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Will we ever enjoy universal respect? Don’t count on it.

Will we ever enjoy universal respect? Don’t count on it.

Last updated on: November 17, 2025 at 3:01 pm by Dan Peterson

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Will we ever enjoy universal respect? Don’t count on it. 2025-11-17T15:01:33-07:00 Dan Peterson

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Nicholas Poussin’s “The Adoration of the Golden Calf” (ca. 1634; Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Have you watched any of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives? I haven’t. I simply can’t summon up any interest in it. If you have, though, what do you think of Jana Riess’s take on the show? “How authentically Mormon are Hulu’s ‘Mormon Wives’? — ‘Secret Lives’ offers an absurdly one-sided picture of Mormonism. But it’s also not fully wrong.”

And there’s this, from The Washington Post. I confess to being mildly discouraged by its not entirely well-informed attitude toward my faith: “‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ is essential viewing. Seriously. The soapy reality show is a perfect mirror of America’s strange cultural moment.”

For reasons that aren’t difficult to surmise, internet trolls prefer to remain anonymous and seldom go out in public. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Nearly three months ago, an anonymous (and anonymized) email was passed on to me that claimed to identify two of the regular pseudonymous participants on what I call the Peterson Obsession Board. I don’t know who sent it, I didn’t ask for it, I can’t reply to it, and I don’t know how reliable it is. In any case, my correspondent claimed to have based his or her findings upon data that s/he had somehow acquired (presumably from the POB) and analyzed by means of AI. First, my correspondent proposed an identity for my Mini-Stalker for which s/he claimed 88% confidence. My Mini-Stalker is obsessed with me, although the cause of his obsession has never been at all clear; so far as I’m aware, I don’t know the guy and have never met him — and the person identified in the email is nobody that I know. With regard to another of the active participants there, my correspondent suggested an identification for which s/he estimated a 70%+ probability of correctness. I’m disappointed if s/he is accurate in the latter case, because the person that s/he named is someone with whom — for several years, anyway — I was distantly but respectfully acquainted and from whom I would not have anticipated such unprofessional behavior and such shoddy and biased reasoning. But maybe my secret informant is wrong? I hope so.

Heber J. Grant (1856-1945), seventh president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Every president of the Church through President Grant was a participant in plural marriage.

Across the Church, yesterday’s scripture reading for the “Come, Follow Me” curriculum included Doctrine and Covenants 132. In that connection, you might have missed these two Meridian Magazine articles from Valerie M. Hudson:

And don’t forget about this important contribution from the Interpreter Foundation: Paul Fields, Steven T. Densley, Jr., Matthew Roper, and Larry Bassist, “Historical and Stylometric Evidence for the Authorship of Doctrine and Covenants 132.”

Anbrey Rees, a volunteer with Latter-day Saint Charities, checks the vitals of a 4-month-old Indonesian girl who had surgery to fix her cleft lip aboard Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH 19) in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, June 2, 2012, during Pacific Partnership 2012. Pacific Partnership is an annual deployment of forces designed to strengthen maritime and humanitarian partnerships during disaster relief operations, while providing humanitarian, medical, dental and engineering assistance to nations of the Pacific.

Now, though, it’s time for a couple of highly distasteful stories from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™:

And here is a pair of links that are relevant to the Hitchens File. One is actually from the Hitchens File, while the other is, let’s say, File-adjacent. I’ll start first with the latter, which drew some (understandably) very negative reactions in a number of circles. (For examples, just read through a few of the comments to the link itself. However, I saw very critical comments elsewhere before I ever saw these.)

The obvious problem with Nikalie Monroe’s inquiry is that she called the wrong place. She called the headquarters of the Tennessee Knoxville Mission, which is an office from which our proselyting efforts in the area are coordinated. She did not know that local welfare matters are handled primarily by our bishops, in our local wards or congregations.

Unfortunately, too, she reached a missionary sister — whether a young sister or a senior missionary, I couldn’t tell — who didn’t handle the matter especially well (because she almost certainly had received no training for an inquiry of this kind). Regrettably, the sister missionary didn’t even express any empathy or, really, try to help. She could, for instance, have assisted Ms. Monroe in reaching a local bishop. She mentioned that bishops are the proper first contact in such cases, but she provided no idea about how to contact the appropriate local bishop. And she kept explaining that Ms. Monroe had reached a “main office” (which obviously made no sense to Ms. Monroe and makes little sense to me) and even that it was a “business office,” which sounds neither very charitable nor very religious.

If you scan through the comments that follow Ms. Monroe’s short TikTok video, you’ll see considerable misunderstanding of the Church’s attitude toward welfare matters and charity — e.g., that we don’t help people who aren’t members of our church or, even, that we don’t care for the poor at all. For a better understanding of what we do, this video, which is less than two minutes in length, is very helpful: “Welfare Facilities—Bishops’ Storehouse.” And this nine-minute video provides an excellent overview: “Inside the Church’s Massive Giving Operation.” In the spirit of the Hitchens File, though (which I’ve been perilously close to abandoning for the four paragraphs immediately above), the video demonstrates that, notwithstanding Nikalie Monroe’s TikTok report, Latter-day Saint theists are actually trying to meddle in the material lives of others, and pretty massively so.

For a profile of the people based in Salt Lake City who supervise the Church’s villainous work, overall, of serving the poor and the needy, see here: “Meet the Church of Jesus Christ’s New Presiding Bishopric: Bishop W. Christopher Waddell is the Church’s 16th Presiding Bishop”

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