Theology and personal experience

 

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

Joseph at the graves People fixate on the golden plates and miss the real origin story. Joseph Smith was a man who buried his children. He and Emma lost a son the day he was born, then twins, then more. He buried his brother Alvin, then his father, then his brother Don Carlos. He sat in a jail in Missouri in the dead of winter and asked God where he had gone. The theology he received is the theology of a man standing at open graves. Families can be bound past death. The dead can be reached. No branch is ever finally lost. It is no accident that the first sermon on baptism for the dead was preached at a funeral. The heart of the doctrine is the family because the heart of his life was loss, and he was handing nineteenth century America an antidote to the same erosion that is finishing the job today.

https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2101149077279007207?s=20

Derek B

@DerekEBoucher

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2h

So the theology and doctrine was birthed out of a personal experience??

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

·

1h

Yes. Name one that was not. Moses at a bush, David over a dead son, John in exile on Patmos, Nicaea because of Arius, the icons because emperors were smashing them. God sent a baby to a village under Caesar Augustus, who spoke Aramaic, told stories about seed and sheep because that is what Galilee had, and learned obedience by the things he suffered. Revelation always comes to a man standing somewhere.

A religion takes the shape of the people who carry it

 

The Eternal Saints

@Eternal_Saints_

Changing the geography of HQ won't save the Church from Utah. The institution will continue down its course regardless of where any office is located. You've got the causality flipped. Utah isn't doing this to the Church. Also, if you think it's time to build up the center place in Jackson County, there's legitimately nothing stopping any Latter-day Saint from moving there right now.

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

Sociology says the opposite. A religion takes the shape of the people who carry it. You can believe almost anything as long as the people around you keep believing it with you, and you will quietly stop when they stop. Faith only changes how a man lives when enough of his neighbors share it. Drop that same believer into a city that shrugs and the effect all but disappears. The best book ever written on the modern LDS Church argues that our whole twentieth century was one long reaction to America, pulling away when we got too close, easing back when we got too strange. And the Restoration knew it before the field existed. Why gather at all? Why Kirtland, then Far West, then Nauvoo, then a valley nobody wanted? Because Joseph and Brigham understood that where the Saints live decides who the Saints become. Brigham did not haul wagons thirteen hundred miles into a desert because geography is irrelevant. The gathering is the oldest sociology in Mormonism. You've read the Manifesto

@Eternal_Saints_

. Wilford Woodruff cites the acts of Congress and the court of last resort in the text itself. The environment is in the canon. Utah isn't doing this to the Church? Then what is the Church made of? It has an address on North Temple, but it lives in its people, and its people live on the Wasatch Front. Salt Lake County has been minority Mormon on the Church's own rolls since 2017. a 2023 survey found only 42 percent of Utah adults still call themselves members, and the researchers pointed to migration as the biggest reason. The Church's employees, its newspaper, its universities, its neighbors, all of it breathes that air every day. Influence has never run in one direction. The Church built Utah, and Utah is now rebuilding the Church. Nobody in the Episcopal Church ever voted to disappear. Their surroundings converted them one small accommodation at a time, and every one of those accommodations looked reasonable while it was happening. And nothing stopped a Saint from moving to Jackson County in 1831 either. They went because a prophet named the place and the Church organized the move. A gathering without a call is just a family moving.

https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2100830422532010255?s=20

The Eternal Saints

@Eternal_Saints_

I’m not sure what most of this has to do with what I said. You seem to be saying that Salt Lake City’s/Wasatch Front left-wing swing is having an effect on Church policy. I’m telling you that this is not the case. The people of Utah never asked for what’s happening to us right now. It was foisted upon us by our ruling class. I’ll let you figure out who that includes. You did ask one good question tho. What is the point of gathering? I encourage you to discover the answer to that question. Then ask the next one. How come we don’t do that anymore?

Donna H, MBA, MAcc

@Donna_H67

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13h

Huh? I guess I'm glad I'm contrarian. I've been LDS in places where not one single person had even met a Mormon, and I came of age in a place where my beliefs conflicted with everyone around me.