The Times Fails Thomas S. Monson

Never did I ever think I would agree with Donald Trump on anything major, nor on anything I thought was silly, such as his constant criticism of the New York Times. But my Church president died last week, and when I read his obituary in the Times, I was shocked to find that I felt that the obituary’s writer and the editorial staff in charge of such things had failed the standards of mainstream journalism in favor of sensationalism. Could Donald Trump be right? Yikes.

President Thomas S. Monson, late prophet and leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was known internationally as a humanitarian figure. Yet the obituary in the Times takes 21 paragraphs to highlight the failures of the Mormon church and its leader to ordain women and to accept same-sex marriage, before the obituary even begins to mention the vital facts of the man’s life. Someone on Twitter mentioned that this obituary was not nearly as kind to its subject as was the obituary for Fidel Castro. What a concept!

There’s a scripture in Isaiah that says a time will come when the wisdom of the wise will fail and the understanding of the prudent will be hid, and things will be turned upside down (see Isaiah 29). This is what I think about this obituary: that a fundamentally good man is treated as if he were the evil one, and his good works, while not precisely hidden, are not mentioned until paragraph 25, well below where one would expect a fair and impartial journalist to balance his article with their placement. I wonder if those kinder paragraphs are even included in the print version. I bet they were cut because of space issues. So all that people reading the print version would see were the controversy. Maybe it sells papers, but it is not fair and balanced journalism.

But even as late as he mentioned Thomas Monson’s regular visits to 85 widows and weekly letters to 23 servicemen serving in Korea while a bishop in the early 1950s, the writer of the obituary included only one other solid fact of humanitarian service in paragraph 27: “Awaiting his turn for the presidency, he embraced humanitarian causes with Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups supporting homeless shelters, food banks, nursing homes and disaster relief efforts in the United States and abroad.” I take exception to the modifying introductory clause, “Awaiting his turn . . .”, since it is misleading. Thomas Monson was not waiting to be president of the LDS Church. Without getting into a lengthy explanation of how presidents are chosen in this church, let me just say it’s not a sure thing that anyone will be president, even the so-called second in line. So he simply lived as he thought he was supposed to: in service to humankind. That is another fact that this sentence in paragraph 27 hid: that most of Thomas Monson’s service was personal, one-on-one, not part of multi-faith group efforts as though he couldn’t be bothered to start anything himself nor do anything himself. Where is a mention of his nearly daily visits to people in hospitals? Where is any description of the countless humanitarian works that *just* the LDS Church did under his leadership?

My own Thomas S. Monson story is that when I worked for the Church as an editor in charge of various pieces of curriculum, I was doing a project to produce a welfare booklet one time, and Thomas S. Monson was the advisor. I had final say over the design, the text, and all the aspects of printing, but he would give approval from the ecclesiastical side. The designer worked with me to come up with the colors and graphics, and we thought we had a lovely piece at the end of all our work. But President Monson’s word came back to us: “No, this won’t do.” He was concerned about the colors and about the audience of the text. He said that elderly people with vision problems wouldn’t be able to read colored print on even light-colored background easily. I looked into it and of course he was right. Readability does deteriorate with less contrast between words and background, and the greatest readability remains black text on white background, with a serif font. He asked us to redesign, which of course we did, and we were impressed that he was so concerned with the minority of the target audience who might have vision problems.

In my interactions with him (and others in the highest leadership) I was personally impressed with his personal goodness. Thomas Monson sincerely loved the Lord and wanted to do what He wanted him to do, as best as he could.

I never was treated as less than an equal by any of the highest leadership when I was working there. A few in lower positions were annoyingly backward for the times, but they were paid employees, not ecclesiastical leaders. It’s a slow thing to effect blanket social change, and to change a religion is fraught with difficulty, especially when the religion relies on actual revelation. We get personal revelation all the time, but for the entire church, the revelation has to come through the prophet. Those of us who are faithful and believe wholeheartedly in this truth wait for the Lord’s timing, and His timing is different from the world’s. I don’t know what will happen about gays and about women in leadership, but I do know that the Lord is ultimately and absolutely fair, and when we get to the other side of mortality, we’ll all say, “Oh, so that’s how it works. I see. Right!”

Meanwhile, rest in peace, Thomas S. Monson, and may your grieving family be blessed with peace.