The discussion from yesterday’s post continued on Facebook today, wherein my cousin lamented the fact that Brigham Young, because of his 19th Century racist views, could not possibly have been called of God as a prophet. That prompted another lengthy outburst from yours truly, an edited version of which I share below. <\/p>\n
______________<\/p>\n
In every era of time when the Lord goes about choosing \u201cgood men\u201d to be his leaders, it\u2019s clear that he has a big problem. Since there are no perfect men, he\u2019s forced to use the men that are available, who are \u201cgood\u201d in varying degrees.<\/p>\n
Many people reject the Old Testament because the people in it do all kinds of terrible things \u2013 even the people we\u2019re supposed to believe are prophets of God. Lot, the only man with a family righteous enough to escape the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, ends up getting drunk and having sex with his daughters. Jacob, the man who stands at the head of the house of Israel, obtained his birthright by wearing animal hair and deceiving his blind father into believing he was blessing Esau. The Children of Israel, God\u2019s chosen people, can\u2019t seem to go ten minutes without breaking their covenants. Aaron, Moses\u2019 right hand man, participates in the defiling of the law and the building of the Golden Calf.<\/p>\n
Jonah. Samson. David. Solomon. All called of God; all lousy role models.<\/p>\n
The New Testament is not without its problematic leaders, either. Paul, a man we\u2019re told consented to the murder of the disciple Stephen, writes a letter to a Philemon, a slaveowner, that accompanies a runaway slave that Paul is helpfully returning to slavery. \u201cHere\u2019s your slave back, Philemon, old pal. Be really nice to him. He\u2019s a good slave!\u201d Shouldn\u2019t Paul have kept Philemon\u2019s slave away from bondage and decried the evil practice of slavery instead of, as he does in verse 22 of his Epistle to Philemon, ask his buddy the slave master to prepare a guest room for him upon his next visit?<\/p>\n
Incidentally, a similar complaint was often raised against Jesus himself. He was the Messiah, after all, and yet he did not end the Roman occupation of the Jews and lead them into a great military overthrow of their vile oppressors. He even told the Jews to \u201crender unto Caesar that which is Caesar\u2019s,\u201d despite the fact that Caesar was denying them the right to self-rule. How can he be considered a good man?<\/p>\n
Paul lived in a world where slavery was commonplace and the societal norm, in a time where it didn\u2019t even occur to anyone that the practice should be discontinued. By the same token, Brigham lived in a world where black people pretty much had no more rights than cattle, where Brigham\u2019s government constitutionally defined black people as 3\/5 of a human being, and where the prevailing religious wisdom was that black people were the seed of Cain, inherently evil, and therefore deserving of treatment as subhumans.<\/p>\n
It would be nice if the Lord could always find \u201cgood men\u201d if the definition of a \u201cgood man\u201d was someone completely untainted by the wicked mores of the time, or, as the Book of Mormon speaks of this kind of thing, the \u201cwicked traditions of their fathers, which were not correct.\u201d The fact is that it doesn\u2019t work that way, and, if the scriptures are any indication, it never has.<\/p>\n
And we, as Latter-day Saints, should understand that better than anyone.<\/p>\n
Our entire faith is predicated on the idea that agency, the freedom to be fallible, is the fundamental reason we\u2019re here. We believe we rejected a plan that would have made us infallible in favor of this one, where a man who has been poisoned by the bigotry of his times is nevertheless called to do a great work \u2013 and the fruits of that work are impressive by any standard. They include, incidentally, the establishment of a moral framework and worldview that has done much good in the world, done by a church that was, at one point, led by an imperfect man named Brigham Young, who taught those good principles along with a handful of lousy ones. It is a better church now than it was when blessings were withheld from black members, but its goodness didn\u2019t spring into existence with its repudiation of Brigham’s archaic racism in 1978.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thediscussion from yesterday's post continued on Facebook today, wherein my cousin lamented the fact that Brigham Young, because of his 19th Century racist views, could not possibly have been called of God as a prophet. That prompted another lengthy outburst from yours truly, an edited version of which I share below. ______________In every era of ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}