I related a story when I started this blog 4 years ago about hearing a rumor when I was about 16 that the SL temple being closed for 5 years to prepare it for the second coming. When I asked my very sweet grandma who worked at the temple about it she laughed at both the thought and my gullibility. It burned me to my core! I vowed to never accept anything slightly sensationalized related to the church without sound documentation. Thus started my journey down a road that lead me away from traditional TBM-ism. I had various ups and downs on that path that lead me to feel strongly that the church needs to do a better job of sharing its history with less white washing that it currently does, something that has increased significantly over the past 60 years or so.
Fast forward to this week where the Deseret News had an article stating, "Active Latter-day Saints want their church to provide a 'frank and honest' presentation of church history, unvarnished by attempts to sugar-coat the past in order to make it more palatable." This survey was not done by DN, but rather "done by the family and church history department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." Furthermore, it wasn't given to people like me who frequent the bloggernacle, it "targeted members who use the church's resources to do family history." That is pretty cool.
This is pretty sad:
...the survey also showed that respondents [g]et much of their information about the church's past from historical fiction. When asked to respond to the statement, "I learned much of what I know about church history from 'The Work and the Glory,"' (a fictional series of books and films about an early Latter-day Saint family and their trials) Olpin said almost half of the respondents answered "yes."
