We’re simply inferior, I guess

My bi-weekly Deseret News column now typically appears in the print edition on Thursdays, and then, also, in the online edition of LDS Living.  Some people tell me that that is a positive development.  I’m not so sure, myself.  But that’s the way it is nowadays.

Anyway, here’s the latest:

“What Do the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon Prove?”

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A comment from the always worthwhile Jeff Lindsay:

“The Surprisingly Modern Book of Mormon: The Perspective of an Archivist”

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I haven’t been hearing much lately about Kate Kelly, the former leader (?) of Ordain Women.  Maybe I just haven’t been listening, or don’t move in the right circles.

I’m afraid that I also don’t think about her very much.

But, in looking for something else, I’ve just run across these two items, from blog entries that I posted back in February 2015, and I think that they’re worth remembering:

I.

“Sadly, the Mormon faith has become a place that incentivizes the survival of the least fit. Since strict obedience is demanded and harshly enforced, only the least talented, least articulate, least nuanced thinkers, least likely to take a stand against abuse, and the least courageous people thrive in the Church today.”

Kate Kelly, founder of “Ordain Women,” in The Guardian (6 February 2015)

II.

As I noted yesterday, Kate Kelly, the founder of “Ordain Women” has pronounced the membership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints unfit, untalented, inarticulate, unnuanced, cowardly, morally acquiescent, and conformist.

Now, it seems unlikely to me that the Saints suddenly became inferior and inadequate overnight, just when Ms. Kelley was excommunicated last summer.  Presumably, they were already low specimens of humanity even when she was still a member of the Church.

Moreover, her judgment of the Saints seems merely a superficially more civil variant of the description often given of Mormon believers on some apostate message boards, as “sheeple,” “Morgbots,” “Mor(m)ons,” and “Utards.”

So, I confess, I’ve been led to wonder why she was ever demanding to be ordained a leader among such a defective people.

Do successful corporate executives crave appointment as Boy Scout patrol leaders?

Do Nobel-laureate physicists aspire to take first prize at junior high school science fairs?

I suspect that the Lutheran theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wanted to abolish the Hitler Youth, not to join the boys and become their leader.

But perhaps I’m failing to grasp the self-sacrificial and compassionate nobility of her offer to receive ordination and to help us.  I’m reminded of Rudyard Kipling’s famous 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden”:

Take up the White Man’s burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go send your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child

Take up the White Man’s burden

In patience to abide

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple

An hundred times made plain

To seek another’s profit

And work another’s gain

Take up the White Man’s burden—

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better

The hate of those ye guard—

The cry of hosts ye humour

(Ah slowly) to the light:

“Why brought ye us from bondage,

“Our loved Egyptian night?”

Take up the White Man’s burden-

Have done with childish days-

The lightly proffered laurel,

The easy, ungrudged praise.

Comes now, to search your manhood

Through all the thankless years,

Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,

The judgment of your peers!

I grant that the concept of a “White Man’s Burden” is racist, and that Mr. Kipling’s poem and the Pear’s Soap ad are gender-exclusive.  Thank History that we’ve evolved beyond such sexism and ethnic bigotry.  But their unashamedly condescending statements of a felt mission to help lesser people, even at considerable cost to oneself, may be relevant here.