Fallibility: A Love Story

Hello and welcome to another episode of Inside Out. My name is Jim Bennett, and unfortunately I am not here with Ian Wilkes this week. Last time I flew solo, it was because Ian had suffered a serious health scare. And I am pleased to report that is not the case this week. Ian is having just way too much fun. He is traveling in the United Kingdom and we've been trying to coordinate schedules. But I think that if I don't fly solo, we're probably not going to be able to record something and get it out this week. So I am once again flying solo. And last time I flew solo, I introduced you to one of my solo projects or multiple solo projects when I talked about my songs that I written. And this time I want to introduce you to something that is also a solo project. I have, over the last few months, completed a manuscript for a book, and the book is titled Fallibility: A Love Story. And what I'm going to do is read the first two chapters to you, or at least excerpts from the first two chapters. I want to keep this to around an hour. So anybody that listens to this and has any feedback on it, please feel free to reach out to me. Email me at jim@canonizer.com. I would love to hear from you. I'd love to hear if you think this is terrific. I'd love to hear if you think that it's awful. Both would be very helpful. So without further ado, Chapter 1: The Right Answers to the Wrong Questions. Let's begin with a conversation between my father and Harold B. Lee about why my Uncle David left the Church. By way of background, it's important that you understand what a magnificent human being my Uncle David was. Here's how his mother, who was my grandmother, described him in her book, Glimpses of a Mormon Family. David is gentle, guileless, tenderhearted. I have never heard him raise his voice to one of his four children. He is an individual, a nonconformist, a thinker going his own way, asking only to be left alone. David was something of an anomaly in the Bennett family. His father and brother both served as United States senators after successful business careers, and his oldest brother ran the family business of Bennett Glass and Paint for much of his adult life. But David's non-business and non-political interests led him to earn a master's degree in mathematics and a PhD in philosophy, with his doctoral dissertation written entirely in mathematical symbols. He was a tenured professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and also an accomplished violist who played with the Utah Symphony and frequently held impromptu quartets in his living room in the house he purchased up Emigration Canyon because of its good acoustics. Simply put, David was a genius, and even though he had left the Church long before I was cognizant of such things, he was one of the most Christ-like men I've ever known. According to my father, David's genius was put to good use by Church leaders who enlisted him to write priesthood manuals in the early days of Church correlation. He reported directly to Richard L. Evans, the apostle who gained prominence for providing music in the spoken word with its spoken words for decades, and also perhaps the last apostle to sport a mustache in public. In my father's recounting, David's writing reflected his eclectic and philosophical worldview, and he confronted church doctrine with a complexity and sophistication that was not often found in church materials before or since. He would submit a draft of a manual to Elder Evans, who would read it and laud its brilliance to no end. But then Elder Evans would frequently come back with a number of required edits and changes, some of them quite drastic. David reportedly became increasingly frustrated with the fact that Elder Evans seemed to be talking out of both sides of his mouth. After all, if he loved the drafts, why was he demanding so many revisions? The answer was that while Richard L. Evans loved pretty much everything David wrote, Harold B. Lee did not. It would be difficult to overstate how much influence Harold B. Lee had at that time. Not only was he serving as the president of the Quorum of the Twelve, he was also the head of the Correlation Committee, which was radically changing how the Church operated. For the first half of the 20th century, every organization in the Church functioned largely independently each with its own slate of directors and alternately overlapping and conflicting agendas. Members found themselves having to decide which organization deserved more of their time and money. Should they go to the Sunday school or the Relief Society fundraiser, both of which may have been on the same night? The freewheeling nature of the organization made for a great deal of variety in both activities and teachings. And correlation was an attempt to bring order out of occasional chaos. By all accounts, President Lee's life experience was diametrical to my Uncle David's. A no-nonsense businessman and politician, Lee was what my father called a Type A personality who was more organizational than pastoral. He could be abrupt and direct in ways that left people upset and offended. And when he was tasked to create uniformity in a church with unwieldy auxiliaries that were flying off in every direction, he was single-minded in pursuit of his goal, regardless of whose feelings may have been hurt along the way. He was trying to smooth out the church's sharp edges, and David Bennett was one of those edges. David found himself with a front row seat to the inner workings of the Quorum of the Twelve, and what he saw directly contradicted the way the Church typically presented itself to the public at large. Rather than serene enlightenment among a perfectly unified group of holy sages, he saw bickering and disagreement and argument, sometimes quite heated. Aren't these men supposed to be the direct conduits of heaven? And if they were, why was it so difficult for them to come to any kind of consensus? This experience left David disbelieving that these men were inspired or particularly special in any way. And it wasn't long after that he decided to withdraw from active participation in the church. And so it happens that after David's departure, my father found himself in the lobby of the Hotel Utah alongside Harold B. Lee. For reasons my father never shared with me, or if he did, I can't remember what they were. I imagine they were waiting for a ride to some event, but I can't imagine what that event might have been or why my father, who held no prominent position in the church or government at the time, would have been accompanying the president of the Quorum of the Twelve to anything. Be that as it may, they were together waiting for something, and President Lee took the opportunity to kill some time by asking what had ever happened to Dad's brother David. Dad recounted everything I've recounted here, and he said that President Lee got visibly angry as he heard the story of David's disillusionment. "Good heavens," President Lee reportedly said, "doesn't he know we're just men?" He said things to the effect that he could understand why people out in the mission field might put church leaders on a pedestal, but that David should have known better. He should have realized that the men who lead the church are mere mortals like everyone else, but, quote, we're doing the best we can, end quote. It was that last phrase that Dad saw as the point of the story. Even though they made mistakes, disagreed, and had flaws like the rest of us, They were good men who had been given a sacred calling to fulfill, and while they fell short like we all do, they do the best that they can. I take that as the point of the story too. In fact, it is the point of this book, as well as the reason I think something like this book is necessary. Because the story of flawed but good men doing the best that they can to build the kingdom of God is a compelling and inspiring story. It's a story of grit and faith and sacrifice, a story of God's purposes being accomplished in spite of setbacks and the failings of the people working to advance the cause of Zion. It's the story of the weak things of the world being made strong. Ultimately, it's the story of God's boundless love for his stumbling, struggling children. A love story where fallibility is a feature, not a bug. Sadly, this doesn't seem to be the story we tell each other or the world at large. It's also not the story President Lee felt comfortable telling outside the confines of the Hotel Utah lobby. Searching his writings and conference addresses, I can find no quotation that reflects the sentiments he shared with my father all those decades ago. However, I can find plenty of quotations from President Lee like the following from the October 1970 General Conference. Quote: Now, the only safety we have as members of this Church is to do exactly what the Lord said to the Church in that day when the Church was organized. We must learn to give heed to the words and commandments that the Lord shall give through His prophet. Your safety and ours depends upon whether or not we follow the ones whom the Lord has placed to preside over his church. He knows whom he wants to preside over this church, and he will make no mistake. End quote. The public and private positions are not irreconcilable, but there is a distinct tension between them. And there have been considerably more similar statements from his successors. That have been interpreted by the membership at large as a de facto promise that church leaders are more than just men. They are infallible men. After all, they will never lead us astray. And whether by mine own voice or the voice of my servants, it is the same. Parenthetically, I submit that both of these concepts are frequently misquoted and misinterpreted from their original intent, and I will address each of them in turn later in the book. The result is that even though there are frequent statements from church leaders emphasizing the fact that they are in fact fallible men, we tend to dismiss them as if they're just being unnecessarily humble. And even if we say they're not perfect, we treat them as if they are. It's the old joke that says Catholics are taught that the Pope is infallible, but they don't believe it, while Latter-day Saints are taught that the prophets are fallible, but they don't believe it. There's also a colloquial saying I've heard many times throughout my life that claims that the church is perfect but the people are not. But the church is the people. It doesn't exist as some kind of Platonic ideal independent of the lived experience of its members. If the people aren't perfect, then the church can't be perfect either. That includes the leaders as well as the lay membership. When pressed, many members will allow for a sort of limited fallibility model to apply to prophets and apostles. They will concede that Church leaders can forget your birthday or misspell your name, but they can't possibly say or do anything in their official capacity that wouldn't be exactly what the Lord would do if he were here in their place. You can find examples of this limited fallibility model in many places, both official and unofficial, such as the apologetic website fairlatterdaysaints.org, which answers the question, "Can a prophet make mistakes?" with an answer that references the oft-quoted maxim that the prophet, that the prophet can never lead the Church astray. Quote: This statement that the prophet cannot lead the Church astray does not mean that the Lord's servants are perfect, or that they will never make mistakes, display weaknesses, sometimes be irritable, have bad breath, or display the characteristics of old age. End quote. That's good to know, but it doesn't get to the heart of what people are really asking when they wonder about prophetic fallibility. Nobody, for instance, has a hard time believing Brigham Young was a prophet because he may have had bad breath. But I've met many people who are deeply troubled by Brigham Young's insistence that the law of God, which will always be so, is that interracial relationships should be punished with death on the spot. They also find it to be a trial of their faith to learn that Brigham Young repeatedly taught that, quote, "Adam is our father and our God and the only God with whom we have to do," end quote. Even going so far as requiring this doctrine to be taught at the veil of the temple at the conclusion of the endowment ceremony. The Church has repeatedly, publicly, and explicitly repudiated the Adam-God doctrine, but curiously never mentioned Brigham Young by name when they have done so. There is also a direct repudiation of Brigham's death-on-the-spot teachings in the 2013 Gospel Topics essay "Race and the Priesthood." Quote: Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life, that mixed-race marriages are a sin, or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form. End quote. But again, there's no direct mention of Brother Brigham, even though the idea that mixed-race marriages are a sin and other racist teachings can be directly traced back to many of his inflammatory sermons. The result of this reluctance to assign accountability for prophetic error is a perpetuation of a false doctrine of infallibility. Yes, then-President Uchtdorf once said in General Conference that, quote, "To be perfectly frank, there have been times when members or leaders in the Church have simply made mistakes," end quote. But every politician knows that saying "mistakes were made" is not at all the same thing as accepting responsibility for them. Who made the mistakes? What were the mistakes? Can you give me an example of one? Just one? We don't seem to be comfortable answering those questions. Ever. That's a problem, and it's a problem that is compounded by the fact that we're responding to such questions in ways that exacerbate the reasons they're being asked in the first place. Instead of answering, we sidestep. Worse, we demonize. If you're asking the questions, you're told that the problem is you. Not the issues that are causing concern. Perhaps you may recall the kerfuffle over remarks that Brad Wilcox, then serving as the Second Counselor in the Young Men General Presidency, gave in a fireside in Alpine, Utah, back in 2022. On that occasion, he spoke about the priesthood and temple ban against people of African descent that was in place for over 125 years. "Now, sadly, you live in a time where a lot of people get uptight about priesthood issues," Brother Wilcox said. It's one of the most glorious things we have in the church, and yet people want to sit and fight about it and get uptight about it. Now, I don't mean to oversimplify a complex issue, but I sure think we make it a little harder than it needs to be. End of Brad Wilcox quote. Except oversimplifying a complex issue is precisely what he's doing. There's a deliberate pattern that's being established here. If you're concerned about, quote, priesthood issues, end quote, you are uptight about it, and you want to sit and fight. Apparently, if you were more relaxed and less belligerent, the problem would go away, or at the very least, you would go away since you're the problem. Notice too that he's using a euphemism to downplay the validity of the concern. You may be livid that the church perpetuated a racist policy for well over a century that denied basic gospel blessings to billions of fellow human beings and children of God, but really you're just quibbling over priesthood issues. So if your home catches fire and burns to the ground, destroying everything you own, you're just uptight about housing issues? Right from the outset, the whole thing is framed in a way that allows Brother Wilcox to delegitimize perfectly legitimate questions. How come the blacks didn't get the priesthood until 1978? What's up with that, Brother Wilcox? he asks. Raising his voice as if to mock the straw man he's pretending to be. What, Brigham Young was a jerk? Members of the church were prejudiced? All three of these questions have straightforward answers. First, blacks didn't get the priesthood until 1978 largely because Brigham Young accepted the false Protestant justification for slavery that they bore the curse of Cain, an idea he explicitly presented in an address to the Utah Territorial Legislature in 1852. "If there never was a prophet or apostle of Jesus Christ spoke it before, I tell you, this people that are commonly called Negroes are the children of old Cain," he said. "I know they are. I know that they cannot rule, cannot bear rule in the priesthood." And while he did suggest that someday the curse of Cain would be lifted, he also said that wouldn't happen "until the last of the posterity of Abel had received the priesthood until the redemption of the earth. End quote. He concluded his lengthy address decrying any attempts to put people of African descent on equal footing with other races by saying, what we are trying to do today is to make the Negro equal with us in all our privilege. My voice shall be against that all the day long. "Enforcement of the ban had been sporadic and inconsistent prior to this address. Afterward, it became an immovable policy that likely endured for so long because Brother Brigham's immediate successors saw no reason to question it, as the world around them was equally racist, if not more so. It wasn't until the mid-20th century that leadership began to deal with serious concerns, and by then, Inertia had calcified the policy into an eternal doctrine. A 1949 letter from George Albert Smith's First Presidency said the ban was, quote, "not a matter of the declaration of a policy, but of direct commandment from the Lord," end quote. President Smith's successor, David O. McKay, also issued a statement that the, quote, "seeming discrimination by the Church towards the Negro is not something which originated with man, but goes back into the beginning with God. President McKay would later make statements that were less dogmatic on this point, defining the ban as a policy and not a doctrine, but still insisting it would require a direct revelation from the Lord to reverse. So, the too-long-didn't-read answer to Brother Wilcox's first question—how come the Blacks didn't get the priesthood until 1978? What's up with that, Brother Wilcox? Is that Brigham Young made a profound error and his successors likewise erred in their unwillingness to correct it. The second question, "What, Brigham Young was a jerk?" is a rather rude framing, as Brigham Young was, like all of us, a complex human being with strengths and weaknesses. He was capable of great kindness and magnanimity. I believe he was an instrument in the hands of the Lord to hold the Church together, after the death of Joseph Smith and lead them to the Salt Lake Valley. Jerk is an epithet that did not describe the totality of the man. But when it came specifically to Brigham's positions on matters of race, perhaps jerk is not too strong of a word. The third question, members of the Church were prejudiced, can be answered much more simply. Yes, many members of the Church were prejudiced. Likewise, many leaders of the church were prejudiced too, some in very disturbing proportions. In 1964, George Romney, father of Mitt Romney, was the governor of Michigan. He was a prominent national figure, an active member of the church, and an ally of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an outspoken advocate for civil rights. About 2 months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Governor Romney received a personal letter from Delbert L. Stapley, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve. The first paragraph was a mixture of greeting and pleasantries, and then Elder Stapley dove right into the heart of the matter. "After listening to your talk on civil rights, I am very much concerned," he wrote. "Several others have expressed the same concern to me. It does not altogether harmonize with my own understandings regarding this subject." Therefore, I thought to drop you a note, not in my official Church position, but as a personal friend. Only President McKay can speak for the Church. End quote. I am relieved that Elder Stapley had the wisdom to clarify that the bigotry he was about to spew was not the Church's official position, because there is nothing about that letter that isn't horrifying. Elder Stapley charges Governor Romney with being too, quote, "liberal on this vital problem in the light of the revelations," end quote. Stapley then makes a series of bonkers arguments alleging that support for equal rights is so offensive to God that, well, no, I'll let him speak for himself. I can't do it justice. Quote, when I reflect upon the prophet's statements, And remember what happened to 3 of our nation's presidents who were very active in the Negro cause. I am sobered by their demise. They went contrary to the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, unwittingly no doubt, but nevertheless, the prophecy of Joseph Smith: Those who are determined to pursue a course which shows an opposition and a feverish restlessness against the decrees of the Lord, 'will learn when perhaps it is too late for their own good that God can do his own work without the aid of those who are not dictated by his counsel' has and will continue to be fulfilled." End quote. Keep in mind that this was written in the wake of JFK's death at a time when the entire nation was still sobered by his demise. No doubt he was one of the three presidents to whom Elder Stapley was referring. The other two were likely Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley, both of whom were shot and killed while in office, and both likewise very active in the Negro cause. I remember first reading this and being too stunned by the plain language to accept the implications of what he was saying. I just couldn't believe what I had just read. Was he really suggesting that God murdered Abraham Lincoln for freeing the slaves? The next paragraph erases any doubt that, yes, that is precisely what he was saying. Quote: In this respect, let me give you a personal experience. A friend of mine in Arizona, not a Church member, a great champion of the colored race, came to me after my call into the Twelve and acknowledged President McKay to be a prophet of God. He wanted to ask President McKay to inquire of the Lord to see if the Lord would not lift the curse from the colored race and give them the privileges of the priesthood. I explained to him that the Lord had placed the curse upon the Negro which denied him the priesthood. Therefore, it was the Lord's responsibility, not man's, to change His decision. This friend of mine met a very tragic end by drowning. He was a most enthusiastic advocate for the colored cause and went about promoting for them all the privileges, social and opportunities, all the privileges, social opportunities, and participation enjoyed by the whites. End quote. So there you have it. In 1964, an apostle believed that if you want equal rights for Black people, God will make sure you drown. Yikes. Back to Brother Wilcox then. Does he make any attempt to answer any of the three questions his strawman character raises? Do we hear anything about Brigham Young's racism or Delbert Stapley's theory that death was divine punishment for the Emancipation Proclamation? No, never. Instead, he pivots. Maybe we're asking the wrong question, he says. And maybe, Brother Wilcox, we're really, really not. I'm probably being too hard on Brother Wilcox, who is now Elder Wilcox, serving as a full General Authority Seventy. He's far from being the only leader who has done this, and he had the decency and humility to apologize for his remarks after they went viral. He was likely surprised by the negative reaction, as he had, by his own admission, given that same talk many times over a span of several years without any negative pushback. Indeed, this sort of strawmanning and deflection has been standard operating procedure for decades, and it's not hard to understand why. If you can't answer a hard question with the correct answer—i.e., on matters of, of race, Brigham Young was horribly wrong— then the best you can do is try to change the subject altogether. I also can't fault Elder Wilcox because this is exactly the same approach I took as a young missionary serving less than a decade after the 1978 priesthood revelation. I remember reading a media guide that had been issued to missionaries that offered suggestions for dealing with questions about the ban. I was to try changing the subject to early Latter-day Saint abolitionism or to testimonies of faithful Black members today. There may have been other suggestions too. I can't remember them, but I will never forget the final line: "Whatever you do, do not apologize for the Lord and his church." I took that to heart. I wasn't that good at changing subjects, though, nor was I comfortable sidestepping hard questions. So, I often found myself trying to find lines of reasoning that didn't allow for any degree of fallibility in the Church or its leaders. Oh, you're troubled by the priesthood ban? Well, that's just how the Lord operates sometimes. In ancient Israel, for example, only the tribe of Levi had the priesthood. So, there's nothing unusual about the priesthood being withheld at different times from different people. Except that's an exceptionally weak argument. Yes, the tribe of Levi were the only ones authorized to administer the rituals of the temple, but those rituals and blessings were available to all the tribes. This was an administrative distinction, not an exclusion of anybody. Unlike black people in the modern church before 1978, no one in Israel was turned away at the doors of the temple. Look, even Jesus said he was only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The gospel was often restricted to certain people at certain times, So we shouldn't be surprised to see that happen today. Except all those restrictions were lifted when Peter received the revelation to preach the gospel to the Gentiles. And the Book of Mormon insists that all are alike unto God, including black and white, bond and free. How are all alike unto God if being black means you can't be sealed to your family and receive all the blessings of the restored gospel? And if you don't have a satisfying answer for that, which nobody does, are you going to tell me again that I'm asking the wrong question? That's precisely the approach that Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge took in 2019 in his BYU devotional address entitled "Stand Forever," a talk intended to ameliorate the faith crisis epidemic among young people in the Church. Yet rather than acknowledge any legitimacy in concerns or questions that young people may have, He insisted that they were falling prey to deception, and the only way to avoid Satan's deceptive answers is to control the questions. "Begin by answering the primary questions," he said. "There are primary questions and there are secondary questions. Answer the primary questions first." He then continues: "Not all questions are equal." And not all truths are equal. The primary questions are the most important. Everything else is subordinate. There are only a few primary questions. I will mention four of them. One, is there a God who is our Father? Two, is Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Savior of the world? Three, was Joseph Smith a prophet? Four, is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the kingdom of God on the earth? By contrast, the secondary questions are unending. They include questions about Church history, polygamy, people of African descent in the priesthood, women in the priesthood, how the Book of Mormon was translated, the Pearl of Great Price, DNA in the Book of Mormon, gay marriage, the different accounts of the First Vision, and on and on. If you answer the primary questions, the secondary questions get answered too, or they pale in significance, and you can deal with things you understand and things you don't, and things you agree with and things you don't, without jumping ship altogether. End Elder Corbridge quote. That might have worked back in my mission days amid the pre-internet 1980s. Back then, pretty much the only way you could learn that Joseph Smith was a polygamist who married teenage girls was to read weird, cheap-looking, misspelled pamphlets in brown paper bags that pastors would drop on people's doorsteps when they found out a member of their congregation was meeting with the missionaries. Today, however, all the secondary questions are just a Google click away, and people learn them before they even know what the primary questions are. And if the first thing I learned about Joseph Smith, from the church's own website no less, is that he polygamously married Helen Mar Kimball, quote, 7 months before her first fit her before her 15th birthday, end quote, I'm gonna have a hard time answering Primary Question Number 3, "Is Joseph Smith a prophet?" in the affirmative. With all due respect to Elders Corbin and Wilcox, we no longer live in a time where the Church can control which questions are wrong, primary, or secondary. The internet has democratized information in such a way that we no longer have any choice but to confront every question head-on. But instead of doing that, we're doubling down on what doesn't work, sidestepping the questions and shaming the questioners. And then we're still somehow surprised that young people continue to leave the church in ever-increasing numbers. It does not have to be this way. The solution to this is not implementing stopgap measures by clothing hard realities in soft, squishy evasions. We can no longer pretend we have a choice as to which questions we're willing to answer, and the answers will not be satisfying unless prophetic fallibility is a reality we're willing to accept. I realize that reality is terrifying for many. It shouldn't be. In fact, the principles of the restored gospel give us the ability to confront the hard questions, accept and even embrace the reality of fallibility in our leaders and in ourselves, and come out with a strengthened testimony on the other side. Just ask Adam and Eve. Which leads us to Chapter 2: Falling into Fallibility. For 3 years while I was getting my undergraduate degree at the University of Southern California, I dragged myself out of bed at 5:30 AM to teach early morning seminary in the Westwood Building directly behind the Los Angeles Temple. I had gotten to know the kids in my class from teaching Sunday school in the Westwood Ward. So, I knew them and their families before I started my seminary assignment. They also knew, knew me, and they had heard some of the heresies I believed when I workshopped them in our Sunday school class. One such heresy was that I had a problem with Church teachings about Adam and Eve. Specifically, I rejected the idea that the Lord had given them conflicting commandments, despite being taught precisely that for all of my life. Most of the Judeo-Christian world believes the Fall to be nothing but a tragedy. It's the story of how Adam and Eve directly defy God and bring evil into the world, and all human sin and misery can be traced directly back to it. But Latter-day Saints preach something sometimes called a fortunate Fall, where humanity's first couple are given two commandments directly at odds with each other: don't eat the fruit, and also multiply and replenish the earth. They can't keep both commandments, so fortunately they keep the one God really wanted them to obey. That didn't make a lick of sense to me, both theologically and logistically. Theologically, I kept coming back to Nephi's statements that have been oft memorialized in sermon and song: And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded; for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them. Or as the Children's Songbook more succinctly puts it, I will go, I will do the things the Lord commands. I know the Lord provides a way, he wants me to obey. If the Lord always provides a way, then why would he give a commandment that couldn't be obeyed without breaking another one? Does Nephi's promise that the Lord giveth no commandments save he shall prepare a way need an asterisk? To note the exception, our partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Logistically, how would God enforce a commandment that Adam and Eve couldn't keep? Presuming if they didn't partake of the fruit, they would have remained innocent in the garden. At what point would God show up and punish them for not multiplying and replenishing the earth? Was there a time limit? What if they were trying and yet nothing seemed to work? Yes, I realize that question sounds like the setup for an off-color joke, but it was deadly serious to me. This heresy was a bridge too far for some of the parents of my seminary students. When the topic of study was the Old Testament, one of the kids showed up at class with a letter signed by several of the parents that outlined what I ought to be teaching their children, complete with scripture citations from 2 Nephi chapter 2 and Moses chapter 5, talking about how the fall had fulfilled the Lord's purposes and Eve stating that were it not for our transgression, We never should have had seed. I found none of them persuasive. I agreed that the Fall fulfilled the Lord's purposes, as everything fulfills the Lord's purposes in the end. But I still couldn't accept the idea that God had set Adam and Eve up to fail. Back then, I was too shaken up by being called out to push back, so I dutifully stuck to the manual and steered clear of the controversy. That didn't dissuage my gnawing discomfort with the central premise of the story. It wasn't until years, perhaps decades later, that I realized that ironically, maybe I really was asking the wrong question. I had been focusing on the story as if it were an academic exercise, and I approached it with scholarly detachment. In the temple, we're repeatedly put in the place of Adam and Eve and told to think of ourselves as if we were Adam and Eve, even doing things like closing our eyes when Adam closes his eyes and standing when Adam stands. Even with decades of repetition, I still didn't realize that this wasn't a story about two ancient people. This was a story about me. Not just me, of course. It's your story too. It's everyone's story. It's not a tale of conflicting commandments or a tragedy about evil. It's a love story of choosing to leave the safety of God's presence in order to become more like him. But no great love story comes without conflict. We have to encounter sin, error, pain, and ultimately death. It's the story of a decision that we each make for ourselves that God will never force us to make, even though he knows that it's the only decision that eventually allows us to become like him. It's a decision to be fallible. Unlike the rest of the Christian world, Latter-day Saints believe that mortality is not the beginning of our existence, but rather an infinitesimally tiny part of our eternal experience. Prior to our arrival on Earth, we each spent numberless eons in the presence of our Heavenly Parents, where we were essentially incapable of sin. We didn't have to judge good or evil for ourselves because the perfect paradigm of goodness was ever-present at every moment. We were very much like Adam and Eve before the Fall—innocent, yes, but also stunted and incapable of any real growth. We knew the road toward eternal life would be rocky, but we chose it anyway. In symbolic terms, then, we each partook of the fruit and got cast out of the garden of the premortal life into this lone and dreary world, and we now spend our entire lives learning to choose the good over evil, constantly falling short along the way. With that framing, fallibility becomes far more than just a glitch in the mortal experience. It becomes the central purpose of the mortal experience. We came here specifically to make mistakes and learn from them. Yes, the collective cost of those mistakes is staggering, and requires Jesus's infinite Atonement to pay for them. When you recognize he was essentially paying for our eternal education, and you realize just how much he was willing to pay, you start to see how infinitely and eternally valuable the lessons of our fallible mortal experience truly are. We discuss these ideas often in the Church, but we usually frame it as a question of agency, not fallibility. How many Sunday school lessons have you heard about the central nature of agency to the plan of salvation? Those lessons usually focus on the importance of using your agency to make good choices, and that's entirely appropriate. We tend not to focus on the other side of that coin, namely that not all of our choices are going to be the right ones. And yet God uses those bad choices to teach us lessons that we can't learn in any other way. In all of our attempts to make sense of pain and suffering and cruel people in a cruel world and the errors of others, we tell the stories as if we are the heroes victimized by the villains that are out to get us. But what if we are the villains? And worse, what if we don't know that we're the villains? When I think back to my childhood, I remember myself as a weird skinny kid with a big mouth who frequently ran afoul of bullies. It got so bad that I found myself finding multiple routes to walk home from school in order to avoid my tormentors who were lying in wait to ambush me, and I was only sporadically successful. There were only so many ways to get home from school, after all. The experience left me with an acute sense of self-righteousness in the face of what I saw as constant persecution, as well as with zero tolerance for bullying of any kind. I found refuge in a performing arts group called the Kids of the Century, which is where I was able to find my fellow weirdos and congregate with people who were more interested in singing and dancing than they were in beating me up. It was there that I met a couple who I will refer to as Hank and Sheila, which were not their real names, but they sound cool, so we'll run with that. The Kids of the Century sang at state fairs and such, and we traveled to most of our gigs in rented buses. Hank and Sheila used to share a seat near the front and proceed to make out in front of everybody. They were one of those cutesy couples with the pet names and everything. Being an insecure adolescent and probably being somewhat jealous because I wasn't making out with anybody, either in public or in private, I teased them mercilessly and encouraged others to do likewise. I don't remember what methods I used, but knowing me, I was probably pretty insufferable. Still, it didn't occur to me that what I was doing would have any real consequences, serious or otherwise, I certainly didn't think of myself as a bully. I was just having a bit of fun, and in my mind it was all good-natured and quickly forgotten. Fade out, fade in. Several years after high school, I went to a Kids of the Century concert only to see Hank and Sheila, now a happily pet-named married couple, sitting two rows ahead of me. Made me smile to see them again. I went up to them at intermission. Hank was very friendly, and we chatted amiably, but Sheila wouldn't speak to me. When she saw me coming, she made a point of standing up and dramatically stalking off in a huff. I was unable to take a hint, so I caught up with her, but she still wouldn't speak to me. She wouldn't look at me. And all I was trying to do was say hello! I went back to Hank, who sheepishly told me that Sheila still hadn't forgiven me for the way I'd made fun of her all those years ago. And she still talked about me with venom in her voice. I wrote about this on my blog many years ago to make a different point than the one I'm making here. I still hadn't taken the hint, and I used them as an example of what happens when we hold grudges. I brought up the story as an indictment of Sheila, still not accepting my responsibility for the pain I had caused her. It wasn't until Sheila herself read my post and decided to comment that the scales fell from my eyes. "This is Sheila," she wrote. "You could have apologized for all the belittling, harassment, and bullying you gave me, my now husband, and my brother-in-law, but you sat next to me without any regard for your actions. There are consequences to your actions, and you were a very big bully." To most of the people in our group, our incident would not have happened if you'd learned the art of remorse. It wasn't until I read that comment that I realized that I was the bully and the villain in her story, and that my actions had caused pain that reverberated for decades afterward. This taught me a great deal about myself and how I treat others, and it's helped me recognize that I often fail to appreciate the full impact of my actions. I learned quite a bit from this whole episode, but lamentably, I learned it at Sheila's expense. Now, could God have prevented me from being the bully that I was? Sure. He could have had me hit by a bus or a meteor before the bullying began. At the very least, he could have warned me through the Spirit that I was doing something I shouldn't have been doing. In retrospect, I can testify that he did exactly that, but I was too much of an adolescent jackass to notice. Anything else would have required him to remove my agency from me. That's the one thing he will never do in any instance. As a result, each of us learn and grow through our mistakes, even as we intentionally or unintentionally inflict pain on others in the process. Jesus suffered all of my pain, and he suffered Sheila's pain too. I can be forgiven for being a bully because Jesus has mercy on me and paid the price for my sins, not because I deserve the forgiveness. When we personalize the pain that we cause as well as the pain that we suffer, we can better recognize that God doesn't intend it to happen, doesn't make it happen, and isn't happy that it happens. I believe we all made the choice to come to a fallen world and learn from the consequences, and God weeps with us when those consequences bring suffering and trauma to any of his children. That is the plan. That is the risk we took when we each symbolically partook of our own fruit and chose to leave the presence of God and enter weak, fallible, fragile mortal bodies. Expecting God to prevent all pain would be to nullify the purpose of mortality. His plan is not to micromanage our lives to the point where we steer clear of everything that might hurt us or shield everyone from the hurt we inflict. His plan is to give us the moral resources to use that pain to make us more like him. It is these kinds of moral choices, good or evil, that define who we are and what our relationship with God will be. This is what makes fallibility a love story. We are fallible because God loves us enough to preserve our agency. He knows that the mistakes that shape and define us are what will eventually allow us to return to his presence. And truly be the kind of peer he wants us to be. We look to the church and church leaders for guidance in helping us to determine which choices are good ones and which ones are not. In doing so, we too often forget that church leaders still have the same agency we have. It is not extracted from them when they are called to high ecclesiastical office.— It doesn't vanish when they stand at a pulpit and begin to preach. We should therefore expect that the fallibility with which we all struggle individually will be manifest in the church collectively, too. So, that's a much shorter excerpt from the second chapter than what I provided of the first chapter, which is pretty much the entire first chapter. Minus a number of other things. But just to give you a general outline for the rest of the book, the third chapter is called "Lucky to Be Resurrected." And it talks about how fallibility and error are manifest in church leadership. I tell some stories about my experience. The quote comes from my mission president saying, "Is there any question as to who?" Elizabeth Taylor's husband is going to be in the next life. Elizabeth Taylor is going to be lucky to be resurrected. And that was kind of obnoxious joke, and I point out that all of us are lucky to be resurrected. The fourth chapter is called A Matter of Trust Thermoclines, and it talks about how faith crisis devolves into trust crisis, because when we are taught that people are that church leaders are infallible, when we find out they are not, it creates a crisis of trust. And I compare it to a thermocline, which is where the water gets very cold when you dive into the ocean. All of a sudden, the temperature plummets. And that's kind of what happens when somebody discovers that church leaders are infallible. All of a sudden, everything goes cold, and there's nothing you can do to bring them back. And so the false doctrine of infallibility creates that trust thermocline. Chapter 5 is Seeking Apologies and Giving Them. I get into President Oaks's discussion about how we don't seek apologies or give them, and I point out the strengths and weaknesses of that argument. And there are some strengths in that argument. Uh, they're all in the idea of not seeking apologies and going forward even if we don't get an apology. But the refusal to give apologies is very problematic. Chapter 6 is called Speaking as a Man, It, Astray, and Bigfoot. And here I get into this whole idea about, oh geez, well, he was just speaking as a man, which is ridiculous because they're always speaking as men. They never cease to be men when they speak. They are capable of error when they speak, even when they're speaking in conference. They are always speaking as men, even when they are speaking as prophets. "It" is part of that title. It's the antecedent in the Scripture that gets us into so much trouble where it says, "Whether by my own voice or the voice of my servants, it is the same." And what "it" is, is not what we say it is. I'm sounding very Clintonian, you know, but it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is. But what that verse in context means is The Lord says, what I have spoken, I have spoken, and I excuse not myself, and it will all be fulfilled. Everything the Lord speaks will be fulfilled, whether it is spoken by himself or by his servants, meaning that the promises of the Lord, what the Lord speaks through his servants, will be fulfilled. Not that everything the servants speak is exactly what the Lord would speak. And then I get into the whole idea of what it means for how a church— the church— President of the Church can never lead you astray. And I think that's something that is yanked out of context and is used as sort of a bludgeon to say that church leaders are infallible, when that's not what that phrase means either. So that's chapter 5. Chapter 6, just pulling this up, is called— well, that is Chapter 6, I'm sorry. Chapter 7 is called, pulling it up, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, Sustain Versus Agree. And I get into the whole idea that can you sustain a leader even if you don't agree with them? And the answer, the short answer is yes. And I explain why. Chapter 8 is called "Half Measures and Gospel Topics Essays." And this is probably the chapter that will ensure this book would never be published by Deseret Book, because I open it with a huge extended metaphor from Breaking Bad. You've all watched Breaking Bad. It's a wonderful show, but it's certainly not a show that you could— I mean, it's very much an R-rated kind of thing that probably won't get quoted in General Conference anytime soon. But it tells the story of this hitman guy who says that when you take half measures, you don't do anybody any good, essentially. And I described the Gospel Topics Essays, which were an attempt to sort of be a half measure to address the reality of fallibility and error in the church, but done in a way that's pretty much hidden from most members of the church. Most members don't even know they exist. And it's a half measure, and half measures don't do us any good. So that's chapter 8. Chapter 9 is Doctrine, Policy, and Truth. So often we get into huge discussions about what's doctrine and what isn't, and we're throwing those three words around— doctrine, policy, and truth— and we're using them interchangeably.. And they should not be used interchangeably because all three of them, I think, are different. And, you know, a doctrine is— right now in the church, essentially a doctrine is something that is eternally true until it changes, and then it, it's retroactively labeled a policy, and it was never a doctrine to begin with. And much easier to do is explain that a doctrine is anything that we teach. That's how the dictionary describes it. And our doctrines, we hope, reflect truth, but it's possible sometimes they haven't. And that's why there's such a thing as false doctrine, but no such thing as false truth. Truth is the thing that never changes. And we hope our doctrines reflect truth. We hope our policies reflect truth. But because we are fallible, doctrines can and do change. And certainly policies change. So that's Chapter 9. And Chapter 10 is, as I scroll through my lovely manuscript, oh, Chapter 10, the title is Mental Gymnastics. And I'm releasing this right after the women's Olympic gymnastics gold. So I should probably use that as, as the metaphor. But this is, this is a cliché, really, the idea of mental gymnastics. And I describe why mental gymnastics don't do anybody any good. And if your faith requires mental gymnastics, your faith is not sustainable. And the final chapter is titled True and Living. And the summation comes from the scripture that says that this is the only true and living church on the face of the whole earth. And every time people stand up at testimony meeting and say, "I know the Church is true," I feel like they're misquoting the Lord, because the Lord never said this is the only true Church. He said this is the only true and living Church. And that gets into the whole idea of fallibility and why fallibility— why this is a love story. This is a living Church, and all living creatures All living things learn and grow from their mistakes. And that's what mortality is all about. And that's what this book is all about. And that's what this podcast has been all about. So I look forward to Ian returning and me having an interactive discussion. But I really would appreciate any kind of feedback that you could provide. My email again is Jim at Canonizer, C-A-N-O-N-I-Z-E-R. No, but look, canonizer.com. It's canonizer. There's only one N in canon. It's not like a cannon that you shoot something with. It's like a canon of scripture. So I promised to keep this to an hour and I have. So I appreciate very much you're listening to it. And I very much look forward to Ian's return, as I'm sure you do. And until then, We look forward to seeing you at the next episode of Inside Out.