Might I suggest that you should have said, “It appears that you should have wrapped your story with the prefix, ” It appears that…” and the suffix, “…but I don’t know the whole story,” but I definitely don’t know the whole story.

Uncle.

I don’t know the story of the “September 6″ as well as a lot of folks; I had just come out of high school when that happened. But I do remember the Metro section of the L.A. Times one Sunday doing a cover story on it; they had a huge picture of the Salt Lake Temple and a headline: “Cracks In the Foundation?” They interviewed several of the “victims,” and I remember visiting a friend in the area whose family I had been trying to prepare for the missionaries; the father asked me about the article saying “It looks like things are really coming apart for your church” or something to that effect. I was really angry at the statements the 6 made to the press, and I remember thinking Good riddance at the time. I wish I had Lexis-Nexis now so I could go back and re-read that article, because I know my thinking has evolved significantly since then.

It’s a pretty straightforward distinction. Say you have a cop who pulls you over. He may hate you because of the cloths you wear or the music you listen to. That’s an improper judgment. He may ticket you because he hates you. That’s an abuse of power.

Jota G: You also said that the “public figures” who lead the “global organization” of the Church are accountable to members for their actions… I am aware of no doctrinal or legal basis on which Church leaders would be accountable to the members.

You’re building a straw man by implying that accountability and power are defined primarily in some legal or doctrinal sense. Accountability isn’t primarily a legal or a doctrinal concept. Leaders have a responsibility to members, many of which are not defined legally or doctrinally, because not every moral obligation fits into a legal or doctrinal framework. If leaders breach their responsibilities, it’s up to individual members how they want to treat it. Many leave. Many stay. This is the way that social interactions work.

Jota G: Ultimately the leaders of the Church are accountable only to God.

Ultimately, everyone who ever lived is accountable only to God. This has nothing to do with anything we’re discussing here.

I’m curious to know what you view as the difference between passing [improper] judgments and the abuse of power. I’m not sure I see the difference.

You also said that the “public figures” who lead the “global organization” of the Church are accountable to members for their actions. While I can buy into the idea that leaders of the church have some kind of holy fiduciary duty to the members over whom they preside, I do not think that they are ultimately accountable to the members. While leaders of the church have a responsibility to members of the church, I am aware of no doctrinal or legal basis on which Church leaders would be accountable to the members. Ultimately the leaders of the Church are accountable only to God.

You make it sound like members of the Church are akin to shareholders in a multi-national corporation. If that is your view, then why be so bitter when the “public figures” leading the big bad “large global organization” “abuses its power” in forcibly repossessing the shares of certain shareholders who want to take the business in a different direction and don’t seem, by their actions, to want to be part of a “large global organization” that “abuses its power”.

If, on the other hand, you see the Church as being the Kingdom of God on Earth, led by flawed, but ultimately (and generally) well-intentioned men, you can begin to see reasons the Church insists on being organizationally strict. All you have to do is look at the experience of the primitive Church to see what happens when disparate doctrines take the hold.

Hardly. First of all, these men are public figures that lead a large, global organization, they are accountable to its members for their actions. Second, I don’t care what judgments they pass. I’m concerned about how they abuse their power.

Dan Ellsworth: I would begin my explanation with “It appears that…” and I would end with “…but I definitely don’t know the whole story.”

I’m confident in the truth of the accounts that I provide. Though this doesn’t mean that I’ll hold to these conclusions come what may, it doesn’t warrant the qualification “It appears that… but I don’t know the whole story.” For example, I’m also confident (as I state in my original blog article) that Tom Kimball is a great guy. But I don’t feel the need to say, “It appears that Tom Kimball is a great guy, but I don’t know the whole story.” Indeed, this expresses a lack of confidence that is not true to my opinion.

Might I suggest that you should have said, “It appears that you should have wrapped your story with the prefix, ” It appears that…” and the suffix, “…but I don’t know the whole story,” but I definitely don’t know the whole story.

Regarding whether I know the whole story, there are surely new facts that I could learn to fill in the gaps of my knowledge. Even so, the outcomes of church disciplinary councils are not private. The Church Handbook of Instruction states that it’s appropriate to disclose the details and reasons for excommunication whenever keeping silent about it can cause harm. So the church is not weathering criticism of these excommunications in order to save the reputations of those its excommunicated. Nor are my conclusions inconsistent with the bombastic statements made by church leaders about the appropriate bounds of research.

It appears that…

and I would end with

…but I definitely don’t know the whole story.

When you make the judgment that the Church leaders involved in these situations don’t know the Savior, haven’t you become the thing you loathe — someone willing to pass harsh judgment on the soul of another member of the Church?
As far as New Approaches goes, no- I haven’t read it, but that’s irrelevant since my judgment of the book and its author does not matter. My point with regard to New Approaches is that if the leadership of the Church came to the conclusion that Metcalfe’s efforts were in oppostion to the mission of the Church, then I think Church discipline is entirely appropriate for him. My judgment is not towards Metcalfe or any others in his situation; I am only making a comment about the propriety of the Church’s use of discipline to prevent what it pereives as being efforts to thwart its mission from the inside. I believe this to be true of any organization.
In instances where the Church is in error in excommunicating someone, I refuse to believe that God would deny that individual any blessings that matter, and I believe that person would continue to feel the companionship of the Spirit.

This is factually incorrect on nearly every level. Margaret and Paul Toscano and Maxine Hanks, for example, were faithful Mormons doing scholarship on Heavenly Mother and early Mormon priesthood practices among women. They’re work no more undermines the church’s mission than the near-weekly discussions of such issues on Feminist Mormon Housewives.

Lavina Fielding Anderson was excommunicated for her groundbreaking article in Dialogue which provided reports of members who felt that they had suffered from cavalier, dictatorial, and abusive misuses of power by church leaders. (This included such things as Bruce McConkie’s letter to Eugene England, of which I own a physical copy. McConkie’s letter is, in a word, totally whacked.) To this day, Lavina participates in her ward, though nobody seems willing to re-baptize her and restore her blessings.

Michael Quinn was excommunicated for publishing Early Mormonism and the Magic World View. The first edition of this was a groundbreaking study of how the culture and beliefs of early church leaders were steeped in folk magic. It’s very good scholarship, and it’s written from a point of view that is every bit as faithful as Rough Stone Rolling

None of these scholars were fighting against the church. They were believing Mormons who wrote scholarly articles in areas that irritated church leaders enough to trigger persecution by them. These actions come from the era in which Boyd Packer made his bozo-the-clown assertion that the biggest threats to the church were intellectuals, feminists, and gays; surely there is no better example of one of our leaders fiddling while Rome burns.

These disciplinary instances are abuse of authority because they leveraged the control that leaders had over the stigma of excommunication in order to undermine the influence of these scholars among members; i.e., they were ex’d so that Mormons would be encouraged to reject them out-of-hand. This is what I hate most about Mormonism: First, that it’s leaders publicly dole out factors of credibility in this way, and second, that members are receptive to it. When I recommended to some Mormons I know that they read Duane E. Jeffery’s Dialogue articles on evolution, I told them that he was a BYU professor. Their first question was, “was he still a BYU professor after he published his articles?” This, for them, was the measure of whether he could be trusted. It’s kind of sickening how routine and reflexive this attitude is.

Dan Ellsworth: New Approaches may be a good book in many ways, but it clearly does have as its purpose the undermining of a core tenet of our faith.

Have you read it?

I emphatically disagree on two counts. First, its purpose is not to undermine belief in the historicity of the Book of Mormon; it’s purpose is to examine the Book of Mormon within the religious and cultural context of its first readers. Second, Book of Mormon historicity is not a core tenet of our faith. B.H. Roberts didn’t believe in the ancient origin of the Book of Mormon, and he was a GA. Many people view it as inspired fiction. Others view it as part of our scriptural tradition, and therefore scripture. Still others follow Blake Ostler in believing that it is based on an ancient record, but the modern translation contains many interpolations and glosses from Joseph. I’ve related my own, rather conventional view above. It’s a complex issue relating just as much to personal modes spirituality as it does to intellect, though certain general authorities may well want it to be otherwise.