UNITED STATES
Verdict
Marci A. Hamilton
Reporter Laurie Goodstein wrote a fascinating New York Times front-page story this week on the admissions by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (“LDS Church”) regarding their founder, Joseph Smith, and the fact he had approximately 40 wives, one of whom was age 14, and some others of whom were already married to other men. This came as a surprise to numerous LDS believers, who had been taught that Smith was a paradigm of virtue devoted to his first wife, Emma. The truth is that he was a rapacious polygamist, and his first wife was not a fan of his polygamy or his revelations on the topic. Some believers are having difficulty squaring these now-documented facts with what they had previously been told about the founder of their faith.
From my perspective, the most important element of this story is why the LDS Church found it necessary to post these damaging facts on its website, given that this is not the most flattering information. The apparent answer is the Internet: “Elder Steven E. Snow, the church historian and a member of its senior leadership, said in an interview [with Goodstein], ‘There is so much out there on the Internet that we felt we owed our members a safe place where they could go to get reliable, faith-promoting information that was true about some of these more difficult aspects of our history.’” Janet Heimlich, author of Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Maltreatment and founder of the Child-Friendly Faith Project, elaborates on this point: “The fact that the LDS church is posting these essays online—even though it is not making them easy to find—speaks volumes. I have been struck by how insular the Mormon community is, yet how former members needed only to do one or two Google searches to find information that contradicted what they had been told their whole lives, including how they were supposed to believe, feel, and act as children. From there, their belief system quickly unraveled. So the church is losing members and it’s scared. And it realizes that it would prefer to be the messenger of such information than other critical sites as a way to stop the hemorrhaging.”
In short, it is no longer as feasible to perpetuate historical misinformation by religious organizations as it was before the Internet. With blogs, a proliferation of media outlets, social media, and websites established to address specific problems in particular communities, the balance of power between the powerful and the vulnerable has been altered for the better and hopefully permanently. …
Given the size and global scope of the Catholic Church, it is inconceivable that, without the Internet, connections could have been made between survivors across countries as they have, with strong coalitions between Irish, Australian, and American survivors, and the emergence of a pattern of behavior by the hierarchy that is echoed in one country after another. Such a global comparison of experiences and the ability to see such patterns were enhanced dramatically by the Internet. In turn, the global character of the scandal earned the attention of the United Nations, which held hearings and issued damning reports on the failures of the Catholic Church to protect children, despite being a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The Internet is also the home for the remarkable database of facts, documents, and news stories about the ongoing revelations of clergy abuse at www.bishopaccountability.org, which was founded by Terry McKiernan and Anne Barrett Doyle, who now devote the vast majority of their time to building and securing this cache of information.
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