So, in my book the PBS documentary "The Mormons" was a wonderful thing. One of the best parts of it, however, may not get a lot of attention. For this reason I have decided to post a link to this awesome resource: the documentary interviews. These interviews are longer versions of the material that went into the documentary. Even these interviews are edited, and I dearly hope that PBS gets wise and puts together a resource for accessing all of the interviews in their unedited entirety.
Here I will quote some of my favorite bits from the Gregory Prince interview. Prince is co-author of the recent biography of David O. McKay. His views match my own so well that I wish I had half a dozen people like him in the boundaries of my ward who were active and reasonably vocal about their views. I might even go to Church again, if that were the case. Anyway, here is Prince...
On gay rights and the marriage amendment:
"The question is, what is the real issue about gay rights, about same-gender marriage? Is this really a threat to the institution of marriage? No. That's a straw man. The threat to the institution of marriage is heterosexuals who either thumb their noses at marriage in the first place or who don't take the marriage covenant seriously. To put all of that on the backs of gays who want to establish a legal union is cruel, and it's wrong. ...
There is irony if you step back and look at the current situation regarding gay marriage, and another situation that also involved marital relations, and that was 19th-century polygamy. ... Where we've come down on the two is quite different, and yes, I think there is irony in that. ... And yet if you are stepping back, each one of those is a reinterpretation of the traditional family. ... There is irony in comparing them a century apart."
On Joseph Smith:
"No matter which way you cook it, Joseph Smith is a bundle of contradictions, an unschooled, roughhewn frontiersman -- which is what New York was in 1820 -- who founds a church that has become a worldwide church. It shouldn't have happened, but it did. ...
[Joseph Smith] was what he was, and it doesn't really bother me. I look at great leaders, particularly religious leaders before and since, and they've all got blemishes, as do political leaders, particularly the charismatic ones. Joseph, if nothing else, was charismatic. And that just seems to be the inseparable baggage that these great people bring with them, and you have to be able to deal with it. …
Some people in the church, even sitting at a high level, tend to reduce it almost to a geometric equation. If Joseph Smith wasn't this, this and this, then the church can't be true. That does us a great disservice, because it turns out not to be as clear-cut as that."
The Book of Mormon:
"Perhaps the most prevalent viewpoint in the church is either the Book of Mormon is a literal history of the Americas before Columbus or it's wrong. There is an alternative somewhere between those two. If you look at the Bible, some of the greatest books of the Bible -- and in my mind in particular the Book of Job, which I feel to be one of the greatest books in world literature, is fictional. Its message is independent of its historicity. That's the key in dealing with the Book of Mormon. Whatever its message is, it continues to resonate with the people who encounter it.
It's not because of its doctrinal sophistication, because if you look at the Book of Mormon compared to the Bible, the level of theology of the two is quite separate. So that's not the attraction. It's not the historicity, because the people who read it don't come away from reading it thinking, "Well, that was an interesting history." It's that there is truth within that book, just as there is truth within the Book of Job that is, in fact, a fictional book. ...
That's the message that people need to get. Forget about the container for a while. Get inside of it and grab the truth that's in there, regardless of the form that it's in, regardless of how it got to be in that container -- and then you win. ..."
On being a Mormon intellectual:
"Being an intellectual in this church is a hard way to make an easy living, for two reasons. One is the wealth of source material: If you go back and look at the history, it's enormous -- and troubling, because it doesn't always square with the public relations version of things. The second reason it's difficult is there is an anti-intellectual bent in the church that in some cases has gone so far as to push people out simply because they were thinking people, either overtly pushed them out by excommunicating them or sending the message that they're not welcome and we'd be a lot happier if you'd just have the good grace to leave, and leave quietly.
So it's not an easy lifestyle, but people don't tend to choose that lifestyle. You are that, or you're something else. I don't think you choose to be an intellectual. It's the way you're wired. It's the way you view the world. So there you are, and if you're going through that journey alone, it's a very perilous and lonely journey. It turns out there are many other people in the church with a similar mind-set, but they are a loose amalgamation at best. It's been with difficulty over the decades that those of us who consider ourselves within that philosophy try to hang on to the church for ourselves and try to hang on to others and keep them in."
On Mormon "certainty":
"There is a strong thread within the church that clings to the notion that I have to be able to say in public, "I know," regardless of what the "I know" involves. Unwittingly that has created a culture that says to the other ones who can't say that in honesty, "Gee, there must be something wrong with me, because I can't say, 'I know,' if I don't know." I think that the desire to be able to go up to the pulpit and say "I know" is not unique to Mormonism. I think that pervades the entire world, and it's why fundamentalism in whatever clothing -- Christian, Judaic, Islamic -- is a dangerous thing, because it gives a false certitude to people. They think that the tough questions in life can all be reduced to one-line answers, and they can't. If you think that's where the world is and you try to live in that world, it's destructive ultimately. So we have to be able to move at some point from, "Oh, yeah, I know," to, "Listen, here's where I am. I think I know some things, and I've experienced some things, and there are a lot of things I don't know. But I'm here for the duration, so let's move forward together and help each other."
On the Book of Abraham:
"One response that has been a very loudly stated response ever since then was, "Those were the wrong papyri." It doesn't address the fact that some of the diagrams, the facsimiles that were part of the Book of Abraham, were with those papyri, and they are the right ones. ... An alternative explanation is to say this is all fiction. ...
There's plenty of ground in between -- and that's the ground that I live on -- that says: "Why does there need to be a one-to-one relationship between historical artifact and modern Scripture? Isn't it the product that we're looking at, and the effect of that product on this community of believers?" And if that is the essential question, and I think it is, then we don't need to worry about the literal relationship between [the artifacts and the Scripture]. ..."
On problems facing the LDS Church:
"Another area is the challenge of feminism; that you have, particularly in the American church, tens of thousands, if not more, women who are not out there picketing, but who are aware that their position in the church is not what they would want it to be. They're looking at this issue different than their mothers or grandmother did.
You have the challenge of intellectualism, and this is a challenge that does not just come from within. Mormonism, because of its importance as an American-born world religion, is ripe for scholarly inquiry. You have scholars, Mormon and non-Mormon, believers and nonbelievers, all focusing their tools on studying this important religion. ... Those are some of the challenges we face now, and not one of those is easy. ...
The strategic problems facing the church don't face me personally. ... The problem I deal with, within my own family, is boredom. My kids ... say, "Dad, this church is boring." When I talk to other kids, they use the "B" word also. If we can't move those kids out of that mind-set, we can lose them. There are so many more alternative voices that they can listen to. You've got hundreds of channels on cable TV. You've got the Internet. It's not the world we grew up in, where you had few competing voices. There are hundreds if not thousands of competing voices, and they are sophisticated and attractive. And if we can't take the essential message that we have and somehow package it in some way that is not so boring to them, we're going to lose them."
On homosexuality and the family:
"We have not yet gotten to the point of understanding the biology of homosexuality, to the point where that understanding enlightens the policy and the behavior of individual Mormons toward homosexuality. ... Are we going to tell [gay individuals], "You must live alone for the rest of your life because you can't fit in this other mold," or are we going to let those people live as what they are, even if it is different than what we are? I hope we can get to that point. What we call it, how we structure it, I don't know. But I think it is cruel to apply different standards of behavior to one group than we do to other groups. ...
The church did a survey 10, 20 years ago and found that half the members of the church were of single families, which means that one-third of the adult membership of the church is single, either never married, widowed or divorced. So to cling to the notion that the only acceptable family unit is a mother, father and children flies in the face of reality. We can accommodate single parents in the church; we should be able to accommodate other forms of family life that are strong, that are nurturing, that are faith-promoting and that are enduring -- but we haven't been able to do that yet. ..."
