When a blog post or opinion article begins with, “Dear leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” it is the beginning of a manifesto. One of the marks of apostate writing is the manifesto. Jana Riess crossed that line this week.
My readers here understand that I have taken Riess to task on several occasions because of her ongoing effort to insinuate liberal social norms into traditional Latter-day Saint culture. Riess has written at length claiming that the Church will lose members in increasing numbers because of its seeming (to her) unwillingness to adopt liberal social positions like acceptance of homosexuality and ordaining women to the priesthood.
Like various feminist/liberal harpies before her, Riess is on her way out the door. She is following in the footsteps of Sonya Johnson. Johnson, as you recall, led the charge during the 1970s push for the Equal Rights Amendment, calling the leaders of the Church out for their opposition to the amendment. Johnson went on to lose her husband and family, eventually becoming a lesbian, starting a lesbian commune, only to denounce even lesbian “marriage” as oppression.
In an article, found in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Thought and Scholarship, John Gee delivers a scathing review of Riess’ recent book, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church. Gee calls the book “Conclusions in Search of Evidence.” (See https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/conclusions-in-search-of-evidence/.) Riess’ book attempts to make the case that the Church is going to lose most of the upcoming generation because of inflexibility on liberal hot-button issues like gay marriage, ordaining women, etc. Gee examiners her methodology in terms of standard social science research methodology and finds it deeply lacking. Riess, a journalist with a PhD in religious history from Columbus is not a social scientist. Like many liberal journalists, she uses poor research to justify erroneous conclusions to support a predetermined narrative. Gee takes Riess to task for everything from her crowd-sourced funding, with big donations from several prominent Church critics to using non-representative sample groups that bias the supposed evidence to support her conclusions.
In her Religion News Service blog post yesterday (See https://religionnews.com/2019/12/13/the-stubborn-faithfulness-of-liberal-mormons/.), she lauds the “faithfulness” of liberal members of the Church while castigating both general authorities and the members who obediently remain within the defined doctrinal parameters of the Church and the culture that results from that obedience.
In the evolution of apostasy, there is often a gradual process of increasing discontent that shifts from one’s fellow saints, to bishops, to higher levels of authority, and ultimately to the entire body of the Church and its general leadership. Riess honors parents who choose LGBTQ children over following the general authorities, and challenges those authorities of the standard liberal talking points of the priesthood ban, female ordination, praying to a “Heavenly Mother,” and prophetic authority. Finally, she ends her screed castigating rank-and-file conservatives in the Church’s ranks for supporting President Donald Trump, which I suppose is the cardinal sin for any liberal to tolerate.
Riess’ RNS blog post may be her manifesto, or at least a preparatory one. The manifesto’s narrative is progressing along classic lines. If she continues down this path, Riess will find herself facing warnings from Church leadership and, unless repentance follows, she will make her last stand as yet another liberal “martyr.” This brings to mind an ironic and somewhat humorous connection. In movies and print, the fatal error of all comic-book antagonists is the “monologue,” where, in the moment of ultimate victory, the villain’s compulsions drive him to give vent to the injustices that cause him to take his present course of criminality. Similarly, Latter-day Saints who are heading for public apostasy have to give vent to their pent-up resentment, wherein they give a laundry list of offenses they have taken against the Church, its members, and its leaders. It is a compulsive act of self-justification they do before they pull the ripcord and bail out. Sadly, they will find that their parachute is not properly packed on the dreadful way down.
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