I don’t remember many details from last Sunday, but I do remember that it felt incredibly luxurious and that it was full of a lot of rest and relaxing and that it felt delicious. I’m not even sure how that all happened, but I’m guessing it was a combination of good naps from Clarissa, Stake Conference (church only 2 hours), tv for the kids, and Ammon having a long quiet time/nap time. It felt like what a Sunday should be. A time for nourishment, healing and rejuvenation and preparation for the week ahead.
Lily stayed home from Stake conference because it was right during Clarissa’s nap time. While home, Lily wrote an article on prophetic fallibility which has been a very important topic for her lately. Lily feels that many people leave the church when they stumble into troubling church history because they can’t handle the idea of the church’s leaders doing crazy wrong things. That cognitive dissonance was destroying Lily inside until she had her epiphany that sometimes even the prophets get things super wrong, and that that is o-k, that the church is still true and inspired, and that all humans have weakness, and that is all God has to work with. It’s a beautiful concept that should put less pressure on the prophet and also less pressure on the saints to treat everything a prophet says as direct instruction from the mouth of God. Instead, it is better to weigh heavily the words of the prophet, but to make your ultimate source of truth your own judgment as enlightened by the Holy Spirit of God. The article is great. It is below:
Prophetic Fallibility: A Light
For most faithful members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, facing uncomfortable facts about church history or policy often feels like a test of testimony. The practice of polygamy, the priesthood ban on blacks, and current anti-LGTBQ policies are just three troubling aspects of the Church that, upon closer examination, can leave members reeling–or compel members to leave.
It does not need to be this way.
As those who have studied these issues and chosen to stay can likely attest, there is a logical answer to not only these problems, but indeed, every problem in church history and policy. That answer is prophetic fallibility.
Prophetic fallibility may appear on the surface to be something we all agree on, and yet the practical application of this principle feels heterodox to many. We just finished sitting through fifteen years of church manuals which began every lesson with stories of how the prophet of the year exemplified the gospel principle of the lesson. We have mutilated and taken D&C 1:38 out of its original context so many times that we commonly treat the prophet’s words as a literal read on the mind of God. And in our most recent conference, not only did we hear routine praises of the prophet sung by various speakers, but we were reminded that the prophet himself has said he reacts to prophetic utterances with exclamation points instead of question marks.
In our church meetings, when the subject of prophetic revelation arises, almost inevitably someone raises a hand to say that we do not blindly follow the prophet. Instead, this comment continues, we are invited to receive our own personal confirmation of prophetic counsel. In my twenty-two years of church attendance, I have never once heard anyone comment about what to do if our personal revelation leads us to reject the words of the prophet.
Prophets are indeed called of God, but they are also mortal, fallen, and subject to acting on their own bias, ignorance, and even base desires. This should not be news, but it feels like news. Current members and leaders alike unapologetically defend the history of the church. If the Book of Mormon is true, these people insist that everything that followed must also be true. Polygamy was inspired. The priesthood ban on blacks was both instituted and removed by God. God, whose first pronouncement after declaring Adam good was that it was “not good for man to be alone,” now commands our LGBTQ members to live a lifetime of loneliness, so devoid of hope that Wikipedia actually has a page on Mormon LGBTQ suicide rates.
On the whole, it seems as though Mormons would rather worship a malignant God and deal with the subsequent misogyny, racism, and suicide among our own than find fault with our prophets or their policies.
This is not to say that the words of our prophet and past prophets are never inspired. Just yesterday I attended my own stake conference and came away profoundly uplifted and inspired by the new counsel on ministering. President Nelson has acted as a prophetic oracle for me on the subject of ministering, on living the higher law of Sabbath Day observance, and of outlining how critical women are to the work of the Lord. I give his words and the words of all of my leaders the best of my religious attention. When the prophet speaks, I consider it my covenant duty to give their words extra weight in my mind and heart.
But for many years–long, embarrassing years–I confused “following the prophet” with following the Spirit. I fell into the Mormon culture trap and assumed the prophet’s words and the mind of God were the same. I assumed that in order to be active and faithful, I had to ignore the cognitive dissonance at the back of my mind. After all, my own thoughts paled in comparison to God’s, whose thoughts were higher than my own. If the prophet’s words were God’s thoughts, then any cognitive dissonance I experienced was simply evidence of how fallen I am. Though the following statement might sound like lunacy to non-Mormons, I believe most Mormons will understand: Even in the midst of racking cognitive and emotional pain, I never seriously entertained the notion that the prophet could ever get it wrong on an issue that mattered.
I remember the first time I realized that I needed to take personal responsibility for my own views. Sharing this will date my epiphany as all too shamefully recent. I was reading All the Light We Cannot See for the second time, and I came across the passage where Frederick refuses to throw icy water onto the dying Russian. All of the other young Nazis in training throw the water when ordered, but Frederick refuses.
I read this passage and froze.
I read the passage over. I read it again. Then I read it once more.
I realized that I was not Frederick. In my profession of ignorance as to the why’s and how’s of God, I was upholding a system of belief that literally kills people, spiritually and physically. Yes, the Church is the place I go for personal spiritual sustenance, where I find a beautiful community and lean into the grace of God, where I have literally found family, but for others–my LGBTQ brothers and sisters, my black brothers and sisters, my fellow women who feel pain from the fall-out of polygamy culture and the current all-male aspect of the priesthood–the Church is not a haven. Or if it is a spiritual haven for them, it is also a place of distinct and extreme exposure.
The Church remains the bride of Christ, and so much of it is breathtakingly, stunningly beautiful, but we can still do better. But if we hope to keep our beautiful church healthy and relevant for us and our children, we must be willing to face the ugly, uncomfortable aspects of our culture. We must be willing to face these aspects, apologize for them, and then disown them. We need our leaders and prophet to apologize for episodes of our past and acknowledge fallibility and weakness in the present. Above all we need to emphasize, as President Nelson did this past conference, personal revelation. The prophet does not doctrinally function as our intermediary with God, and we should cease to treat him as such.
Only then will we begin to behold the light our culture has yet to see.
