Mormon Land

Launched in the 1970s, Affirmation is the oldest support group for LGBTQ members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The mission, according to Affirmation’s website is to create “worldwide communities of safety, love and hope” and to promote “understanding, acceptance and self-determination of diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions” as members define “their individual spirituality and intersection with [the church.]”

Just as the Utah-based faith has evolved in its understanding of and approach to its LGBTQ members, Affirmation has expanded as well — across the country and around the world. It hosts annual meetings in several nations.

Affirmation recently gathered in Utah for its first in-person conference in three years. On this week’s show, President Nathan Kitchen, Vice President Laurie Lee Hall and board member Melissa Malcolm King talk about the 45-year-old group, its expectations for the future, and how it has changed through the years.

All would agree that, at age 98, President Russell M. Nelson, leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, appears to be in incredible health.

Still, even this famously fit former heart surgeon made a concession to advancing age during the past weekend’s General Conference, delivering all three of his speeches while sitting on a stool at the podium.

“Sometimes even small adjustments, such as a chair,” he stated on social media, “help those of us who ‘age on stage.’”

But do the ages of the global faith’s senior leadership pose a bigger problem? After all, two of the three First Presidency members (Nelson and Dallin Oaks) are in their 90s and the third (Henry Eyring) will join them next year. Among the 12 apostles, M. Russell Ballard turns 94 on Saturday, three others are in their 80s, and, starting next month, five will be in their 70s.

While this multilayered hierarchy makes allowances for the occasional incapacitated authority, does this collective “gerontocracy” give rise to a stagnant, intractable, out-of-touch leadership? Would switching to a system that brings younger blood into the leadership invigorate the global faith of 16.8 million?

Historian Gregory Prince has thought and written about these issues. He joins us today via zoom to talk these, frankly, age-old questions.

In the days and weeks after the reported discovery of the first known photograph of Joseph Smith, a debate erupted: Is this really him? Here’s why it could be; here’s why it couldn’t be.

Underneath all the chatter lurked some fundamental questions: What do we know about what the Mormon founder looked like? Why does it matter? Will we ever know if this tiny locket image shows one of America’s most influential religious leaders?

Historian Benjamin Park, an associate professor at Sam Houston State University, explored those topics and more in a recent piece for The Salt Lake Tribune. Park, who also is writing a history of Mormonism, discusses the big questions surrounding this small photo.

The International Center for Law and Religion Studies is a global academic leader in the field of religious freedom. Founded in 2000, the center is part of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, the flagship campus of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Religious freedom has long been a key concern of the Utah-based faith. So the BYU-affiliated center’s mission is to “help secure the blessings of religious liberty for all,” through scholarship, networking, educational activities and legal reforms.

Scholars at the center who specialize in comparative and international law concerning religion have provided advice to dozens of civil and governmental bodies in more than 50 countries, eager to implement safeguards on religious freedom.

Brett Scharffs, the Rex E. Lee Chair and professor of law at J. Reuben Clark Law School, is the center’s current director.

In this special “Mormon Land”, Scharffs speaks from Cordoba, Spain with Peggy Fletcher Stack, where he is presenting several papers at a European meeting of legal scholars on the topic “Human Dignity, Law and Religious Diversity: Designing the Future of Intercultural Society.”

Susa Young Gates, the daughter of one of Brigham Young’s many plural wives, may have been just one child among the Mormon pioneer-prophet’s vast brood, but she eventually would stand out among all his offspring.

Although gifted at music, she made her name as a writer and editor. She founded the Young Woman’s Journal, became the first editor of the Relief Society Magazine and published a biography of her famous father.

A go-getter, she labored for women’s suffrage and rubbed shoulders with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other leading feminists of the day. She suffered through a painful first marriage and rejoiced in a happy second one. She delighted in doing genealogy but also endured the deaths of eight of her 13 children.

Even though her name appears prominently in the pages of Mormon history, few Latter-day Saints know much about her.

Romney Burke, hopes to change that with his new book, “Susa Young Gates: Daughter of Mormonism” — an exploration of her personal, professional and religious life.

On this week’s show, Burke notes, among other things, that Susa Young Gates had notable clashes with her distinguished dad but remained devoted to him and spent much of her life trying to please him. She defended the faith’s — and her father’s — practice of polygamy but never entered a plural marriage herself. Though she pushed for women’s right to vote, she was less keen on women running for office. She opposed birth control and was an early proponent of a concept that lives on in some Latter-day Saint cultural circles — that women have motherhood and men have priesthood.

The effects of a reported racist outburst at a Brigham Young University women’s volleyball match continue to ripple across the country.

A week after a Duke player said she was repeatedly called a racist slur at the match with the flagship school of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the coach of South Carolina’s defending champion women’s basketball team pulled out of a home-and-home series with the university.

BYU officials say they believe the Duke player and continue to investigate the incident but have so far been unable to find the culprit.

Other schools and teams have had racist episodes at athletic events, so why has the Provo incident touched so many nerves?

On this week’s show, BYU alum Darron Smith, who teaches sociology at the University of Memphis and is the author of “When Race, Religion & Sports Collide: Black Athletes at BYU and Beyond,” talks about the volleyball match episode, the resulting fallout, the school’s history with Black athletes, and why BYU and Latter-day Saint leaders need to do much more to combat racism on campus and within the faith — starting with an apology for the church’s former priesthood/temple ban for Black members.

An administrator at Brigham Young University removes thousands of LGBTQ resource pamphlets from welcome bags intended to go to new students. Faculty and staff recoil as the school adds language explicitly requiring new hires to waive clergy confidentiality on matters related to employment standards. And, finally, an investigation continues after reports that a Cougar fan repeatedly hurled racist slurs at a visiting Duke volleyball player, igniting a media firestorm.

The flagship university of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has found itself at the center of a number of unwelcome headlines in recent days — surrounding topics ranging from race and LGBTQ issues to religious freedom — prompting many to ask: What’s going on in Provo? How has this spate of news affected BYU’s reputation? Are these isolated occurrences or part of a larger movement? If the latter, who or what is driving this trend? And what might be the ultimate aim?

Address those questions and more on this week’s show are Patrick Mason, a BYU alum and chair of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University, and LaShawn Williams, a Duke graduate and faculty member in social work at Salt Lake Community College.

Ever since The Associated Press published its explosive account of an egregious case in Arizona — where a Latter-day Saint father sexually abused his young daughters for years, even after counseling with his bishop — social media has been lit up by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, asking one another how this could have happened and what, if anything, the church could do to ensure it never happens again.

Many commenters have focused on the faith’s “help line,” which bishops can call to find out how to safeguard the victims and what legal obligations the lay leaders must consider. Critics say the help line should focus more on the victims and not legality management. Some members, though, see other areas that could be improved to help victims.

On this week’s show, Laura Brignone, a Latter-day Saint visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studies technology and interventions for domestic violence and sexual assault, discusses how the church could partner with existing help lines to assist abuse victims and offers suggestions for enlarging the group of helpers and the way they are trained.

Earlier this month, an Associated Press investigation of several child sex abuse cases, including a particularly horrific one in Arizona, revealed that the much-debated “help line” supplied by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its lay leaders failed to protect the victims.

The exposé brought responses of dismay, disgust and anger from insiders and outsiders alike — and the reverberations are still being felt.

On this week’s show, AP journalist Michael Rezendes, who previously earned a Pulitzer Prize with The Boston Globe for uncovering the Roman Catholic Church’s pattern of covering up clergy sex abuse while part of the team dramatized in the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight,” to talk about his latest story, how came upon it, how he reported it and how it compares to his previous reporting on this sensitive subject.

Rezendes also talks about an astonishing amount of document shredding on sexual abuse — for instance, all records of calls to the help line, he reports, are routinely destroyed — within the Utah-based faith and points to a lack of transparency surrounding its handling of these cases.

Marriage in a Latter-day Saint temple is called a “sealing,” which is believed to stretch beyond death into the eternities. So what happens when a couple split up? Well, for devout members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that’s much more complicated than a governmental divorce. In today’s world, that is something called a “sealing cancellation.” But there are different rules for women and men. Men can be sealed to more than one woman without any cancellation, but women can be sealed only to one man so must obtain a cancellation. And rules about who can be sealed to whom in the hereafter via proxy rituals are different from living couples. Many believe this confusion reflects remnants of polygamy. But does it?

On this week’s podcast, Nathan Oman, a Latter-day Saint law professor in William & Mary in Virginia, who has been researching the history of the faith’s modern sealing rules, tells how he discovered some startling facts. In fact, sealing cancellations and their gender differences arose in the early 20th century, well after the church officially had abandoned the practice. And Oman speculates about why it happened.