On October 5, following a link sent to me by an email correspondent, I read a summary of President Russell M. Nelson's remarks at the recent General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), published on the Church's official website. Transcripts of his remarks were not yet available, and I do not watch videos, so this was at the time my only source. I was dismayed to see President Nelson quoted as saying that "any discrimination because of race is morally wrong and contrary to God's plan of happiness for His children."
Today I saw that transcripts were now available at the CJCLDS website, so I decided to read President Nelson's remarks in full. His only remarks about "racism" were in his Sunday morning talk "Let God Prevail":
Each of us has a divine potential because each is a child of God. Each is equal in His eyes. The implications of this truth are profound. Brothers and sisters, please listen carefully to what I am about to say. God does not love one race more than another. His doctrine on this matter is clear. He invites all to come unto Him, “black and white, bond and free, male and female.”
I assure you that your standing before God is not determined by the color of your skin. Favor or disfavor with God is dependent upon your devotion to God and His commandments and not the color of your skin.
I grieve that our Black brothers and sisters the world over are enduring the pains of racism and prejudice. Today I call upon our members everywhere to lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice. I plead with you to promote respect for all of God’s children.
The question for each of us, regardless of race, is the same. Are you willing to let God prevail in your life? Are you willing to let God be the most important influence in your life? Will you allow His words, His commandments, and His covenants to influence what you do each day? Will you allow His voice to take priority over any other? Are you willing to let whatever He needs you to do take precedence over every other ambition? Are you willing to have your will swallowed up in His?
Conspicuous by its absence is the quote about discrimination being morally wrong. I did a double take and revisited the link to the summary, only to find that it had changed. Everything was the same except the parts about "racism" -- the subtitle and one paragraph, both of which had been completely rewritten. There is no retraction or indication that the article has been modified since it was first published.
This page is not archived by the Wayback Machine, but fortunately Google still has a cache of the original version.Since a Google cache link is obviously not going to be good for long, I reproduce the entire summary below, with the changes shown in strikethrough and red.
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President Nelson at October General Conference: Let God Prevail, Embrace the Future, Live ‘a New Normal’
Prophet reminds Latter-day Saints that racism is “morally wrong” and contrary to God’s plan of happiness and His purpose of the gathering "God does not love one race above another," President Nelson said
Moving forward, embracing the future with faith, seeing turbulent times as opportunities to thrive spiritually and choosing to let God prevail in our lives. Those were some of the key messages shared by President Russell M. Nelson during the 190th semiannual conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
While President Nelson expressed joy for the opportunity and ability to gather virtually for the conference, he also expressed sorrow to all those impacted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters and other hardships.
“Through it all our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, love us! They care for us!” he said. “They and Their holy angels are watching over us.”
President Nelson added that despite the current commotion in the world, we can look to the future with joy as we turn to our Savior Jesus Christ.
“Let us not spin our wheels in the memories of yesterday. The gathering of Israel moves forward. The Lord Jesus Christ directs the affairs of His Church, and it will achieve its divine objectives.”
Are You Willing to Let God Prevail in Your Life?
During the Sunday morning session of the conference, President Nelson taught about the gathering of Israel and how that is related to our willingness to let God be the most important influence in our lives.
“The only way to survive spiritually is to be determined to let God prevail in our lives, to learn to hear His voice and to use our energy to help gather Israel,” he said.
During the address, President Nelson reiterated that God loves all of his children and emphasized that racism in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints cannot be tolerated.
“Let me be clear, brothers and sisters, any discrimination because of race is morally wrong and contrary to God’s plan of happiness for His children. It is also contrary to His very purpose of the gathering.”
"I assure you that your standing before God is not determined by the color of your skin. Favor or disfavor with God is dependent upon your devotion to God and His commandments and not the color of your skin."
As President Nelson taught saints to see themselves participating in the gathering of God’s children taking place right now, he issued this prophetic invitation:
“As you study your scriptures during the next six months, I encourage you to make a list of all that the Lord has promised He will do for covenant Israel. ... Ponder these promises. Talk about them with your family and friends. Then live and watch for these promises to be fulfilled in your own life.”
Embrace the Future With Faith
Speaking during the women’s session to women and young women ages 11 and up, President Nelson expressed his love and appreciation for all they have done to be everyday heroes during these difficult circumstances. He also reminded them of the Lord’s promise that “if ye are prepared, ye shall not fear” (Doctrine and Covenants 38:30) and urged all to take steps to be more temporally, spiritually and emotionally prepared.
He shared three principles to consider:
- Create places of security
- Prepare your mind to be faithful to God
- Never stop preparing
President Nelson taught, “Our ultimate security comes as we yoke ourselves to Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ! Life without God is a life filled with fear. Life with God is a life filled with peace.”
Live ‘a New Normal’
In his concluding address on Sunday afternoon, President Nelson acknowledged in today’s world we often hear the term “new normal.” But he invited disciples of Jesus Christ to embrace “a new normal” that includes turning one’s heart to God, repenting daily, ministering to and serving others, keeping an eternal perspective and living each day to be better prepared to meet God.
President Nelson announced plans to build six new temples before he ended the conference with this blessing of peace:
“I bless you to be filled with the peace of the Lord Jesus Christ. His peace is beyond all mortal understanding. I bless you with an increased desire and ability to obey the laws of God.” He continued, “I promise that as you do, you will be showered with blessings, including greater courage, increased personal revelation, sweeter harmony in your homes and joy, even amid uncertainty.”
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What does this mean? Here are the possibilities:
1. Since transcripts were not yet available, the article was prepared from notes and the quotes were therefore not verbatim. This is implausible. The fake Nelson quote is not at all similar in wording to anything that he actually said, and the article is full of other direct quotes which were perfectly accurate and did not need to be modified.
2. The article was prepared using scripts President Nelson had written prior to delivering his talks. When the talks were actually delivered, he followed his script until he came to the part about "racism" -- when he was suddenly moved by the Spirit to say something other than what he had originally planned.
3. An accurate script or transcript of President Nelson's remarks was available at the time the summary was written, but some fifth-columnist in Church employ deliberately and dishonestly modified the part about "racism," hoping no one would notice. Eventually someone did notice, and the falsehood was quietly corrected.
4. The original quote was correct, and it is the new version -- and the published transcript of the talk, and the accompanying video -- that has been dishonestly modified. This sounds like crazy conspiracy-theory talk, but, incredibly, I cannot rule it out. Watch the video (as I finally did, my curiosity overcoming my videophobia for once), and you'll find that the camera cuts to a new angle just before the four paragraphs I have quoted above (about "racism"), and then again just after them, so the video could conceivably have been edited. I find this possibility implausible as well, because it would imply that Nelson himself was directly involved in the deception, and because it seems like an awful lot of work to go through to replace one antiracist statement with another, slightly different one.
To any of my readers who may have watched the Conference live, what do you remember President Nelson saying? Which quote is correct?
UPDATE: Several family members and acquaintances who watched the Conference live and took notes have confirmed that the currently available version of the talk is correct; so far, only one person remembers differently. Commenter MC has also confirmed the correctness of the current version by showing that people posted quotes from it -- but not from the deleted version -- on Twitter in real time. Possibility 4 can be considered disproven.
12 comments:
"I grieve that our Black brothers and sisters the world over are enduring the pains of racism and prejudice. "
In the context of 2020; that is the key sentence (albeit additionally supported by the general tenor of the whole thing). By the choice of example, it is a statement of affiliation with Establishment-media, secular, anti-Christian leftism. Even saying nothing would also be a statement of support for mainstream leftism - passively going-along-with the dominant stream of strategic evil.
Only a clear and explicit rejection of the real-world agenda of antiracism As It Actually Is (here, now; obvious, mandatorily imposed) would be a Christian statement.
It may be argued that any large institution simply must support this evil agenda - or be destroyed; and that may well be true.
But if so; the fact must then be acknowledged that (here, now, late 2020, IRL) all large institutions - including churches - have therefore taken the side of Satan, and against God.
Totally agree. They even capitalized "Black," God help them.
I watched it at 150% speed. I hate talking video but that makes it tolerable. 4 fits my recollection. I was so dismayed that I could not pay attention to the rest of the talk.I would add the possibility that a fifth columnists changed the talk before it was put on the teleprompter, though if that were the case, the corrections and error should be noted, not glossed over.
I would like to put forward another defense. This is something of a hostage situation. I have a number of non white LDS friends in college. Most of them have become very racial since then. They honestly believe that people are gunned down solely because of their skin color and that is a thing that could reasonably happen to them or their children, and that massive discrimination has retarded their success in life. They are completely duped of course. But they are not bad people. Like C.S. Lewis wrote in the Screwtape Letters of the British they would condemn the Germans in horribly, but if a downed aviator showed up at their doorstep they are courteous and hospitable. How do you approach someone like that? A direct approach is not likely to succeed but will shake their belief systems. And in fact discrimination does in fact sometimes happen, though anti-racism has become far more harmful, net.
I have updated my priors. President of the church is a role that has clearly superseded that of prophet seer and revelator. I must rely on my own personal and family revelation if I would receive clear guidance. I note that he himself has said, in past conferences, that developing your own personal revelation will be essential in the days to come, as have previous prophets. This brings me no joy, but must be squarely faced.
HomeStadter, let me be sure I understand you. When you say "4 fits my recollection," you mean you watched it live, or watched an earlier version of the video, and you remember him saying what he was quoted as saying in the original summary.
If that's true, all I can say is -- keeping in mind the Mormon context of this whole thing -- Oh. My. Heck. That means that after the Conference, President Nelson very deliberately put on the same suit and tie, stood up at the same pulpit, and delivered his modified remarks so that they could be filmed, spliced into the video, and dishonestly presented to the world as what he had said on Sunday morning. What the actual flip?
Do you remember him saying anything else that doesn't appear in the current video and transcript? Anything sufficiently different from the current version to have conceivably motivated such a brazen act of gaslighting?
I watched it near live, with a time lag of 10 minutes or so, so I could watch at 150% speed. The original text fits better with my recollection. I instantly assumed your previous post "categorically condemn racism" to have reference to his talk.
Like I say, my mind refused to pay attention to the rest of the talk, so I can't comment on any other changes.
I may be able to shed a little light on this. Many years ago I once covered general conference as a reporter, and a few minutes before each session began, a church employee would come by and give us all printed copies of the talks about to be delivered. This meant we could read along as the talks were spoken, which really helped us get accurate quotes since it is difficult to type as fast as someone is speaking.
I can tell you that the vast majority of the speakers read their talks verbatim, save for the occasional verbal slip here and there, with one exception. Gordon B. Hinckley, who was the prophet at the time, read his main talk word for word as well, but when he gave the usual address to the members at the close of the conference, he spoke several paragraphs' worth of text that didn't appear in our printed versions at all. There are probably two possible reasons for this: Either they printed his prepared talk days or weeks before conference took place and he made a last-minute change that didn't warrant reprinting all that paper, or he may have been moved by the Spirit in the spur of the moment to say something different.
A week or so later I thought to look at the version that had been published on the church website, and they had used the words he actually spoke, not the written version. Again, probably two possibilities here: Either the archivists had a general rule to go with what was said and not what was written, or — what seems more likely to me — if there is a significant discrepancy, the archivists may simply contact the speaker and ask them which version they would prefer to have published. It may even be possible that, if the speaker feels they worded something badly in a way that could be misunderstood, they may ask for a "corrected" version to appear, so as to make their intended meaning more clear.
I don't know what happened in this case (I am no longer a reporter), but it seems pretty unlikely to me that President Nelson went to the trouble of rerecording just a few sentences. As an official church publication, the archivists would not need to hold themselves to the journalistic standard of quoting someone word for word even if they have bad grammar, don't make sense, etc. I doubt it was anything nefarious; even the Book of Mormon authors sometimes went back and corrected things when they realized they had made an error. Just my two cents.
Homestadter, yes, President Nelson's talk as originally quoted was the proximate inspiration for that post, though of course his is very far from being the only organization issuing such statements!
Heidi, thank you for the very informative comment, and congratulations on no longer being a reporter!
I don't think the change we are discussing can be grouped together with correcting someone "if they have bad grammar, don't make sense, etc." Both versions of President Nelson's antiracist statement are clear and grammatical, and both were considered good enough to highlight in the official summary of the conference, including in the subtitle.
Did you watch the Conference live? What do you remember him saying?
FWIW, I have no recollection of the deleted quote, and also I find no mention of it on Twitter. Typically during conference people pull out important quotes from each talk and tweet them in real time. I can't find that for the deleted text. So my guess is no. 2.
For example, here is some of the corrected text that was tweeted during the talk itself.
https://twitter.com/girdedloins8/status/1312809942986883073
MC, I hadn’t thought of checking Twit. Good thinking! I see the tweet you linked as dated to the wee hours of Monday morning, but perhaps they automatically adjust it to Taiwan time for me. Anyway, strong evidence that the current video and transcript are correct and that the original summary was in error.
I’ve sent out an email to my Mormon family members asking what they remember but haven’t received any replies yet.
Several people have confirmed that the currently available version of the talk is the correct one, and I have appended a note to that effect to the original post.
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