Talk Review: The Voice of Warning

[DPRoberts]

Since oliver_denom is not doing his conference talk reviews, I thought I would take a stab at reviewing one talk for those who like that king of thing. I do not intend to review more than a couple of talks, but I encourage any fellow NOMs to submit their own as the spirit moves you. I chose to review this talk because it was one of the few I actually listened to and I had no idea what the heck Elder D. Todd C. was getting at.

The talk begins with a bit of Ezekiel wherein is used the metaphor of the watchman. The metaphor is generally used (at least within Mormonism) as a description of our duty and obligation to spread the word of "warning" contained in gospel teachings. Elder C says that the warning is to turn away from sin. He then goes into how the warning is both to the sinner and the righteous, with wicked promised forgiveness should they repent. The righteous, on the other hand, are threatened with their iniquity nullifying their righteousness. I give him credit for teaching more from scripture, in more detail, than we usually get from GAs. (I leave it for those more scripturally literate than me to comment on whether or not his interpretation is reasonable).

He then goes on the tell of the duty to warn that falls on the various latter-day-saints, from the prophet to missionaries to parents. He particularly dwells on parents and asks them to teach the joy of obedience as well as the "demoralizing consequences" of sin. I suppose that works if the parents actually find joy in gospel obedience.

It is the later part of the talk where it went off the rails for me. He seems to be trying to impress on members the duty to proselytize their neighbors, and goes in an odd direction to do that. He draws a distinction between and "shame culture" and a "guilt culture". He seemed to stop short of explicitly calling the guilt culture superior, but he disparaged shame culture, particularly on social media, as being subject to the "shifting judgment of the crowd". He seems to imply that our failure to warn is due to our fear of social shaming from others. And he criticizes the hypocrisy of these unnamed others as espousing tolerance and inclusion but being unmerciful to those with differing opinions. Well, OK, that happens, but this is a bit of a straw man IMO.

His antidote to the shame culture is "the rock of our Redeemer". This is superior because it supposedly does not change.

He then goes back to the duty to warn which seems to be another call to pester our neighbors who he says want pestering because we have "what people, deep down, really want". Then he bounces to an example about defending marriage, quoting the Deseret News opinion editor. This did not fit all that well and seemed like an attempt to shoehorn in a sound byte about marriage.

He throws in a few more paragraphs about the duty to warn with a mishmash of scriptures. Seemed to be an admixture of guilt mongering and blessing promising. Standard Mormon stuff.

If my review seems all over the map, his talk was the same. He had a point, I suppose, but did not make it very well. Along the way he used some of the usual straw men, managed to mention marriage (score a few points with the senior members of the quorum) and end with one of Bednar's greatest hits, tender mercies.

He talked about shame culture as if it is exclusively in the realm of social media and has nothing to do with Mormon culture. Conveniently overlooked the fact that we have a culture where merely missing church on Sunday sets off alarm bells with the other members. And he seems to be OK with guilt as a means of social control. Not surprising to me.

One final comment. Since now we use quotes from the church-owned newspaper in general conference, count on the uber TBMs to start reading the Deseret News as scripture.

What were your impressions of this talk?

[fh451]

I only listened to snippets of this talk from the Mormon Discussion podcast, but what I heard about the "shame" vs "guilt" culture made me want to laugh out loud. When he was describing the evil, worldly "shame" culture, I at first thought he was describing the church. It fit extremely well. Then he goes on to say how the world does all those horrible things. Really? It just blew my mind.

fh451