The announcement was made a few months ago, but with everything else going on you might have forgotten it. Starting January 2021, there is no more Ensign. Behold the January 2021 issue of the rebranded Liahona, the new LDS magazine for all the world. I seriously wonder whether one in ten active LDS adults read it anymore. Or even one article per month. But let’s take a peek at a few articles in the new mag anyway. See what there is to see and say what there is to say.
“A New Publication for a Worldwide Church.” A short letter from the First Presidency explaining the change. “Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can be found in countries around the world. Although we speak many languages, we are united in our efforts to follow the Savior and rejoice in knowing that we are all children of God.” Translation: Let’s stick to the basics. We’re all peasants now. Or at least we will all read what peasants read. Another step forward for Correlation. There’s a real opportunity here for Sunstone (the magazine) and Dialogue (the journal) to fill a niche for LDS adults who still read and who want a little more substance in their monthly magazine.
“How Studying Church History Strengthens My Faith.” A nice thought, that. The article is written by an African member of the Church, with this nice intro paragraph:
As a high school student in South Africa, I enjoyed studying history. When I went to university, I received my degree in history. As a seminary and then an institute student, I enjoyed all my courses, but I particularly enjoyed the Doctrine and Covenants because it introduced me to Church history. Over the years, I have enjoyed reading books on Church history—even those that addressed difficult topics in our history. As I continue to learn Church history from various sources, my own faith is strengthened.
I wish they had put titles to a few of the books on LDS history he had read in a footnote. Or give a paragraph each to two or three books. Nope, just a wave of the hands. A different approach to the topic is found in Davis Bitton’s 2004 talk, “I Don’t Have a Testimony of the History of the Church.” Well worth reading if you haven’t read it before.
There’s a Come Follow Me section, including the article “What did Moroni Teach Joseph Smith?” The first thing I noticed was how much the young Joseph Smith in the article looks like a young Ringo Starr, but maybe that’s just me. In 2020, we get by with a little help from our friends. Here comes the sun: 2021 is just around the corner. A testimony, it don’t come easy. No, those are not quotes from the article.
In the Young Adults section of the magazine, “Waiting for Answers Without Doubting.” The obligatory monthly article combating the faith crisis pandemic. Makes me think of Keynes’ famous aphorism, “In the long run we are all dead.” I suppose all of your doubts will go away if you just wait long enough. “I have learned that doubts often stem from focusing on circumstances rather than on the Savior and His love for us.” There’s a bonus faith crisis article in the “digital only” young adult section, “Faith: The Antidote to Uncertainty.”
At the bottom of the Table of Contents there are several “local page” sections for English-speaking countries, with interesting groupings based on LDS regional boudaries: Africa Southeast, Australia, New Zealand, UK and Ireland, Canada and the US. It’s just odd that Australia and New Zealand have separate pages, but Canada gets grouped with the United States. I’m sure the Canadians will be as happy about that as the Irish will in being grouped with the UK. Turns out there’s nothing particularly local about these “pages.” Just the usual gospel discussion written by an Area Authority Seventy assigned to that area. (I’m not sure that’s an actual title; I just made it up.)
As you can tell, I’m having a hard time finding something nice to say about the new publication and the new approach. Maybe one or two of the readers can chime in with an article that works for them. It’s possible the magazine has a different effect in print, with color illustrations and better formatting. Old issues of the Ensign are still available for die hard magazine readers who don’t like the new Liahona. If you have absolutely nothing to say about the Liahona, maybe you can offer a suggestion or two for my Wheat and Tares blogging in 2021. I’ll probably do a lot of LDS history posts in 2021 because that’s what the LDS curriculum is studying, by way of the D&C.
Wheat & Tares 
Oh, my, the full-court press is now the church’s MO for young people. I know they’re concerned, but I didn’t expect EVERY article in the Digital Only: Young Adults section to be about dealing with uncertainty or a faith crisis.
For how long can they recycle Uchtdorf’s doubt-your-doubts address without addressing the specific source of doubts and related issues? And for how long does the gaslighting work? Take My Questions and Christ’s Love, for example. The author determines that her “weakness in understanding” is ultimately the problem, cuz it’s certainly not the fallibility of what’s being taught. It’s the same old circular reasoning: A personal witness confirms that the church is true, and if there is no witness of the church’s truth, it is either the fault of the individual or the deceptions of the adversary, because the church is true.
I seriously wonder whether one in ten active LDS adults read it anymore
And I said “No no no no, I don’t read it no more.
I’m tired of reading stuff that’s a bore.”
In the print version that list of digital articles is introduced with a reference to “this month’s” magazine. That seems a bit short of “the church’s MO for young people.” The list is then followed with a reference to YA Weekly in the YA section of the Gospel Library app. Those article titles don’t seem to a recycling of the doubt-your-doubts address. It remains to be seen what the magazine’s “MO for young people” may turn out to be.
On the positive side some of the photography and art work is better than some we’ve seen in the past. (Of course, some is not.)
Maybe I’ll get to reading the whole thing out of curiosity about the magazine. I wonder if I’ll find any useful ideas. The Ensign didn’t have any for me in recent years, but its stories and reports from various individual saints were a useful and occasionally inspiring window into someone else’s experience. Maybe some of that will still be found in the Liahona.
Did you read the publication “courage”, affiliated with the RLDS? I don’t think it’s still around. However I took issue with the title because it implied that those who disagreed with it were cowards. Leaders like William D. Russell referred to conservative religious thinking as “19th century” while Liberal thought was “mainstream”.
The Brethren don’t understand that Liahona will compete w/ TicToc videos of tie-dyed raccoons having gay sex in a Bangkok opium den. Also that Wikipedia answers most of the kid’s church questions: “The archaeological, historical, and scientific communities do not accept the Book of Mormon as an ancient record of actual historical events.[5]” Solution: get real. Meet kids where they are; not where you want them to be. Correlating the life out of things is the answer to exactly nothing. Effective Church communication/outreach can actually do a lot of good for some kids, but the medium, more than ever is the message, and they’re not stupid.
On the Liahona, same recycled stuff. The articles on doubt and “faith crises” all seem to say, “you know it’s true because of some feeling you were supposed to have felt years ago, so accept that that is what makes it true, stop doubting (even though every faithful member technically doubts every other religions’ truth claims that are diametrically opposed to those of Mormonism), and continue to pay, pray, and obey, because if you don’t we’ll call you weak and faithless and continue to condition your family members and spouses to think the world is collapsing on them because of something you don’t believe and feel the need to impose social punishments on you so the leaders don’t have to.”
On topics for next year, a few suggestions: history of the LDS church outside the US, economic history of the early LDS community (land, banking, finance, wealth transfer), history of folk belief in the 19th century US, Mormon folk belief, journals and writings of early followers of Joseph Smith. Thanks for all your posts and work on this blog.
People aren’t having a faith crisis, they are having a reality crisis. Until Church leadership can face those realities, which is going to require them to admit that the prophets make a boatload of mistakes and loosen the reigns significantly on people, none of this material will help. Those types of articles might help someone very early in a reality crisis but in my experience it just creates a little more runway for the same outcome. For people in a later stage of their reality crisis, they’re just plain insulting.
I agree with Elisa. This kind of lightweight “doubt your doubts” stuff is both condescending and harmful. And I don’t like the vilification of doubting things. Any rational person would be at least skeptical about some of the church’s claims. To put a natural and understandable skepticism under the umbrella of “doubt” and to denigrate it isn’t going to help anyone come back. If anything, it will help them out the door. The sad part is, all of the stuff the church claims, teaches, etc. is supposed to be taken on faith, which by definition is NOT certainty, so really, wherever we are on the belief continuum, we’re ALL doubters anyway. Quite ironic that in the “Faith: Antidote to Uncertainty” article that it talks about being so desperate for answers that we’ll accept anything. IMHO, that’s exactly what the church is doing; providing answers to stressed members that aren’t sufficient because no answer to a question of faith can be sufficient. I really don’t think stuff like this is going to help.
I loved reading the Friend as a child, and the New Era as a teen. I even liked reading the Ensign for while as an adult, even though I found myself disagreeing with published perspectives with increasing frequency. However, once I was an adult, I had to subscribe to the Ensign myself or read it online. It sounds pretty weak to say this, but when my subscription to church magazines ran out, there was no notification to remind me and I’d often not notice for a few months, and then I’d wonder if it was just late. I read stuff on facebook, and was subscribed to blogs and stuff via facebook and email, but I couldn’t subscribe to the Ensign that way. I liked the Ensign on facebook but for some reason, new articles would only show in my feed a few times before I never saw anything from them.
Content of the new church publications aside, I really think they could improve by making their content available across various platforms. I’d like to get notifications of new content, and have suggested this to church mags a few times. p mentioned competing with tiktok. It wouldn’t hurt to try and produce tiktok, Instagram, twitter, facebook, and other content that links to the magazine content. I see more of the church news and lds living in my facebook feed than I ever see of church mags.
Elisa- I just love the way you cut to the chase
I remember getting the New Era starting in the late 1980s. Even as an immature youth I had complaints about it. I could tell the “first presidency messages” every month were just recycled conference talks, and that seemed disingenuous to me (if the leaders of the Church really cared about the youth, then why couldn’t they be bothered to write a special article for the youth once a month?).
Also, the articles and photographs back then mostly showed Utah Mormon kids doing Utah Mormon things, which was an alien world to kids like me who were growing up far outside of the Mountain Time Zone. Then at some point (maybe in the 1990s) the pendulum swung hard the other way and Church magazines seemed to aggressively promote a global vision of the Church, with lots of diverse pictures of Saints around the world. While I don’t have a problem with diversity, it just seemed like the Church magazines were trying too hard to force-feed a version of the global Church that seemed more aspirational than in line with reality.
This latest incarnation/rebranding of Church magazines seems like another effort to appeal to an even broader global Church audience, and the result is content that is even more watered down and less personal, less interesting. It leans more heavily on platitudes and ambiguous stock photos. When you try too hard to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.
Thanks for the comments, everyone. And Happy New Year. Tomorrow night, we can party like it’s 1999. Oops, wrong artist.
jaredsbrother: “For how long can they recycle Uchtdorf’s doubt-your-doubts address without addressing the specific source of doubts and related issues?” My sense is the Gospel Topics Essays were the official attempt to identify and respond to specific issues, but that the leadership thinks this wasn’t particularly effective. So now the standard approach is to allude vaguely to doubts or problems but not identify them or attempt to refute them. They’re just doubling down on the standard “pray to get a testimony, and if that doesn’t work, pray harder.” It seems like they’ve moved on from “doubt your doubts” to “just stop doubting already.”
p says, “Meet kids where they are; not where you want them to be.” But I don’t think a dozen guys in their eighties sitting around a table can really figure out where kids in their teens and twenties are. The generation gap is now a three-generation gap and it is almost unbridgeable.
John W, thanks for the suggestions. Folk beliefs in the 19th century seems like a fun topic. So does mainstream theology in the 19th century. Mormon doctrine both then and now seems like a mix of the two 19th-century streams, folk beliefs/practices and mainstream Christian doctrine. I tend to read the D&C as “stuff Joseph Smith believed in the 1830s,” and what JS believed was pretty much what he soaked up from his environment, which was exactly those two streams, 19th-century folk doctrine/practice and 19th-century doctrinal views and disputes in 19th-century churches. The Book of Mormon largely reflects those same two sources.
Elisa, for the win: “People aren’t having a faith crisis, they are having a reality crisis.” I’ll be you could sell a truckload of t-shirts with the phrase: “It’s not a faith crisis, it’s a reality crisis.”
@Alice and @Dave B thank you, but I can’t take credit for that concept. I read it here! In a comment from MDearest on the Chernobyl series:
“I have had recurring crises, but they aren’t faith crises. Just a schedule of meltdowns caused by an eruption of some truth or another I was struggling with all my heart to ignore, and instead be obedient to some other authority besides the truth.”
Gold.
I have a suspicion that the next 12-18 months of Liahona content is already submitted, approved, and laid out for publication. A timely article on a major event might pop up, or an obituary after the passing of someone in leadership (also probably written and waiting on a hard drive somewhere), but otherwise the writing is likely finished.
So I thought I’d read all the “Doubter” articles in the current online Liahona (it’s a bit flattering – they usually don’t focus on me so much).
Observations:
– None specified what the doubts or questions were. I don’t think I even saw mention of broad categories.
– Most were very good at saying “doubts and questions are natural – don’t beat yourself or others up”
– Then a few proceeded to beat us up
– When any resources or helps were mentioned, they were church created or “talk to your leaders”
– A couple had some good circular logic – “faith is the answer – if you start believing you will stop not believing”
Overall, I think it’s great to normalize a normal condition. That by itself will allow some to “stay” longer and not think they need to take immediate evasive action. However, I didn’t see anything that addresses the real roots of the issues. Avoiding any kind of discussion on specific topics will not facilitate any healing – the stew will continue to simmer.
A separate comment on a different church media topic:
I have the Church News app (Church News, subtitle: A LIVING RECORD of the RESTORATION) on my phone that I check now and then. Noticing a trend, I did a tally.
Out of the 10 most recent articles, nine (9) had “Russell M. Nelson in the article title, photo, or first or second sentence of the article.
By contrast, “Jesus Christ” (the personage) appeared just two times in the same way. Three times if you want to count “savior’s gospel”. I didn’t count the occurrences of “Russel M. Nelson, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints”.
Maybe today’s news feed is an anomaly (or maybe Jesus just isn’t trending lately), but it does seem to reinforce the emphasis on leadership vs. Jesus that has been discussed extensively on Wheat and Tares.
Elisa, two more quotes I gleaned from the Chernobyl series:
“I have learned that getting inspiration requires a humility that large bureaucracies generally lack.”
“… your inspiration is only as good as your information.”
@J good stuff
@BeenThere, I agree that it’s great they are normalizing doubt. That’s a big important step. I hate that they are treating it like a disease or something that needs curing … but at the same time I understand why they think that way and can at least appreciate the progress.
A Brene Brown quote I love is “the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.” I do hear echoes of that version of faith at times in Church but I think too often we are trying to get people “in crisis” back from doubt to certainty. I know a lot of people who have had faith transitions who managed to make it work and find a way to continue to participate, but I don’t know *anyone* who went back to their earlier way of believing. It’s a fools errand to try to get people there. We need to make room for different modes of belief so that people who cross that threshold still have a home at Church (if they want it).
@ Elisa, David Ostler agrees that people who continue to believe after a faith crisis find that their faith has changed. In his book Bridges, Ostler includes a chapter entitled “How Faith Changes.” He notes 2 common qualities for the changes. First, they prioritize personal responsibility for spiritual development over organizational authority. Second, he says their faith is best described as nuanced. He includes a short list of some specific examples of what he means by those two qualities. He does say that a person can have those faith qualities without first going through a faith crisis, but also that he doesn’t think you can continue to believe after a faith crisis without those qualities. I thought the book both insightful and accurate. I think it ought to be required reading for church leaders.
@PWS I will have to check it out. I hadn’t because I’ve read a lot of others (Planted, Thomas McConkie’s book, Crucible of Doubt, Falling Upward, etc) but maybe I’ll put that on my list.
I suspect my bishop has read it or at least similar materials given the way he’s been treating me (which has been surprisingly awesome).
I like the new Liahona! Loved the brevity of the articles. Loved the diversity. I’m four years past my decade long, gut-wrenching holocaust of a faith/reality crisis and have obtained a soothing peace regarding our mortally-flawed church history. It took a loooong time to forgive finding out what really went on compared to what we were taught. Now I’m in a place of not feeling so betrayed and hurt, angry and horrified. I’m no longer appalled. Jesus and my forgiveness healed me so now I see good (no matter how little) in just about everything instead of darkness and negativity. I paid dearly to get where I am now, but it was so worth it. I love the good in the past and in the church today. I love focusing on Jesus and being a student/disciple of his teachings. I love having the pedestal gone that I once had the church and it’s leaders on. I love that now it’s an aid to my discipleship and the leaders are not the evil money-grabbers I cynically believed them to be for so long. I love that my pendulum has settled in the middle and the extreme swing is no more. I’m ok that the church isn’t what I wish it to be and accept it as it is. Jesus is everything I could ever hope for. I pray for and send love out to every person struggling in their own faith/reality crisis. I know your pain well. I mourn with you. I hope that someday you will have peace and resolution in whatever form is best for you. “God bless us every one.”
“ Avoiding any kind of discussion on specific topics will not facilitate any healing – the stew will continue to simmer.”
Word-up Been There
Ironically the whole “doubter thing” is also an opportunity for Church to increase or at least stabilize the size of the fold by acknowledging the existence of members who stay while rejecting as 19 Century nonsense the supernatural claims. There is great appeal for many in being part of a powerful organization dedicated to doing good in the world. I am convinced that, believers or not, intelligent, educated, fundamentally good & moral people organized into effective structures can radically improve the world, especially when backed by a $100+B corporation.
What are/were the critical responses to the talk by Davis Bitton? I’m curious but I also admit I just started reading this talk last night.