaced with Joseph's revelation on polygamy.

Section 101 was written by Oliver Cowdery as a statement of belief, not by Joseph Smith as a revelation.  At the time, there were limited printing facilities in Utah, so the church continued using the 1845 Liverpool edition.  Later Liverpool editions were reprints using stereotypes, and it would have been expensive to make changes at that time.  It was in 1876 that Orson Pratt, under the direction of Brigham Young, revised the Doctrine and Covenants.  The major revision being the addition of 26 sections, and the removal of section 101.  The story of the doctrine and covenants has been published in the church magazine, the Ensign.  It is neither secret nor hidden.

• After Church president Wilford Woodruff published the manifesto on polygamy, church leaders including Woodruff, continued to take wives and/or perform plural marriages in secret.  No one was punished for this post-manifesto polygamy until 1911 when apostle John W. Taylor was excommunicated for performing plural marriages.

While we see the manifesto today as the end of plural marriage, it was not understood this way at the time.  It would be more correct to say this was the beginning of the end of plural marriage.  At the time, the saints understood the manifesto to be a revelation, but they did not understand it to mean all plural marriages are universally forbidden.  It was after Joseph F. Smith issued the second manifesto in 1904 that used more specific language that the practice eventually ceased entirely.  The language in the second confirmed the intention of the first for all plural marriages to cease, and that those solemnizing plural marriages will be excommunicated.

• Joseph Smith and Sydney Rigdon illegally started a bank in Kirtland after being denied by the Ohio government.  So they called it an anti-banking company (whatever that is) and lied about having the capital to back up their bank notes by displaying chests of junk covered with a thin layer of silver coins to potential investors.

There existed at the time some corporations that interpreted their charters as allowing them to carry out bank-like functions.  Perhaps this is why Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon felt that they could legally allow the Kirtland Safety Society to act as a bank.  Because of the immediate need for liquid assets, they may not have had time to receive much legal counsel.  Without a banking charter, the people lost faith in its money.  Even with a charter, it would likely have failed because of the financial crisis of 1837.  Later that year, Joseph and Sidney are found guilty at a jury trial of the civil offense of illegal banking and issuing unauthorized bank paper currency.

Joseph bought a safe a few months prior to attempting to charter the Kirtland Bank, but the safe's dimensions were 25x24x29 inches, hardly big enough to be considered a vault and contain the boxes of junk from the stories given by various apostates.  The founders of the bank probably had enough genuine liquid assets to operate.  Joseph was probably hasty and naive about running a bank, but they didn't extort money and in fact they worked to repay their debts even years later.

• The church has edited, re-written, added, and removed many sections of their scriptures and publications in order to make it seem like Mormon Doctrine has always been consistent with the current teachings of the church.

We have already spoken about some of the changes made to the scriptures and also how church manuals are to teach us the doctrine of our day.  These are not to distort the past and make doctrine seem consistent.  We know that the church was different back then.  No one is trying to deceive anyone.  The image on the screen during this statement is of the changes made to what is now Doctrine and Covenants 27.  These changes were mentioned in that same article on the editions of the Doctrine and Covenants.  There it said that chapter 28 of the Book of Commandments was combined with a later revelation to make our current section 27.

• Hyrum Smith's Book of Mormon Elder Holland was holding was different from pictures of Hyrum's Book pictured in the Church News.  The church came out and said that Holland did have the correct book.  The church was trying to cover up Holland being less than honest by giving him a way to save face.

In 2007, descendants of George A. and Bathsheba Smith donated artifacts to the church, and the story was published in the Church News.  One of the items was a Book of Mormon, believed by these descendants to be the copy George's cousin Hyrum Smith read from before he and Joseph were martyred.  During the week after Elder Holland's 2009 conference talk, the Deseret News published an article about Hyrum Smith's Book of Mormon.  The copy that Elder Holland displayed was with descendants of Mercy Thompson, Hyrum's sister-in-law, until 1944.

It seems reasonable to me for Elder Holland to want to use the book that had belonged to church historians for 65 years over one donated only 2 years ago.  It also seems clear that the older book has had its ownership better documented.  Even in the Church News article, the image of the Book of Mormon is captioned, "Page remains turned down, perhaps in honor of Hyrum Smith."  When you are looking for deception, you are going to find it, even if it doesn't exist.

• Since the church introduced plural marriage and practiced it for years, and continues to allow widowers to be sealed again, and to have it still taught as an essential part of becoming a God in their scriptures, to say we have connection with any polygamist groups is a lie.

Celestial marriage is essential for exhalation, but nowhere in our scriptures does it say plural marriage is.  Remarriage after the death of a spouse occurs with people of different faiths all the time.  The only difference is that we actually believe marriage lasts beyond death.  The vast majority of Mormons and non-Mormons see serial polygamy as completely different than parallel polygamy.

When Elder Cook says "there's no connection" with polygamous groups, he isn't saying that we don't share a common history, or even that don't share some common beliefs.  He's saying that they are not part of our church.  When people call them Mormons, others automatically assume that means they are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  When they see these groups called Mormons, they assume that our church approves of their actions.  Even though "Mormon" should refer to anyone who believes the Book of Mormon, this is not how the vast majority of the population use this word.

• When President Hinkley was asked why the church doesn't publish their budgets, he said, "That information belongs to those who made the contribution, and not to the world."  Full-tithe paying members have ever seen this information, so President Hinkley is a liar.

Members do see this information-- how much they donated to the church.  This is what President Hinkley was saying.

• Egyptologists translate The Book of Abraham completely different.  This shows that Joseph Smith was a fraud.

While we do not have the original papyrus for the text of the Book of Abraham, we do have the facsimiles.  Egyptologists do not translate the facsimiles the same as Joseph Smith.  I don't think there's anything wrong with symbols having multiple meanings.  Why can't Osiris returning to life be symbolic of Abraham being saved from sacrifice?  No one takes the parables of Jesus at face value, so why can't we do the same for Egyptian art?

• For Elder Holland to dismiss the Papyrus as an unrelated revelatory vehicle when members are taught that Joseph Smith translated it, it is a denial of official church doctrine and claims of Joseph Smith.

 Elder Holland says, "All I'm saying is that what got translated got translated into the word of God.  The vehicle for that I don't understand, and don't claim to know, and know no Egyptian."  He doesn't say the papyrus was "an unrelated vehicle," but rather a vehicle that he doesn't understand.  In fact, the one claim that he does make is that it was translated into the word of God.  How is this different from what we are taught?

• Michael Purdy, spokesman for the LDS Church, first said he didn't know whether the Strengthening Church Members committee existed, then said it did exist.

The first time, the interviewer asked two questions, "What's the Strengthening Church Members committee?  And does it still exist?"  Couldn't Mr. Purdy have been answering the first question when he said he didn't know?  When the interviewer then only asked if it exists, Michael answered yes, but he didn't know what it does, but would find someone that did.  But I don't know what Mr. Purdy's train of thought was.  Maybe he actually did think he could lie if there were no follow-up questions?  If so, this is a pretty weak example of lying.  I wish all liars would immediately tell the truth when a question is repeated.

• President Monson told the story of Thomas B. Marsh about stealing milk strippings.  This is a false story, and he knows it is false.

I took the liberty and watched the video he references here.  The claim that it is a false story is likely true, since it didn't appear until George A. Smith told the story in 1856.  The second video describes that the real reason Thomas B. Marsh left the church is told in an affidavit he signed describing the actions Mormons took in the 1838 Mormon War in the burning of Gallatin.  The reason he says that President Monson knows that the milk strippings is a false story is because he references that affidavit.

In reality, President Monson is only referencing the George A. Smith story, which itself references the affidavit.  But doesn't that mean George A. Smith is lying?  Without knowing where he got the story, it is hard to say.  When Thomas B. Marsh rejoined the church in 1857, he published an autobiography in the Millennial Star.  He did not mention this story, and only said that "I got a beam in my eye and thought I could discover a mote in Joseph's eye."  Although the story probably isn't true, being aware of the affidavit doesn't automatically mean the burning of Gallatin was the only reason he left the church.  People leave the church for multiple reasons all the time.

* * *

The rest of the video speaks about the temple, which I believe is sacred and so choose not to discuss.  It is implied that the reason I don't speak about it is because it is "weird" or that it will turn people away from the church.  While I know some people think it is weird, my first experience in the temple wasn't weird to me at all.  Rather, I felt like everything I had learned while in the church came together in the temple.  I would like for everyone to be able to come to the temple and experience the peace and joy I find there.  But just as you wouldn't baptize someone that hasn't first prepared for that covenant, one cannot enter the temple until they are prepared for the temple covenants.

This is the gospel of Jesus Christ-- to have faith in Him, repent of our sins, be baptized, receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, and endure to the end.  When we know that Joseph Smith was chosen by Jesus Christ to be a prophet and restore the church He established, then we know that these "weird" things Joseph Smith taught were revealed to him by Jesus Christ.  It is only through the Holy Ghost that anyone can know these things, and no amount of "lying for the lord" is going to convince anyone.