The Game Is Afoot!

Movie poster 6DIA — This is the official movie poster for the Interpreter Foundation’s new dramatic film “Six Days in August.”

The game is afoot! This is the week that things really begin to get underway for the new Interpreter Foundation film Six Days in August:

There will be special early screenings of the film at 7 PM on Thursday — that is, this very week — in nine Carmike theaters along the Wasatch Front in Utah. These theaters are located in Ogden, Farmington, Salt Lake City, West Jordan, Midvale/Sandy, Orem, Provo, American Fork, and Draper. If you’re interested, you can obtain tickets at https://www.cinemark.com/…/six-days-in-august-early…

There will also be a major fireside related to Six Days in August on Wednesday evening — again, this week — at the SCERA Center for the Arts in Orem. If you’re interested, go to “Unveiling History: Six Days in August Fireside.”

And did you know, by the way, that Six Days in August has an active Facebook page? Well, it does. But you’ll never guess its name, no, not in a million years. So I’ll give it to you: “Six Days in August Film.”

Please go to the official Six Days in August website and request that the movie come to your area. Even if you’re in Utah. Seriously. Filling out the request form will probably require considerably less than a minute of you, but we are and will be taking such requests into account as we plan the distribution of the film. Please don’t assume that it won’t be shown anywhere near you. If there is sufficient demonstrated interest, we will try to place it in a theater not too far away from where you live and move and have your being. (See Acts 17:28.)

Capella Sistina Michelangelo — Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgment, in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I posted here yesterday on the topic of excommunication. (See “Three Cheers for Excommunication!”) Years ago, shortly after I had first blogged about the subject, an online article appeared under the title “High-profile excommunications may harm Mormon retention rates in the long run.”

It summarized a survey that, I’m embarrassed to say, I still haven’t directly examined for myself but that seems worth a careful look. Permit me, though, to offer two preliminary observations reacting to the summary alone.

Even if excommunicating certain people were really to drive certain others out of the Church — which I hope is not true on any statistically significant scale — it would still need to be done if (a) excommunication is, in cases meriting such action, the course that the Church is divinely mandated to follow and if (b) the cases involved merit such action. There would be absolutely no eternal point in growing the Lord’s Church, or even in maintaining its membership numbers, if the course adopted in order to do so caused the Church to be unfaithful to the Lord.
The summary article describes some active members as having been “troubled” by several then-recent high-profile excommunications, and seems to take that as meaning that they opposed those excommunications. (Perhaps the survey justifies that equivalence, but the article doesn’t appear to do so.) But, of course, I’m troubled by such excommunications — they sadden me very much — and yet I don’t oppose them and am certainly not contemplating departure from the Church over them.

At about the same period, my longtime friend and colleague Jack Welch sent me a note on the subject. In it, he expressed his opinion that “the Book of Mormon offers the most controlling and authoritative instructions” on the subject of excommunication and pointed my attention specifically to Mosiah 26 and 3 Nephi 18 — and most particularly to 3 Nephi 18:30-32.

Jack — who, in addition to being a retired professor of law and one of the foremost students of the scriptures in the entire history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (I say this with no intention of embarrassing him, but simply because it’s the truth), has a remarkable wealth of experience in ecclesiastical leadership under his belt — is someone whose opinion on this subject I take very seriously.

Here is 3 Nephi 18:28-33:

28 And now behold, this is the commandment which I give unto you, that ye shall not suffer any one knowingly to partake of my flesh and blood unworthily, when ye shall minister it;

29 For whoso eateth and drinketh my flesh and blood unworthily eateth and drinketh damnation to his soul; therefore if ye know that a man is unworthy to eat and drink of my flesh and blood ye shall forbid him.

30 Nevertheless, ye shall not cast him out from among you, but ye shall minister unto him and shall pray for him unto the Father, in my name; and if it so be that he repenteth and is baptized in my name, then shall ye receive him, and shall minister unto him of my flesh and blood.

31 But if he repent not he shall not be numbered among my people, that he may not destroy my people, for behold I know my sheep, and they are numbered.

32 Nevertheless, ye shall not cast him out of your synagogues, or your places of worship, for unto such shall ye continue to minister; for ye know not but what they will return and repent, and come unto me with full purpose of heart, and I shall heal them; and ye shall be the means of bringing salvation unto them.

33 Therefore, keep these sayings which I have commanded you that ye come not under condemnation; for wo unto him whom the Father condemneth.

I realize that a not insignificant number of those who vocally reject the idea and practice of excommunication also reject the antiquity and even the authority of the Book of Mormon. Mainstream believing members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, however, won’t lightly dismiss the teachings of the Book of Mormon on this topic.

Finally, to quote a comment from “LB,” one of the esteemed readers of this blog: “A church with no boundaries will eventually have no enduring center.” And, I might add, does it even make any sense to speak of the center of something that has no boundaries? This seems to me of much more than merely metaphorical significance.

Hitchens, Christopher — Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), the eponymous hero of the “Hitchens File,” from Wikimedia Commons. I actually miss him; he was an interesting voice and a superb writer. But he wasn’t a serious writer about religion, and he shouldn’t be taken seriously on the subject.

I never want any of my audience here to be forced to go too many days without getting their soul-satisfying fix — LOL! as if we meat machines have souls! — from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™. So here are a few more horrors that I’ve recently drawn from that apparently inexhaustible ocean of theistic depravity: