I have slightly mixed feelings about this article, but, on the whole, I quite like it:
I don’t know whether the judgmentalism in church is as bad as the author describes it. I feel little if any of it myself — I claim no moral credit for that; it’s simply something I’ve never felt and can’t really imagine feeling it (which may result from a personality defect as much as from any particular virtue on my part) — and, on the whole, if it’s happening around me, I’m mostly oblivious to it.
I recall, back when there was supposedly a huge controversy about women wearing pants to church, being asked how I would have reacted to pant-wearing women when I was a bishop. My response was that there may well have been women wearing pants to church in my ward. If there were, I wouldn’t have remembered it for more than thirty seconds even if, very improbably, I had noticed in the first place. I just don’t care.
My chief reservation comes if the author is suggesting that speakers in Church ought not ever to speak out clearly for adherence to the Word of Wisdom, or chastity, or the importance of heterosexual marriage, or abstinence from drugs, lest doing so offend someone in the audience. Perhaps that’s not his intent.
Obviously, we ought to be charitable, loving, supportive, not harshly condemnatory, and, certainly, not obsessed with the sins of Others. But we also have to be forthright about what the Lord expects of us. (Not only of Them.) Mostly, we should be talking with each other, when we talk of problems, about the problems that we have. In our community. In our families. In ourselves. Not the problems that They, the unwashed heathen beyond the blessed ranks of Righteous Us, may have.
Someone told me a story a couple of years ago about Virginia Perry, the first wife of the late Elder L. Tom Perry, of the Council of the Twelve. (She died of cancer just a few short months after his 1974 call as an apostle.) Back when he was serving as the president of the Boston Massachusetts Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was once sitting on the stand during a meeting, a poor woman, “underdressed,” entered the chapel and sat down all alone. I can’t recall whether she had been inactive or not. But apparently she had no friends or particular contacts in that congregation. Sister Perry saw her, watched her sit down alone, noticed how much her clothing clashed with that of those around her. So Sister Perry unobtrusively left the meeting, returned to her own nearby home, hurriedly changed into an outfit more like that of the other women, returned to church, and sat down next to the poorly dressed lady.
I wish I could remember the details better than I do, but I loved that story.
I, too, would like everyone to feel welcome at our worship services. And I promise anyone out there who feels awkward coming to one of our meetings that, if you come to my ward in a sincere spirit of inquiry or worship, I’ll be more than willing to sit beside you. I don’t care who you are or what your history may have been.
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