Dan Peterson

The recent Associated Press article about a case of sexual abuse in Arizona and about certain related claims regarding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues to generate controversy and accusations.

What the heck. I’m in the mood, and I think that I haven’t told this missionary story here before. So I offer to you yet another exercise in geezerly nostalgia. (It’s my blog, after all. Just try to stop me!)

I would love to be able to bottle whatever it was that had such an impact on that Swiss investigator and pass it on to others. But I have not the faintest idea what “it” was.

Serving as a missionary in German-speaking Switzerland, while it had its substantial personal rewards and while I am passionately in love with the country, posed some challenges.

We tend to make more progress, spiritually, in times of stress, sorrow, sadness, opposition, and difficulty than in times of ease. Or, as the great thirteenth-century Muslim poet and mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi put it, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

If the Book of Mormon was to be mocked because it only ranked thirty-fifth, shouldn’t those authors be dismissed because they failed to make even the top one hundred?

I freely confess that the American Founders and the founders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints alike were and are human. But I also believe them to have been good men, on the whole and for their cultural milieu, and I won’t stand idly by while they’re defamed and marginalized.

I’ve been thinking of an experience that I had many years ago when I was a missionary based in Interlaken.

Long ago I formulated Peterson’s First Rule for the Study of Other Religions and Worldviews: If a substantial number of sane and intelligent people believe something that seems to you utterly without sense, the problem probably lies with you.

Every looker-on was ready to weep for joy; but none were able or felt inclined to talk.

Thomas Sowell once said, “It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.”

It’s within our power to help the Book of Mormon witnesses to fulfill their commission from the Lord.