Pioneer Day

Full disclosure, Pioneer Day is not my favorite. I am the child of converts. When we talk of our honored ancestors who came across the plains… my ancestors were the ones cursing them and driving them out. Pioneer Day always seemed a sort of ancestor worship that has made me uncomfortable.

Then I look at my wife’s family. Pioneers all the way back on both sides of the family. The ones that still live in Utah are very proud of their heritage, but already half-way out of the church by their behavior and loudly proclaimed beliefs on social media.

I read recently in the New Testament where the Pharisees bragged of having Abraham as their father, thus they did not need anything Christ was teaching. Modern veneration of the pioneers seems the same error to me.

We are not saved by who our ancestors were. The more family history I do, the more this comforts me. That generation was called upon to do hard things. Their sacrifice will do nothing for us if we do not develop personal faith and personal obedience. We are going to be called upon to do equally hard things. If we draw strength from the example of the past, fine. But ancestor worship can be a form of idolatry too.

It’s not just drawing strength from the example of the past.

Each of us in our individual struggle is a Protestant view. At best that gives you salvation.

Us progressively joining in the atomization of the world is pure loss.

If remembering the Pioneers would help forge us together as a people, I am certain the Brethren would be emphasizing it.

If Nehemiah and Ezra weren’t good enough for the Pioneers, why are the Pioneers good enough for us? At what point are the miracles of the past too distant? Are we about to be going through our own Winter Quarters and Martin’s Cove?

Perhaps we need to, though I am not eager for it.

You missed his point.

We *Don’t* need pioneers for salvation.

We do need Pioneers for there to be some welding link between the Fathers and Children spoken of by Joseph in reference to Malachi. We need Ezra and Nehemiah as well as the 1842 ones. We need the human race sealed together via individual links from the beginning to the end.

If not we may be technically saved, but heaven would be quite impoverished.

History becoming irrelevant is a decision. Once that decision is made it means you are ceasing to be a people and to become a people again will have to have your own winter quarters or Babylonian exiles.

My beef with an annual Pioneer Day is that it’s too parochial for a world-wide church. Every region has their pioneers who sacrificed.

I think that is a kind of false consciousness.

It’s like saying that if your family from country x emigrates around, you should no longer connect back to your country x ancestors because now you are a worldwide family.

Synthesize continuity and change.

Should we remember the Exodus, considering that none of our ancestors may have crossed the Red Sea?

I think we should, and Pioneer Day should be similar.

Of course, my direct ancestors are all later converts.

I spoke on this very subject yesterday. My talk is posted on my blog. https://plainandpreciousthing.blogspot.com/

My view is that a people always has a founding story.

Rozy, thanks!

Exact blog post for Pioneer talk –
https://plainandpreciousthing.blogspot.com/2022/07/pioneers-today.html

Rozy, good talk, especially the parts about living the principles embodied by the pioneers. You did exactly as Elder Oaks said.

Your investigator also illustrated the problem with parochialism (if that’s the right word) that has plagued the Restoration for generations. Somehow, someone, or maybe even “everyone as a whole”, gave your investigator the idea that they would be a second class member. (I’m assuming they knew they “could” join, and their “can’t” was their unwillingness to be looked down on.)

You saved/recovered that situation well. But that was not entirely the investigator’s fault. Church culture itself had become that investigator’s stumbling block.

To this day, the reputation of members among non-members is of being stand-offish. A visiting AA 70 said as much, using the exact word “stand-offish”, at our stake conference a few years ago.

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G: the foundational story of this people as a people starts in spring 1820. 1847 is a chapter.

The parochial aspect of how PD is celebrated, requires the annual apologia of “but we’re/you’re all pioneers too.” IOW, it’s true — very true — but it doesn’t play well in Peoria anymore.

Net: I assume that TPTB decided to de-emphasize Pioneer Day for a reason. And there’s been a lot of change in what’s emphasized over the past 7 years, especially since Pres Nelson’s tenure.

Granted, a lot of the changes have us scratching our heads wondering why. What was the Lord’s purpose? To what better place/condition is this change going to take us? Was this somehow “our fault” and this new way is the “lesser law” because we did so poorly with the higher truth/law ?

Or is it part of the general “paring down” of traditional activities so that we can laser-focus on the essentials?

Zen, The Jews remember the Exodus with the annual Passover Supper. Which is now our weekly Sacrament.

Btw, the Exodus was an ordeal, a defining event, but it was not the “foundational” story of the Israelites. As an identifiable people, they started with Jacob/Israel. (Not all of Abraham’s and Isaac’s descendants were Israelites.)

1820 is the foundation story of the religion but not of the people. And our religion uniquely basically requires that we be a people in addition to being a religion. We mostly aren’t a people anymore.

The schtick about how we are all pioneers now was part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Its the equivalent of the old guys in high priest quorum calling their wife their boss nyuk nyuk

Perhaps, it isn’t so much wrong, as old-dated. I don’t mean ‘out-dated’ to mean irrelevant or not applicable. I mean, it feels like the jock bragging about what he did in high school, while still struggling to make his dead-end job work.

In that context, we haven’t done enough to make this all alive for ourselves. The Pioneers are stolen glory, for people who can not sacrifice.

We need that sacrifice to make this lived and real.

Books – it absolutely was a foundational event for them, in a similar way. Even Nephi talks about it, when he is contextualizing his own exodus to L&L.

Pioneering to what was to become Utah was a fore-shadowing, a type, of “fleeing from Babylon to Zion”. What we must all do, and what will literally be done again to the new Zion (by some) and to the stakes and homes of Zion by the rest.

It wasn’t the first flight either – Kirtland, Missouri, and Nauvoo. (Missouri could count as two or three by itself, if you count the shifting from county to county.)

Once the gathering to a central place ceased, was that event still the “foundational” thing? Is it what “makes a prople” ? Let me cogitate on that some more. My first reaction is still “no”, it’s not what makes God’s people His people. What do the prophets say makes people God’s people?

The prophets talk about what makes you God’s people.
Not so much about what makes you a people at all.
But the one is a requirement for the other.

Zen: I think Nephi uses the Exodus from Egypt as a model, a type, a foreshadowing, an example, of their own family’s exodus.

The Israelites were already an identifiable people for 400 years by the time of the Exodus. The Israelites were already well founded. Though the Exodus further defined/shaped/molded them.

The salvation of the Israelites from Egypt, is also a type/foreshadow of salvation through the atonement/resurrection of Christ. The death of the Egyptian firstborn finally prompting their release. The blood on the doorframe leading to the passing over of the angel of death.

But somewhere in history, even while celebrating the blood’s connection to being “saved”, eating unleavened bread to remind them of the night of blood on the doorframe, ie the Passover supper/seder, they lost sight of what it was pointing to.

The Last Supper of Christ and his apostles, being a Passover seder, not only pointed to what was to occur, it reinforced that the original Exodus story, with the deaths of Eygptian firstborn, the blood, the being spared/saved, was itself a type/foreshadowing of His atonement, the salvation of His people.

“The prophets talk about what makes you God’s people.
Not so much about what makes you a people at all.”

Maybe I need more education/instruction on that. I see all other forms of unification automatically flowing from truely being “God’s people.”

I agree with Zen that The Exodus was a foundational event in ethnogenesis.

Certainly the prior period of exile helped with the
Egyptians treating them as an identifiable group on the wrong side of an ethnic boundary. But the Exodus was transformative. Identity creating.

That’s why nephi links his story back Moses so frequently. He is self consciously engaged in an act of ethnogenesis and identity formation himself.