The website FutureMissionary.com is designed to shake the faith of prospective missionaries by blindsiding them with troubling issues related to Church history. The site’s anonymous authors claim to be returned missionaries, and write as though they are “believing” members who naively accept and promote controversial statements and ideas without question.
The most prominent and detailed page on the website is “A Letter to a CES Director: Why I Lost My Testimony.” The authors claim that such blatant materials will help to prepare missionaries for questions and challenges they will face. In reality, the letter and other material on the site only introduce attacks on the church without discussing crucial context and explanations that would help readers fully understand the material.
The approach and tone of the FutureMissionary site resembles that of MormonThink.com before MormonThink became openly antagonistic toward the Church in late 2012.
Yes, I was thinking of Mormonthink when I read the introduction. While I believe our missionaries are naive about a lot of things that they will encounter, the site seems to be just another way of spreading anti-Mormon propaganda, which, at the end of the day, is information viewed from a secular, rather than eternal paradigm. I had a missionary in our ward who was allowed to read Rough Stome Rolling before his mission and this proved useful in his preparation.
I wonder if some of the statements by Elder Spencer W. Kimball on interracial marriage might apply. On the one hand he discorages it, on the other he declares “A couple has not committed sin if an Indian boy and a white girl are married, or vice versa.” This is from a 1958 address where he discoraged inter-racial marriage, but the issues to him seen to be social and cultural, and that cross-cultural marriages are more difficult. To try to reduce these views to racism is to not understand their deep cultural background. Also, to try to tell people that 1950s teaching on marriage should be accepted as relevant 60 years later in to miss the fact that especially in the case of Elder Kimball this is couched in terms of teaching conditioned on the social issues of the time. Not all teachings by Church leaders are of permanent, unfaltering truths, and the whole method of teaching this by President Kimball was clearly of it as a teaching adapted to the social realities of the time. This quote is from p. 302 of the “The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball” published 1982 by Bookcrat and edited by Edward L. Kimball. Technically President Kimball avoided mentioning African-Americans in his talk, but in many ways with his basic assumption that we are speaking of Native Americans raised on the reservation with their families still resident there, the issues may be more pronounced than in marriage between African-American and whites.
Considering in a 1959 talk Elder Kimball said that the brethren recommended that “Chinese marry Chinese … Caucasians marry the Caucasians”, having Elder Gong, an ethnic Chinese with a Caucasian wife, as a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy, may be a strong on the level of actions speak louder than words, that the brethren do not discorage inter-racial marriage.
I don’t necessarily think SWK was against inter-racial marriage per se, but more against divorce, which in those days was probably more likely to occur with mixed races where there were significant cultural differences. From a “pre-existance” point of view, one could assume that we are placed within the “bounds of our habitation”, including ethnic and cultural, in order that we mate with a kindred spirit, who was also sent into this situation. I believe SWK had the best interests of the rising genrsation in mind when he made this statement. The people at Mormonthink and the like, wnat to use obfuscation to dishearten church memebers, but when things are viewed with the full panorama of eternity, the leaders statements are spot on.