Sunstone 2002: The Church and Its Scholars: Ten Years After

I have started to re-listen to cassettes of sessions from the 2002 Sunstone Symposium, and thought I’d offer some brief comments and observations about them. The first session I re-listened to concerned the 10 year anniversary of the 1992 Sunstone Symposium where Laviana Fielding Anderson presented her 20 year sketch on the ‘deteriorating’ relationship between the Church and its scholars. The events of that session in 92' appear to have had some effect on the eventual excommunication of Anderson, something I’ve never fully understood, along with the cases of some of her contemporaries. Anderson is obviously very attached to the Church, even loyal, certainly a believer, but one who finds plenty to be concerned about in the world of contemporary Mormonism, especially in regards to the relationship between the institutional Church and the individual member. The cases of Anderson and the dozen or so prominent LDS intellectuals to have been excommunicate between 1993 and 1995 are worthy of perusal, and you should be able to find much information there on at the Sunstone website and elsewhere.

In this session Anderson reviews what she said ten years prior and reiterates her continued agreement with, and the perhaps disturbing continuing relevance of, the conclusions she presented originally. Anderson’s basic material was pretty familiar to me still, but I got a lot out of hearing the respondent Armand L. Mauss, author of ‘The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation’, put forth his somewhat folksily styled perspective. Mauss believes that the escalation of these issues into media circuses and out-and-out conflict with the Church leadership does nothing to better the situation at hand. While sympathetic to the experiences of many of those who feel hurt by the Church in regards to a perceived backhand to there concerns and ideas, Mauss feels that one must remember that grassroots change is not likely to be imposed on the leadership of our hierarchal Church, least not in any short period of time. He advises members to remember that the Church is not a democracy and that continued affiliation means one has to live with the flaws and occasional short sidedness that comes with that. However he also says that the cultivation of good relationships with Church leaders both local and general can help get ones opinions heard, and is the most likely and least potentially destructive way to have an influence on the ecclesiastical body. I sympathize with Anderson’s idealism, but Mauss’s pragmatism better reflects the current state of the Church, and the mostly likely avenue to change in official tolerance of divergent conceptions of what it means to be a Mormon.