Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, December 4, 1993 TAG: 9312040017
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: William Hamilton THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: SALT LAKE CITY LENGTH: Long
At 94, the nation's agriculture secretary under President Dwight D. Eisenhower has been incapacitated since 1989, confined to a wheelchair and surrounded by 24-hour-a-day nurses and security guards. The severity of his condition became public only recently when one of his grandsons, tired of what he said was a charade involving posed pictures and letters signed by an automatic pen, denounced Mormon leaders for participating in a deception.
His grandfather's absence, Steve Benson conceded, had made little difference in running the church, whose bureaucracy he compared to that of the former Soviet Union.
"To me, it was just further evidence of the systematic illness that has affected the hierarchy of the church," said Benson, 39, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Arizona Republic. In mid-November the sixth-generation Mormon officially left the church.
By Mormon tradition, the prophet is the most senior member of the Brethren, as church authorities are called, and so Ezra Taft Benson is not the first spiritual leader to become incapacitated in his final days. But his grandson's disclosure and the unusual glimpse it provided into the upper reaches of the hierarchy reflect a larger struggle that has placed a powerful and normally secretive church in an uncomfortable public spotlight.
In the view of many experts inside and outside the church, it is no coincidence that the struggle, pitting church elders against Steve Benson and a small group of dissidents challenging Mormon practices on everything from the role of missionaries in Latin America to the status of women, comes as the church is enjoying unprecedented success.
From the church's base here and in the West, missionaries have gone forth to every corner of the world, doubling membership in the last 15 years and bringing closer the day when a majority of Mormons will live outside the United States. But that growth has created new pressure on authorities to maintain the kind of discipline and adherence to doctrine shown in functioning without Ezra Taft Benson's leadership. The result has been the increased confrontation.
"Why should they [church authorities] be concerned about a number like this?" asked Allen Roberts, a local architect, reflecting on the relatively small numbers of intellectuals involved in the disputes. "Because they want to control everything."
The most outspoken voice on the need to maintain orthodoxy has been that of Boyd K. Packer, acting head of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles, the church's second-highest governing authority.
Packer has led a campaign against what he sees as the three gravest threats facing the church: homosexuals, feminists and what he described as "the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals."
Five scholars have been excommunicated and another "disfellowshipped" for "apostasy" this fall, while two professors at church-run Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, were told that their contracts would not be renewed.
Those actions were taken after less-publicized excommunications of dozens of ultra-conservative Mormons. Church authorities "want to shorten the spectrum of orthodoxy so it's right in the middle," Roberts said.
In keeping with the church's traditional secrecy, no high-ranking officials would agree to be interviewed for this article. But at the church's general conference in October, Gordon B. Hinckley, de facto leader in Benson's absence, said critics were few in number and their influence was distorted because of access to the media.
"Our responsibility is not to please the world, but rather to do the will of the lord," he said.
Even as they denounce church elders as a "gerontocracy" of white men whose average age by one calculation is 84, dissidents acknowledge the special role of the General Authorities, as church leaders are called, especially the prophet. By Mormon tradition, he alone can receive divine revelation on behalf of church members.
But, dissidents such as Steve Benson argue, another tradition - a spirit of tolerance and open debate that dates to Mormonism's formative days on the frontier - has been stifled by such bureaucratic organs as the Strengthening the Members Committee. The panel monitors writings and public statements of church members and brings controversial remarks to the attention of authorities.
In the late 1960s followers of the "New Mormon History" began examining more systematically a past controversial since Joseph Smith, the founder, first claimed to have translated the Book of Mormon from gold plates he said he found in upstate New York.
New interpretations of Mormon history have led to questions about doctrine. For example, D. Michael Quinn, a former BYU historian excommunicated this fall for historical writings, found that in the 1840s Smith conferred powers of the priesthood on some women.
Other historians have examined the Mormon tradition of a "Mother in Heaven," a female divinity equal to the male God. Mormon feminists have cited these as a basis for increasing the role of women in a church that allows only men to hold church office and emphasizes that a woman's most valuable role is as mother and wife.
Church leaders have met such ideas with hostility. Maxine Hanks, editor of a recent collection of writings on Mormon feminism, was excommunicated. So was Lavina Fielding Anderson, a feminist and historian, disciplined after publishing a 20-year chronology of what she called "ecclesiastical abuse," harassment by church officials of writers and intellectuals.
In official statements, church authorities have expressed regret about the excommunications and insisted that the decisions were made by local officials and not part of a "purge." But they have reiterated their responsibility "to preserve the doctrinal purity of the church."
by CNB