QUOTE (justamere10 @ Aug 17 2008, 05:40 PM)
LDS Church archives have never been hidden, they have been available in the same manner every other major library makes available its precious original manuscripts, only to authentic scholars and researchers who will cause no concern that they might damage irreplaceable manuscripts.
So wrong, justamere10. This statement is just absolutely false.
I can't tell if you're simply ignorant of the way in which, for at least 150 years, the LDS church as been hiding and covering up information and documents in its possession to prevent damage to the church's public reputation, or whether you're just lying here. I hope it's the former.
Here's evidence to support my assertion:
Below is a summary of an article that recently appeared in the Deseret News, a respected publication in Salt Lake City. I've emphasized parts of the text that support the arguments I've been making in this thread and refute justamere10's, and have excluded entire paragraphs and deleted numerous sentences for brevity (the original is a five page online article). To read the original article in its entirety, everything precisely in context, click the link below).
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Deseret News, 7/19/08
"Book confronts LDS tragedy," by Carrie A. Moore
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,700244245,00.html"What did the terrible atrocity say about the killers?" who were led by local LDS Church leaders in southern Utah. "What did it say about their church and its leaders? Did early Mormonism possess a violent strain so deep and volcanic that it erupted without warning?"
The questions in the book's preface played out not only in the authors' daily research, but it haunted their daydreams and served up nightmares, they said.
As active members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and all current or former church employees, Ron Walker, Richard Turley and Glen Leonard found themselves immersed in the twisted horror of seemingly godly men trying to justify the cold-blooded murder of 120 men, women and children during nearly a decade of research and writing.
Yet their new book, "Massacre at Mountain Meadows," is dedicated to those most often overlooked in most of the scholarly and secular accounts of the tragedy: "To the victims."
Unlike many previous LDS accounts of the tragedy, it portrays the wagon train emigrants passing through southern Utah in September 1857 as ordinary people with bright futures and some flaws rather than as scoundrels who somehow deserved to die.Instead of defending the perpetrators — as some both inside and outside the LDS Church believed the book would do — it names the local LDS leaders and their dark deeds in detail, culling from affidavits given to a 19th century church historian by those who participated in the slaughter or learned of it firsthand.
The information, which has never before been available to researchers, came from archives owned by the LDS Church, including those of the faith's First Presidency.What the book doesn't do is implicate then-LDS Church President Brigham Young in directing or ordering the killings.
It does describe how [Brigham Young's] wartime preaching and that of other top LDS leaders contributed to the atmosphere of unquestioned authority, conformity, fear and suspicion that ended with terrible, "unexpected consequences."A former LDS Institute teacher and historian at church-owned Brigham Young University, Ron Walker came to the task with questions of his own, he said. Some people asked whether the project should go forward, and Walker conceded it was a question they asked themselves as much as anyone.
"There is a collective sense of guilt here that's part of our heritage. The only way you can really deal with it —
you can't put it in a closet. Ultimately, you have to open it up, open the windows. There is short-term pain, but it seems the only way to get beyond that is with honesty and open disclosure and a sense of regret. Maybe even a sense of confusion."
Research also yielded not only names and other biographical information about the approximately 120 victims and the 17 surviving children,
but a listing of their considerable property (including about 900 head of cattle), much of which ended up in the hands of massacre participants, and some of which was taken to Cedar City "and sold at a public auction held at the tithing office."With affidavits of participants documenting the atrocities in possession of the church for decades, why did it take 150 years for such a full accounting?
"We can only do what we can do when it's our time on the stage," Turley said. "This is our time, and others have dealt with it differently. Our attitude is, look at it openly and honestly. I think that 150 years past the event, people should be about to step back and recognize that no one alive today had anything to do with the events. Though there is a lot of emotion wrapped up in it, still that emotion doesn't need to be directed at living people."
Walker said in the 19th century, when the massacre "was being used as a club to hurt and destroy the church, you have to be defensive, I suppose. You have to be careful. I'm sure that played into the thinking and policy of Brigham Young. But I think this book is an expression of the strength of the Mormon culture today.
Now we can take a look at some unfortunate things in our past and deal with them honestly. I think we should be happy about that." [the obvious implication here is that subsequently Mormon culture was NOT strong enough to "deal with [these events] honestly."]
Two religious historians who did not work on the book but have watched its progress said there were also other factors at play in bringing the depth of the historical record to light. Jan Shipps, professor emeritus of history and religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University, said
the information age and ready access to technology have created permanent changes in the ability of any institution [like the LDS church]
to keep sensitive information under wraps. For decades, most Latter-day Saints knew little or nothing of the massacre, she said. For young Latter-day Saints learning about LDS history, "they used to send them to seminary and give them the Mormon story and that was that, and they went away from it and kept it and that's what they had in their heads when they went on their missions. Some came back and realized that was not the whole story, just the canonized story." The advent of the Internet and entire ministries devoted to attacking the LDS Church has provided "too much detailed information that's readily available" about the massacre and other sensitive topics.
Philip Barlow, a historian who holds the Leonard Arrington Chair in Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University, said he sees it not only as a mark of the faith's "maturity and confidence to be able to come to terms with their past," but
the subject has also become "too big now for the church to ignore with any credibility," in part because the academic study of Mormonism has burgeoned in recent years.
"This was not only a trauma to the victims, their families and descendants, but it was a deep psychological trauma for Latter-day Saints themselves.
There has been tremendous denial and avoidance. ... People inside and outside the church will see that the church isn't going to crumble," in light of the book's detailed account of wartime hysteria turned tragic. "Its credibility will deepen and not lessen by its ability to face its warts and difficulties. ...
"
People, including Latter-day Saints, want some substantive, authentic history. There's a whole segment of people that are very hungry for that sense of honesty, credibility and self-understanding."[You see? It's not just me, justamere10. There's a "whole segment of people" who have the same feelings I do about the history of dishonesty and compromised integrity within the LDS church, both from inside and outside the organization, and who want very much to see these serious faults remedied.]
Both the authors and scholars see lessons in the details of the conditions that led to the massacre. Those cautionary tales apply across societies and institutions
but may be most instructive for Latter-day Saints and their leaders, they said.Walker said the authors saw "very little unique about Mountain Meadows that is not replicated in many cultures and mass killings throughout history. It fits the pattern. ...
What happened in southern Utah is virtually a template of religious and ethnic violence in a time of war."... I think the church's system of checks and balances works
when it's allowed to. But in the case of the massacre, those were overridden. People got caught up in the emotions, in their own self-assuredness. They were caught up in feelings of retribution, caught up in trying to hide their own wrongdoing."
"Mormons are going to be reminded that [the] church is made up of human beings," Barlow said.
"The church needs to be conceived by its members as not essentially divine with a few freckles and warts, but as a group of people — fully human — trying to respond to the divine. I think there might be a mental paradigm shift to come to terms with the full humanity of the church as responding to the divine rather than being divine."" ... It's a case-study in how not to apply religion and how one should apply true religion in one's own life," he said.
As for "digging up the past," as many had worried they were doing for no good purpose, Walker said he believes it could be that
the importance of the book "will not be in its historical findings but in its possible legacy for truth-telling," as a copy of the
affidavits held by the church for more than a century are published and made available to the public. [i.e. after being deliberately hidden from public scrutiny by the LDS church all these years.]