(Posted Jan. 16) Marc Dotson: Our series, introductory as we tried to make it, still required some basic understanding of Latter-day Saint (Mormon) doctrine.
And since this site, mainly from Web searches, has garnered more attention, a good help: The best place for a comprehensive summary of the most basic (and I would say essential) LDS doctrines has to be the Articles of Faith.
(Posted Dec. 4) Heather Robinson: One struggle we faced while writing this series was the lack of contacts representing the multiple fundamentalist groups.
Luckily, we had access to willing members of the Apostolic United Brethren, the "Allred Group." Marianne Watson, a member of the Allred Group, had a lot of information about the different fundamentalist groups because she has been gathering information and writing historical articles about the groups for years.
Because of the large amounts of resources we have who are involved in the Allred Group, more information about those people might be helpful to our readers.
We quoted Watson when we said: "In the Allred Group, marriages are not arranged and wives must consent, she said.
'It's a rare day when they don't,' she added."
Certain misconceptions about fundamentalist groups could cause readers to think the wives consent because they are afraid of their husbands. However, this is not what Watson was trying to portray.
In the Allred Group, wives are constantly praying for the day their husband will take a second wife. Yeah, some wives are worried about it and aren't as open as others, but the majority of women in the Allred Group make how bad they want a sister-wife obvious. Some women get a sister-wife after praying for as little as a few months, but others wait for as much as 10 or more years.
Taking another wife usually isn't even the man's idea. Most women initiate the praying about a girl and the husband supports his wife's decision. It's a long, tedious process to ask to get to know a girl. The husband and wife have to agree on a girl, then everything has to go through the prophet, the girl's father, her mother, the girl herself and back through most of the people again.
Some girls are more excited about getting a sister-wife than they are about getting a husband. The girls see it as an opportunity to live with your best friend; to have girl talk all night; to share responsibilities and give the children someone to talk to when they're uncomfortable talking about something with their mom.
The process isn't as torturous as it appears in the media. In the Allred Group, if a girl isn't comfortable with a relationship, it doesn't happen. Most girls are thrilled to get to know a married couple … or trio … or a larger family.
(Posted Nov. 11) Marc Dotson: Since so much of this story is tied up in history, it makes writing an investigative story difficult at best. Journalism is history's rough draft, not history itself, and yet we had to provide enough of the history, disputed as it may be, to put the issues and human struggles in context.
A lot of people have pointed out at the apparent lack of Latter-day Saint comprehension of their own history. I think it's more complicated than that. It usually is.
From the same interview done for PBS' The Mormons, Dallin Oaks from the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles answered this concern best. The question related to why more hazy aspects of the church's history weren't addressed:
"It's an old problem, the extent to which official histories, whatever they are, or semi-official histories, get into things that are shadowy or less well-known or whatever. That's an old problem in Mormonism - a feeling of members that they shouldn't have been surprised by the fact that this or that happened, they should've been alerted to it. I have felt that throughout my life.
"There are several different elements of that. One element is that we're emerging from a period of history writing within the Church (of) adoring history that doesn't deal with anything that's unfavorable, and we're coming into a period of 'warts and all' kind of history. Perhaps our writing of history is lagging behind the times, but I believe that there is purpose in all these things - there may have been a time when Church members could not have been as well prepared for that kind of historical writing as they may be now.
"On the other hand, there are constraints on trying to reveal everything. You don't want to be getting into and creating doubts that didn't exist in the first place. And what is plenty of history for one person is inadequate for another, and we have a large church, and that's a big problem. And another problem is there are a lot of things that the Church has written about that the members haven't read. And the Sunday School teacher that gives 'Brother Jones' his understanding of Church history may be inadequately informed and may not reveal something which the Church has published. It's in the history written for college or Institute students, sources written for quite mature students, but not every Sunday School teacher that introduces people to a history is familiar with that. And so there is no way to avoid this criticism. The best I can say is that we're moving with the times, we're getting more and more forthright, but we will never satisfy every complaint along that line and probably shouldn't."
(Posted Nov. 4) This blog provides a forum for continued discussion on the topic just scratched in our three-part series. We, the authors, will provide commentary on writing the series and will field appropriate questions.
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