In the small world of Mormon Studies and online blogging, the term "inoculation" refers to teaching mainstream Latter-day Saints enough accurate LDS history that they won't contract a terminal case of apostasy when they encounter publications or talks that use select historical events and interpretations to present an anti-LDS message. [And, speaking broadly, that also includes publications or talks which are relatively objective or scholarly with no overt anti-LDS intent but which come across as anti-LDS to a mainstream Latter-day Saint who reads it.]
I have posted on this topic at some length before, for example in "The Devilish Details of Inoculation." I'm guessing a similar debate about the merits or risks of "inoculation" occurs in other denominations — perhaps what to teach Evangelical teenagers about evolution or what to teach Catholic teenagers about the string of historical forgeries that were relied on to establish Catholic authority for a millennium (Hans Kung is especially good on this point) or what to teach Jewish teenagers about the documentary hypothesis or what to teach Muslim teenagers about almost anything or what to teach teenage atheists about scientific eugenics and race theory. Anyway, here are a couple of recent posts on Mormon inoculation.
- "The Hard History — is faith enough to get us through?" at BCC. A controversial statement: "I like the idea of being informed and faithful, but I would certainly choose 'faithful' over 'informed.'"
- "A Meandering Thought on Inoculation" at NCT. First line: "One thing I loved about my high school freshman year of Catholic History was the chapter on the Spanish Inquisition and discussing the horrible things done then."
- "Trying to Understand My Friends Who Didn't Leave the Faith" at Mormon Matters, from a different perspective, with 284 comments and counting. It starts out: "If someone told me three years ago that I would be where I am now, I would have never believed them. And yet, here I am." This post that shows why inoculation remains such a controversial topic.
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Most people who supported what you call scientific eugenics and race theory were good Christian gentlemen, some of them even your fellow religionists.
People who support such reprensible theories today, as far as I can tell are called neo-Nazis and are pretty much 100% Christians. What does this have to do with atheism, again? Oh, that's right, NOTHING. Please try again.
Let's not forget that scary "Science" did what science does -- self-corrects when new evidence is found -- and showed such theories wrong, wrong, wrong. Science worked.
"Innoculation," as you define it, is not much better than "indoctrination." In fact, the former is really the latter in disguise. Teaching just enough of a controversial topic to make the adherent think he or she is informed is really deceptive and counterproductive. The end result is not retention. It's disillusionment, once the adherent realizes there's more to the story than he/she has been told. Openness is the best policy.
Bill, whether it is official policy or just the reality on the ground, "opennness" is what we already have: anyone can read anything. Whether from your public library or Amazon or Googling terms of interest, there is unprecedented openness and access.
The inoculation discussion is not about restricting information or access -- that's a straw man argument. "Inoculation" is about encouraging mainstream members of the LDS Church (most of whom don't really have that much interest in the details of LDS history or doctrine) to do some reading and thinking. It complements openness.
Dave, if the LDS Hierarchy wished to encourage mainstream members to know a little *actual* Mormon history, they could talk about it somewhere. Church manuals, perhaps; talks during conference; during all those infinite seminary lessons? That none of these opportunities are taken, and that the internet is roundly condemned) can only be parsed to mean that the least knowledge the better, as far as the institutional church goes. How many wives did Joseph Smith have? How many were married to other men at the time? How often have you discussed this in a meeting?
Dave, openness is not what we already have. While it's certainly true that we live in an age of unprecedented access to information - including materials that might challenge the testimonies of the faithful - it is much more common for churchmembers to be counseled to stay away from what Elder Oaks called "other sources." BYU professors have been dismissed, not for writing diatribes against the Church, but for writing in the wrong journals. I can only speak for myself, but if I can remember any pattern detectable from Conference talks, firesides and other words from on high, it has been to follow the living prophets and ignore the rest.
Such counsel may be dead-on for those in need of more milk than meat, but the lack of leadership in this area is counterproductive. It's not hard to see why the leadership would want to avoid sticky topics with the propensity to take it off message, but when rank-and-file members are left to either avoid such topics or approach them at their own risk, people are often left ignorant (and unprepared) or devastated by what they find on their own.
My approach, when confronted with weird Mormon statements from the fossil record (including one of Brigham's many infamous rants) is to hunt down and read the original source - in its entirety. This is not innoculation. It's research. Inquiring minds want to know. Doing so does not un-weird the weird, but it does provide badly-needed context. Instead of depending upon the facile spins of a faithful handler, I'm able to discover the larger context for myself. If weird-comment-lookup were less a guilty pleasure and more a matter of Gospel study, it would suck the poison out of many uninvited discoveries while helping some of the faithful temper their credence for any stray comment uttered by a long-dead Mormon leader on an odd Tuesday when it was really the chili talking.
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