What to keep?

I don't think I have mentioned this yet, but for a while I have been wanting to go through and read old conference talks. The church web site has them back to 1970, so that is where I started. 

Conference often lasted for three days back then. It is hard to say, but at my current rate, where I give two or three days to the Come Follow Me curriculum and then the rest of the week to conference talks, this could easily take four years (assuming that I re-read years that I read or listened to at the time). I am currently on the second day of the October 1970 conference. 

It feels important, but it is going to be a slog, what with all of the liberal bashing. Seriously, it wasn't the only instance, but in the spring session Harold B. Lee said...

One time I asked one of our Church educational leaders how he would define a liberal in the Church. He answered in one sentence: “A liberal in the Church is merely one who does not have a testimony.” ("The Iron Rod", Sunday afternoon)

I actually had started that, got irritated and re-read the four gospels instead, and then re-started maybe six weeks ago and had to go through all of it again.

Fall 1970 started off better, where I was finding several talks that I liked in the Friday morning session. Then I decided to finish since there was only one talk left, and it was Ezra Taft Benson slagging on rock music. 

As I keep at it, there are different things that I realize. 

First of all, everyone was in a kind of defensive mode because several other churches had stopped requiring chastity, and it was alarming. I'm not sure how much it was dominating the news, but the Equal Rights Amendment was going to pass the House of Representatives on October 11th of that year. 

In addition, I can see that they were not using "liberal" to mean Democrat (because after all, we don't endorse any parties or people), but as a movement for change, and reactionary. It might have made more sense to use "progressive" for those purposes, but we don't always use political terms accurately. They definitely meant opposite of "conservative".

There was one talk that defended conservatism because God is unchanging so shouldn't we be as well? They weren't always trying to change in the City of Enoch while they were waiting for translation.

That line of reasoning would make sense if as people or as society we were perfect; we're not, certainly not in the way we follow God.

Conservatism requires a certain confidence that the current system is good. If you were a white man from Utah in the '70s, that was probably pretty easy to do, even if you had seen poverty and suffered and were a very good person. It is heartening now to know that Dallin H. Oaks can say that Black Lives Matter, but the extrajudicial killing of Black people was happening in the '70s too, and before, but with less filmed evidence.

If it is reactionary to see that there are problems and try and make things better, then I am happy to be reactionary. That word seems to apply more to seeing something new and non-conforming and immediately finding it bad and threatening. I mean, yes, lots of rockers have been depraved, but it is not a given. Classical music and hymns are great and they have their place, but so does rock and metal and especially punk. There's room for a lot of different things in this wide world.

That doesn't mean that all music is good, or that all change is good; those kinds of wide blanket statements would not even be likely to be true. I do think that if we could listen better, and trust people more, that we could do better.

I think I am going to leave that there for now, and then do a clothing-related example next week.