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Trust the Media!

Trust the Media!

Last updated on: March 20, 2024 at 9:39 pm by Dan Peterson

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Trust the Media! 2024-03-20T21:39:54-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Celestial Room of the Helsinki Finland Temple
(LDS Media Library)

[Ooops. This week isn’t Holy Week! For some reason, I keep thinking that Easter is this coming weekend. But it’s not. Does anything like that ever happen to you? My apologies.]

This week is “Holy Week,” about which I wrote this column a while back. (I have fairly strong feelings about Holy Week.) And here are a couple of potential resources for this week for Latter-day Saints:

“#BecauseofHim: New Ways to Celebrate Christ This Easter: New resources at ChurchofJesusChrist.org provide ideas and ways to share and celebrate Christ this Easter season”

“Apostles Share Messages of Jesus Christ during the 2024 Easter Season” (Thus far, Easter messages are up from Elders Gerrit W. Gong, Ulisses Soares, and Patrick Kearon.)

The Oakland California Temple (LDS Media Library)

You might be pardoned if, after reading these two articles, you confusedly came to imagine that Halloween must be just around the corner — or even that, among Latter-day Saints, every day is Halloween:

NBC News: “BYU now requires incoming students to read controversial ‘musket fire’ speech: The 2021 address, which defends “marriage as the union of a man and a woman,” called on members of the Mormon church to defend its teachings with “musket fire.””

Try to picture the combination of insanity and brazen effrontery that is required to suggest that “marriage” is “the union of a man and a woman.” Who would ever believe such a thing, let alone say it in public?

Incidentally, I published an article in Meridian Magazine on 7 September 2021 in which I shamelessly defended Elder Holland and that very “musket fire” speech: “Elder Holland: What They Heard is Not What He Said.” And I stand by what I wrote.

Daily Mail: “Former Mormon lifts the lid on church’s ‘creepy’ baptisms for the DEAD that sees children being put through ‘traumatizing’ ceremonies to ‘save’ those who have passed away

Alyssa Grenfell, 31, grew up as a ‘devout Mormon’ but left the religion in 2017
She recently spoke about the ‘creepy baptisms for the dead’ in a YouTube video
She said the religion had her go to cemeteries and take pictures of gravestones

This article in the Daily Mail conjures up the sense of a nighttime graveyard scene in an old black and white movie starring Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi, with drifts of dense fog obscuring the grave markers, which are decayed and tilted at various angles in the darkness while menacing music plays in the background. And that’s pretty much what temples are like. Dark and ghoulish. Right?

It’s easy to understand why Ms. Grenfell is so thrilled to tell us all about her post-Church ascent to the sunny uplands of alcohol, ear-piercing, and tattoos.

Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of temples, you might enjoy this new Interpreter Foundation book, which, while it was edited by Stephen D. Ricks and Jeffrey M. Bradshaw rather than by Bram Stoker and Stephen King, would also make a great birthday or holiday gift: The Temple: Symbols, Sermons, and Settings.

The temple is central to Latter-day Saint worship. Through modern revelation Joseph Smith restored the ancient tradition of temples and the ordinances performed therein. Studies of ancient temples can shed much light on latter-day temples and temple worship.

Several years ago Latter-day Saint scholar Matthew Brown planned a conference entitled The Temple on Mount Zion and began to invite the participants. Matthew Brown loved the temple and temple worship and studied and published on ancient and modern temples. His interests and knowledge were vast. When Matthew passed away very unexpectedly in 2011, his friends decided to organize a series of conferences in his memory. This volume, the fifth in the series, contains proceedings from the fourth conference held in his memory 10 November 2018 and reflects many of the topics that Matthew loved, centered on the theme of the temple: symbols, sermons, and settings.

The purpose of the book series is to increase understanding and appreciation of temple rituals and doctrines, and to encourage participation in the redeeming work of family history and temple worship.

Videos of the presentations at the conference are available here.

The Preston England Temple, one of a number of holy places worldwide where sacred work is performed for our departed brothers and sisters. (LDS Media Library)

Clearly, and despite our dedicated missionary efforts over the past two centuries, we have a very great distance yet to travel before people around us will have even a remotely accurate understanding of what we Latter-day Saints believe and how we live: “National Survey on Perceptions of Latter-day Saints.” (And that survey was taken within the United States!)

Fortunately, in the United Kingdom we have the Daily Mail, which very often features articles that are designed to enhance its readers’ understanding of the Church and its members.

The London England Temple is actually located quite a distance to the south of the city of London. (LDS Media Library image)

For example, looking only at articles that it has published since the beginning of this year, the Daily Mail has devoted more than one piece to Alyssa Grenfell, mentioned above, who somehow managed to survive “bizarre” and “traumatic” vicarious baptismal ceremonies in a temple. And it has dedicated numerous pieces to the important ongoing story of a “single Mormon mum” (now, it seems, sadly excommunicated) who earns nearly $50K each month from posting racy photos of herself online. And, interspersed among these helpful, even indispensable, journalistic contributions have been been articles devoted to the story of a Latter-day Saint father of three who has come out as a transgender woman, to the inspiring story of a wannabe “Mormon prophet” who forced his family to eat grass and live in a shed, to the revealing memoirs of a Salt Lake City prostitute centered on the kinky sexual perversions favored by active Latter-day Saint men, to accounts of sexual perversions among “Mormon” fundamentalists, to the story of an accused pedophile (ex-)bishop and the supposed “hush money” paid out by the Church in his case, to reports of the decline of the Church in Utah, to stories about lawsuits alleging financial fraud on the part of Church leadership, to claims that Church leaders are indifferent to child sex abuse, to accounts of the freedom experienced by families who manage to escape the cult bondage imposed by the Church, and so on and on.

Sympathetic and high quality British documentary films like the 1922 documentary advertised in this vintage photograph have their parallels in some modern British journalism. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

Isn’t it reassuring to know that the Daily Mail is out there, earnestly striving while at the same time adhering to the highest standards of professional journalism, to increase accurate understanding of the Church among its readers? Presiding over such a high quality operation must surely fill the editors of the Daily Mail with a deep feeling of gratifying professional pride.

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