Toscano responds to Bushman
Recently, LDS historian Richard Bushman admitted to a small private group that the LDS Church has been promulgating a “false narrative.” I’ve copied the Mormon Stories YouTube link below.
Here’s my response to Bushman’s belated admission:
I was excommunicated along with the other September Six in 1993. My wife was excommunicated in her own right in November 2000, by a stake high council. These excommunications were connived by Boyd K Packer, who seemed ever to have confused the Church with the Air Force.
The reason we and others were excommunicated was because we had been giving speeches at Sunstone or publishing there and in other venues (at least since 1980 and earlier) various warnings that the Church was in peril of losing its members because its allegedly divinely inspired apostolic leaders had lied and were lying about the Church’s theology and history.
My nearly 40-year-old lament is that the Mormon revelations, especially what Richard Bushman calls the “exaltation revelations,” have been either ignored, misread, or misinterpreted by the LDS apostolate beginning with Brigham Young and ending with the most recent First Presidency and Council of the Twelve. My lament is as valid today as ever.
The LDS apostles are not truth-tellers. They are not ministers of the gospel. They are administrators of the corporate church. They are not special witnesses of Christ Jesus. They are counter witnesses—because their acts betray him.
When we were excommunicated for admonishing the apostles to “Choose Love Not Power,” we were ignored. At that time church historians like Richard Bushman and Jan Shipps, sociologists like Armand Mauss, LDS apologists like Teryl and Fiona Givens, BYU religion teachers like Lou Midgley and recently “woke” Brian Haulid, and researchers and writers like Daniel Peterson at FARMS (now the Maxwell Institute) did not so much as utter a whisper of support for us—not even privately. They stood by and let these excommunications occur to stigmatize us because they wanted us silenced; and they wanted to enjoy continued access to LDS leaders and to the Church’s archives.
Well, now the chickens are coming home to roost—actually, the chickens are leaving home to roost elsewhere.
I ask you: Who is going to believe that the LDS Church is divinely guided through its God-called apostles when they—the Church’s own apostles—have blamed its racism on the Lord? have blamed its misogyny on the Lord? have blamed its homophobia on the Lord? have blamed its xenophobia on the Lord? have worshipped Mammon by accumulating 124,000 millions of dollars and attributed that effort to the Lord? and have repeatedly lied to Church members in the name of the Lord?
The LDS apostles are the Sanhedrin to the teeth. That’s the real problem. And collaborators like Bushman won’t admit it publicly because, as did the Vichy French, they profit from their complicity.
I still believe in Joseph Smith’s exaltation revelations—despite his flaws, failings, misdeeds, and sins; but unlike Bushman my belief does not include tolerating the hypocrisy, heresy, and mendacity of Joseph Smith’s despotic apostolic successors.
Richard Bushman like the others I’ve mentioned and like others I haven’t mentioned are not to be credited. Why? Because they do not address the fact that once a special witness of the Lord lies, his testimony is rendered worthless. This is the consequence of their lying: no one will believe their report of the good news, the fullness of the gospel revealed through Joseph Smith.
This is the catastrophic effect of the Church’s “false narrative” that is predicated on a foundation of apostolic lies—an irreversible effect that well-intentioned LDS apologists cannot face or admit.
Of course, all this is only my humble (though mildly enraged) opinion!
Here’s the link to the Mormon Stories Bushman YouTube video: