E67: UTBOH Fact, Fiction and the Birth of Fundamentalism

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:28)
Hi everyone, this is Lindsay Hanson-Park. I'm the executive director of Sunstone and the co-host of the Sunstone Mormon History Podcast.
Before we get started today, I know this is not an ad. This is a disclaimer at the beginning because the series is bringing all kinds of new listeners onto our playground.
I'm just going to give you a little brief explanation before we dive into the heavy truths of the Mormon internet and Mormon history.
As executive director of the Sunstone Education Foundation, I should probably tell you what Sunstone is first. Sunstone is a nonprofit that has been around for over 45 years.
It's an open forum that puts out a magazine and a symposium and a bunch of different activities in and around topics with Mormonism. It was originally founded by a bunch of college kids at Berkeley studying theology in the 1970s who wanted to talk about their religion, Mormonism, in a way that other world religions were discussing their faith. But in the Mormon tradition, it's kind of hard. It's very fraught.
The stakes are very, very high. It's very political. And so people talking about Mormonism don't always do it well or don't know how to do it. What I mean about that is our community is very obsessed with talking about, is the church true? Is the church false? And when you hear that phrase, is it true? It means are Mormonism's truth claims accurate?
Is Mormonism God's one true church on earth? And in Mormon parlance, we say the church is true. It's a weird thing for outsiders to hear, I know, but that's how we talk. So for a long time, the discussion in and around any topic of Mormonism, whether it be art, poetry, politics, religion, theology, spirituality, and especially history, has to do with, does it prove that the church is the one true church on earth, or does it poke holes in it and show that it is false? And at Sunstone, we're trying to have a different conversation because as someone who, like myself, has experienced the wounds of that kind of conversation personally, we're trying to talk about faith differently. We want people to be able to discuss all the elements of the faith without having to always use it as a missionary tool to convert or de-convert from the church. Those conversations are happening everywhere in and around Mormonism, and they're just not that interesting. And not only are they not interesting, they're dangerous. As I and many of you out there who are Mormon know, these topics have very, very high value attached to them.
If you lose your faith, you could lose your family, you could lose your community. And depending on what Mormon family you were raised in, depending on their level of orthodoxy, and depending on their Mormon group, depends on the loss involved.
And now a note for my Mormon listeners. I use the term Mormon because it is the historically accurate term to describe all the movements that came from Joseph Smith's church. Now, you should know that there are a few movements that no longer identify with the Mormon label, Community of Christ, which was the reorganized church. The one that left with Emma Smith, which you can see depicted in the Under the Banner of Heaven series. They prefer to go with Community of Christ. They don't like the Mormon term, especially since they didn't come across with the Brighamite group, Brigham Young. They stayed back with Emma Smith. So even though they are under the Mormon umbrella, they like to be called Community of Christ. The same goes for my tradition, the mainstream tradition, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Up until a few years ago, just a very, very few years ago, when the current prophet, Russell M. Nelson, decided to distance himself and the Church publicly from the term Mormon, our mainstream Church were proud to be Mormons. I grew up in the generation of the prophet Gordon B. Hinckley, where we did the I'm a Mormon campaign and we had Mormon ads, and we declared publicly, I'm a Mormon, I live it, I love it. But the new guy doesn't like that term. He says using the term Mormon is a win for Satan. So when we're talking about the mainstream Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we'll try to use the name. But when we're talking about the large diaspora of Mormonism, we're going to use the term Mormon. We're not doing it to be offensive. We're not doing it as a win for Satan, and we're not doing it to misappropriate you. We're just doing it as a shortcut for everyone out there.