The two subjects people avoid when in conversation with one another are politics and religion. Both subjects stir up more trouble than a hornet’s nest. But, it’s when either of these two subjects are talked about with such misinformation that it turns into a three-ring circus that it’s hard to tell which is fact and which isn’t.
B.Jay Gladwell was tired of hearing about the falsehoods of the Mormon Church and it wasn’t until he joined himself did he realize a lot of what he heard just wasn’t true. He wrote a book called What’s Wrong with Mormons? and hoped to draw the world’s attention to what the church was really all about through first-hand knowledge and hands-on experiences.
“As a Mormon,” he says in an interview recently with “The Writer’s Life,” one of his blog stops in his thirty-day virtual book tour with Pump Up Your Book Promotion this month, “you’re constantly bombarded by what other people—non-members outside the church—are telling other people about what our faith is, how it works, and what the doctrines are. The unfortunate thing is that 99.9 of the time the things these folks are telling other people are totally incorrect, and are, in most cases, out-and-out lies. Now, in many instances, some of these people are just repeating what someone else has told them because they don’t know that it’s inaccurate, and they don’t know any better than to repeat misinformation. Nevertheless, in some of these cases, they are premeditated. They’re falsehoods perpetuated by certain individuals who have an agenda.”
Just as B.Jay was starting to work on the book, he was listening to an Internet radio show and he made the comment that anyone who felt it was necessary to defend his religion must not be very secure in his faith. “On one hand,” he says, “I can understand why he would say that. On the other hand, after thirty-two years of hearing the same old misinformation being repeated time and again, it gets old. So a person has a choice to make. He can either sit by silently, allowing the misinformation to be perpetuated, which leads to further misunderstanding or he can stand up and say, ‘Excuse me. What you’re saying is incorrect. That’s not what our faith is about. Those are not our doctrines. That’s not what we teach.”
Does it bother him that people disagree with the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?
“What bothers me is when people disseminate misinformation. What’s disappointing about this whole situation is people giving more credence to those spreading the misinformation than to those who are members of the Church. After all, who knows more about a person’s religion? That’s why I wrote the book. This is my attempt to stand up and say, “This is what Mormons believe; this is what Mormons teach; this has been my experience in the Church over the past thirty-two years.”
