rhetoric against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Salt Lake Tribune

Word choice matters. We see this in Leftists use of scare quotes around terms like Religious freedom.

We also see this in the case of the Salt Lake Tribune covering issues related to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They refer to the Sepetem Six purge, without even putting quotes around purge. A purge historically was a killing of leaders. That is not fit here. Also, since the people were not Church leaders the whole rhetoric of purge does not make sense. It only has resonance if you falsely assume the Church is lead by intellectuals instead of by the people who are called and sustainted to lead the Church such as the general authorities.

The restored Church is lead by a lay priesthood, and this is something that the Tribune does not seem to want to understand. Even though the general authorities receive a stipend for their running of the Church on a fulltime basis this does not change their lay nature. They are not called based on having studied for the ministry. A few general authorities have a background in the Church Education System, but this is more often connected to administration than teaching in you follow their actual careers, and even if cases like Jeffrey R. Holland who was probably the most a religious teacher of any of the general authorites, has a Ph.D. in American studies not religion per se.

The last problem with the rhetoric is that saying that 6 people excommunicated in a month is a purge ignores reality. The Church probably excommunicates many more people than that in a week, and there have been times in the last century when a specific mission has seen more missionaries than that excommunicated in one session of a disciplinary council. France in 1957 saw 15 missionaries excommunicated in a meeting presided over by Joseph Fielding Smith. Despite some saying Joseph Fielding Smith was a hard nosed conservative, since the crime was supporting piolygamy, any apostle would have excommunicated just as many people there.

There is a need for more balanced journalism on the part of the Salt Lake Tribune, and this needs to start with an avoiding of false narratives about "purges".


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