It used to be that one could sit in an LDS ward and be regaled with speculations about the location of the Lost Ten Tribes or hear the latest mundane duties of the Three Nephites (jump-starting cars, etc.). If there is one thing we can thank (?) Christian anti-Mormons for, its the complete desiccation of the Mormon mythological imagination. Sure, they aren't the only culprits.
There are plenty of people in every ward who have little tolerance for anything that smacks of imagination or creativity. These people, like most Mormons, have not figured out that Joseph Smith was a mythographer par excellence. Instead they prefer the parched diatribes of a pompous Bruce R. McConkie, who seems to have honestly believed there was such a thing as Mormon doctrine, and who took it upon himself to define that for everyone else.
It used to be, however, that Mormon doctrine had more to do with which General Authority happened to have written that year's priesthood manual than anything else. As a result you got B.H. Roberts' Seventies Course in Theology or Widstoe's Rational Theology, both of which make contemporary LDS manuals look like the ingredients to a bar of soap. Since the definition of Mormon theology was so fluid, people seemed to understand that there was an element of personal interpretation to it. Therefore, they unabashedly engaged in public speculations right in the ward house.
Sadly, Correlation put an end to interesting manuals and more unforunately yet, Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine was the final book by a GA to claim to explicate doctrine. Without another Widstoe or Roberts to follow, the book that should never have been (the prophet, David McKay, told BRM not to publish it) evolved into the armchair theologian's guide to putting everyone else in their place. This led to the oft-heard refrain "well, McConkie said . . ." that rang in LDS meetinghouses across the land for decades.
The other option was,"well, Nibley said . . ." which was heard far less often, and for very good reasons: 1) hardly anyone could understand what Nibley was saying, 2) Nibley was not a GA, and 3) to anyone who cared to listen and could understand, it was clear that Nibley was really a Brigham Young Marxist. Still, one might hear the Nibley name, if only in reference to trouncing anti-Mormons somehow (the anti-Mormons are still puzzled by his responses too).
As this was all happening, the Church was flooded with new converts, who came from a predominantly Protestant background. These people came with a hard-won testimony of Joseph Smith's prophetic calling and the the truth of the Book of Mormon as a witness of Christ. What they did not bargain for was odd tales about how the Three Nephites mowed the lawn just in time for the ward picnic or some such.
The more vocal among them started registering their complaints. They joined forces with the retreating McConkieites with the exclamation, "THAT'S NOT DOCTRINE!," which for them was in reality, "if that's anything close to what we're about, I'm outta here!" For these folks it was necessary to quote C.S. Lewis liberally as a mediation between the Christianity they formerly believed in, and the Christianity avec Smith that they had now embraced. By processing it all through Lewis, the wonkie bits were thankfully shaved off.
The coup de grace, however, came from the multi-pronged attack of the Church, the BYU Religion Department, and FARMS. The Church made its contribution through the production of utterly vacuous, white-washed "prophet" manuals, and statements on the primacy of Mormon canon in the establishment of doctrine. Between these two moves it became clear that Mormon doctrine was now a matter of plausible deniability. Since no one can afford, or really wants to wade through the vast, murky swamp of the Journal of Discourses, the fact that Brigham Young had much more colorful things to say than "Jesus is the Savior" is lost on most people. Brigham is so much easier to deal with when you can edit him down to stuff like that.
Some of the faculty at BYU's Religion Department have decided that the time has come to make overtures to the rest of the Christian world. They have invited Evangelicals to speak on BYU campus. They have written books about Jesus that help others understand how truly Christian we are. Stephen Robinson co-authored a book entitled, How Wide the Divide which seemed to me to be an exercise in defining Mormonism as narrowly as possible so as not to appear un-Christian in any way. In reality the divide is much wider than Robinson let on.
The chimaerical beast called FARMS makes its contributions too. Plausibility is the first and last word in FARMS apologetics. At FARMS it is not what one can prove, but that one can make a case for the inability of others to disprove Mormon claims that is really the important thing. FARMS is about so many things, all of them much more dreadfully tedious than Three Nephite and Danite tales. If you drop by the nasty, younger-sibling version of FARMS called FAIR, you will be treated to their chant, "You Can't Prove It!" Oddly, the things we can't prove are the Mormonism that most of us got to know through our ancestors and Church history. Now that this version is too explosive for the masses, it is apparently necessary to pretend that it either never existed or was horribly misconstrued.
All of these forces have contributed to the rendering of ward meetings into a sure-fire cure for insomnia. Everyone sits around either avoiding dangerous (read "interesting") statements or trying to make answers like "prayer," "the Spirit," and "obedience" sound fresh for the billionth time. The new refrain at Church is, "we are repeating simple things because we still haven't learned how to live them." Behind every instance of that statement lies the sad realization that church is destined to be a mind-numbing waste of too much time for the rest of our short lives.
