Daniel C. Peterson

Suffice it to say that I was once sent out, a number of years ago, as a kind of "agent" of the Strengthening Church Members Committee. My mission? To try to help a member of the Church whose apostasy was threatening his marriage and causing anguish to his very active wife, children, and parents. (The wife and parents, and his stake president, has asked for help.) The weapons of choice? Talking with him for about four hours in Salt Lake City, in the presence of his wife and stake president, and recommending some readings.

The classical ad hominem is an argument, and I do believe, along with virtually all logicians, that ad hominem arguments can be legitimate, relevant, and significant—provided their limitations are clearly understood and their conclusions properly weighted. Obviously, they can be abused. But they are by no means invariably fallacious.

In the brilliant third chapter of Degenerate Moderns, entitled "Homosexual as Subversive," E. Michael Jones demonstrates the crucial and explanatory role of personal lifestyle not only in the traitorous career of Sir Anthony Blunt, but in the theories of John Maynard Keynes, the biographical writings of Lytton Strachey, and the novels of E. M. Forster. "Modernity was the exoteric version of Bloomsbury biography; it was a radically homosexual vision of the world and therefore of its very nature subversive; treason was its logical outcome.... The Bloomsberries' public writings—Keynes' economic theories, Strachey's best‑selling Eminent Victorians, etc.—were the sodomitical vision for public consumption."

Reflecting upon the development of the characters in Forster's long‑suppressed book, Maurice, Jones notes that, "In the world of this novel it's hard to tell whether declining religious faith fosters homosexuality or whether homosexuality kills faith. At any rate Forster sees a connection.... As their involvement in sodomy increases, so also does their opposition to Christianity."

In any event, it seems clear that immorality (not merely of the homosexual variety) and intellectual apostasy are, and always have been, frequent (though not invariable) companions. (Joseph Smith's famous announcement of a link between adultery and sign‑seeking is apropos here.) Sodom and Cumorah are apparently not compatible.

I'm not sure why some Jews appear to be offended by Mormon temple service on behalf of Jews. Jews have precious few friends around the world. They should not be seeking to alienate Mormons, who are deeply philosemitic.

I would respond that we Latter‑day Saints do, quite unapologetically, insist that Jews 'are not worthy enough to receive God's eternal blessing on their own.'

The total depravity of those who disagree with me is an important article of my personal faith.

I would guess that barring baptisms for the dead would have to be part of a broader strategy that would forbid masses for the dead, prayers for the dead, invoking the memory of the dead, and, perhaps, thinking of the dead altogether.

I hope that Jews, of all people, will be very careful not to entertain the kind of religious hatred and bigotry that some will undoubtedly attempt to inflame over this issue.

One area of the Book of Mormon that does bother some is what they see as anachronistic doctrine; that the Book of Mormon has Christian doctrine prior to the coming of Christ; that it has seemingly New Testament doctrines appearing centuries before Jesus arrives, and it seems to be representing a form of Christianity existing in the New World where there doesn't seem to be much evidence of that archaeologically. Christianity is invisible in the New World prior to the coming of Columbus, and so those things seem like clear anachronisms to people looking at it in that way.

There are certain things that exist in the Book of Mormon that some people argue [are] anachronistic. Steel is an example of that, though the issue dissolves a little bit when you look at, well, what did the word "steel" mean? When words like that appear in King James's English, what do they mean? They don't necessarily mean what we mean by "steel" today. But we do have a problem with metals in the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon seems to describe fairly widespread metal use. Well, I don't know if it's widespread; it's common throughout the Book of Mormon history and text, and yet we don't have any good evidence of any kind of metal industry, even small‑scale cottage industry, in Mesoamerica at the time.

The plates of the Book of Mormon were translated in a sense by Joseph Smith and in a sense not by Joseph Smith. Joseph didn't have the capacity to translate any modern or ancient language, certainly, at that time. A little bit later on he'll learn some Hebrew and some German ‑‑ not much, but a little bit. But the translation occurred by supernatural means, far beyond his capacity to do it. There were a couple of means that were prepared for this. One was that he used an instrument that was found with the plates that was called the Urim and Thummim. This is kind of a divinatory device that goes back into Old Testament times. Actually, most of the translation was done using something called a seer stone. The seer stone is obviously something like the Urim and Thummim. It seems to be a stone that was found in the vicinity, and I can't say exactly how it would have worked. It may have been a kind of a concentrating device or a device to facilitate concentration. He would put the stone for most of the concentration period in the bottom of a hat, presumably to exclude surrounding light. Then he would put his face into the hat. It's kind of a strange image for us today, but it sort of makes sense if you think of a computer screen, I suppose: You don't want to be looking at [anything] against a bright background; it hurts your eyes. ... He would read off what he saw in the stone, apparently in passages of about 25 to 35 words.

Horses in the Book of Mormon would be another. You have relatively few mentions of horses, but there are some, and we don't know exactly how they were used; they don't seem to be all that common. Were they horses as we understood them, [or] does the term describe some other animal? Languages don't always and cultures don't always classify things the way we would expect. We have what we call common‑sense ways of doing it. They're not common sense; they're just ours. But again, we don't have a strong case there. We're just problem solving there.

The Book of Abraham is a lesser‑known text in the Mormon canon of Scripture. It's part of what's called the Pearl of Great Price, and it purports to be a document written by the hand of Abraham that was recovered by Joseph Smith, translated [from] a group of papyri that he recovered while living in Kirtland, Ohio. The papyri were lost for a long time, ... and eventually the papyri came back to the church, and people were saying, now this is a real chance to test Joseph Smith's claims as a translator, as a prophet: Do the papyri match up with what Joseph Smith gave us? And the answer is no; ... they don't, if you translate them in a conventional Egyptological way, give you the text of the Book of Abraham.

We have possibly about 11 or 12 percent of the papyri that belonged to that collection, ... so it's very possible that there was a text that would be translatable, even by a conventional Egyptologist, into the Book of Abraham, but we don't have it now. But even that seems to me not altogether necessary. We know that Joseph didn't translate in the way that a scholar would translate. He didn't know Egyptian, ... so he was getting it by revelation. That even opens up the possibility to me that even if Joseph thought he was getting it from the papyri, he may not have been. How would he have been able to know? I'm not saying he wasn't. My own preferred solution to this is to say that he was, and the papyrus is missing. ...

There aren't many [reasons for excommunication], really. Flat out saying Joseph Smith was a liar, I think, yeah, there's no reason for you to be a Latter‑day Saint. ... It gets a little fuzzier after that. Advocating a nonhistorical Book of Mormon, for example, advocating it in the church, I'd probably say you can't do that. If you believe it privately, that's your business. ... If they're not talking about it, if they're not advocating it, then I would say leave them alone. Work with them, if nothing else, but leave them alone. So I don't see a really clear line there. Obviously there's no room in the church for, say, a vibrant Mormon atheist movement or something like that. ...

To be a practicing homosexual is something that will bring you into contact with the church court. To be a homosexual as such, to be of that inclination, there's nothing excommunicable about that and there are lots of them in the church. It must be a terribly difficult road to walk. But the standard for a homosexual is the same as the standard for a heterosexual. No sexual relations except within marriage. And if you violate that, that is one of the most serious things the church will look at. In that sense, there's no discrimination; there's a single standard that if a heterosexual male violates his marriage covenants, he's likely to be disciplined, whether it's with a man or a woman.

People come in to me sometimes and they bring up Mountain Meadows Massacre and say, "I had never heard about this, until last week." And they're horrified. They think that Brigham Young ordered it. That the Church is lead by mass murderers. Or something like that. I think we make a mistake by not telling them about Mountain Meadows earlier on, and also making the case for, look, the evidence for Brigham Young's involvement is at best thin. I think actually there's none at all, basically. But we can inoculate them beforehand, make sure they've already had a controlled dose of the disease, in effect. So that they're not shocked when another issue comes along. ...

Another issue that comes up is Joseph Smith and plural marriage. ... If you deal with the problem up front and say, "Look, here is this issue; this is what we have to say about it," people then are confronted with it later on and they say, "Oh, okay, I've heard that before." But if they think the church is hiding something from them, well then they think, "Well, what else am I not being told? This is maybe just the tip of the iceberg; there's a lot more out there." And then confidence in the teaching authority of the church is decreased, and I think that's a mistake. I think we can handle these issues. But I understand the impulse.

When you think about the dramatic change that we took at the end of the 19th century ‑‑ we surrender plural marriage; we effectively surrender any kind of theocratic dreams, church control of the economy; many of these things disappear, or if they don't disappear they're severely mitigated, modulated ‑‑ the question is, have we lost those things altogether, or are they still there? My contention is that they're still there.

There's still that Zion‑building ideal. When we go and work for the welfare cannery, the welfare farm, there's still that sort of thing there. Fast offerings and that sort of thing are still there. But I worry that we may become too assimilated to the surrounding model. I glory in the distinctives of 19th‑century Mormonism. I don't want to return to all of them. Certainly it's not my prerogative to call any of them. I'm not calling for the restoration of plural marriage. But I do think that we need to remember that we were in tension with the surrounding society and that there always ought to be some. We ought to be bothered if everybody always thinks we're just peachy‑keen.

Many Jews in general are troubled by the notion of proselytizing. I remember speaking with a rabbi in Jerusalem, very nice guy, who said to me simply that to convert a Jew is the equivalent of killing a Jew, especially because Judaism has been so threatened, obviously particularly in the 20th century. I understand the sensitivities on that score. In terms of Holocaust victims in particular, there's the sense that they died ‑‑ whether they were religious or not ‑‑ they died for being Jewish. So to take people who are in effect martyred for their Jewishness and then be baptized as Christians posthumously really offends a lot of Jewish sensibilities. That I understand. I think the church has tried to be sensitive on this, but we are caught on this doctrine. And the doctrine is this: Ultimately anyone who is saved must be saved through Christ, and that means at some point explicitly acknowledging Christ and accepting baptism. And that goes for everybody who has ever lived. So in a sense we're not theologically free to say to anyone, including Jews, that we just won't do this, and in our viewpoint, in fact, at the end of time, people would say thank you for this. But in the meantime, I understand the offensiveness of it, and it's a very, very troubling thing, and we go out of our way, particularly the church in the 20th and 21st centuries, to be religiously sensitive, and we're genuine about it. There's genuine friendship between the church and Jews and Catholics, and in a certain level Muslims. We've been cultivating those ties, so we don't want to be seen as people who trample on other people's religious sensibilities, especially since it's been done to us quite a bit.