{"id":81,"date":"2010-09-30T12:45:11","date_gmt":"2010-09-30T12:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/elder-jensen-says-hes-sorry.html"},"modified":"2010-09-30T12:45:11","modified_gmt":"2010-09-30T12:45:11","slug":"elder-jensen-says-hes-sorry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/elder-jensen-says-hes-sorry.html","title":{"rendered":"Elder Jensen says he’s sorry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joanna Brooks’ fine essay<\/a>
\non Elder Marlin Jensen’s apology for…well, we’ll get to that…at a
\nmeeting of 90 members of the Oakland, CA stake (diocese) points to
\nongoing uncertainty about the role of the LDS Church in public life
\nthese days. Jensen’s a lovely guy (I’ve had dinner with him a couple of
\ntimes), and that very rare bird: a Mormon General Authority who says
\nhe’s a Democrat. That he should go to Oakland to hear firsthand the
\ndistress of gay and pro-gay rights Saints is at once no surprise and
\nsomething remarkable under the Mormon sun, given the extraordinary
\nlengths Salt Lake went to mobilize its California troops on behalf of
\nProposition 8 in 2008. What gives?<\/p>\n

Exactly what Jensen apologized for is not entirely clear. Brooks quotes
\none attendee who reported his words as follows: “To the full extent of
\nmy capacity, I say that I am sorry . . . I know
\nthat many very good people have been deeply hurt, and I know that the
\nLord expects better of us.” Certainly, Jensen wasn’t apologizing for the
\nchurch’s stance on same-sex marriage–his capacity doesn’t extend that
\nfar. But to say that God expects better of “us”–the Mormon people? the
\nLDS leadership?–suggests that he was doing more than a perfunctory
\n“sorry to have offended you.” Whether or not, as Brooks hypothesizes,
\nthe church may be shifting its ground a bit on the issue, Jensen’s
\nappearance suggests a clear recognition that its Prop. 8 campaign was
\nnot a good thing.<\/p>\n

Since February 2008, when Thomas Monson assumed the presidency of the
\nchurch after the death of Gordon Hinckley, maladroitness has pretty much
\nbeen the norm for Mormonism in the public square. Besides Prop. 8, Mitt
\nRomney’s presidential run, the senatorial fortunes of Harry Reid and
\nBob Bennett, the Glenn Beck phenomenon, anti-immigrant legislation–all
\nthese have presented the church with challenges it has not seemed to
\nknow how to handle. Hinckley was a master religious politician; Monson,
\nnot so much–and indeed, barely a public presence at all. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joanna Brooks’ fine essay on Elder Marlin Jensen’s apology for…well, we’ll get to that…at a meeting of 90 members of the Oakland, CA stake (diocese) points to ongoing uncertainty about the role of the LDS Church in public life these days. Jensen’s a lovely guy (I’ve had dinner with him a couple of times), and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nElder Jensen says he's sorry - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/elder-jensen-says-hes-sorry.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Elder Jensen says he's sorry - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Joanna Brooks’ fine essay on Elder Marlin Jensen’s apology for…well, we’ll get to that…at a meeting of 90 members of the Oakland, CA stake (diocese) points to ongoing uncertainty about the role of the LDS Church in public life these days. Jensen’s a lovely guy (I’ve had dinner with him a couple of times), and…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/elder-jensen-says-hes-sorry.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-09-30T12:45:11+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Elder Jensen says he's sorry - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/elder-jensen-says-hes-sorry.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Elder Jensen says he's sorry - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"Joanna Brooks’ fine essay on Elder Marlin Jensen’s apology for…well, we’ll get to that…at a meeting of 90 members of the Oakland, CA stake (diocese) points to ongoing uncertainty about the role of the LDS Church in public life these days. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}