The Blast Shelter

[ Reading time: 10 - 16 minutes ]

Subject: LDS Prophets on “Survivalism” Prt 8
From: Oiled Lamp
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 22:27:38 -0500

Thomas S. Monson
(Apostle, 1963; Second counselor to President Ezra Taft Benson, 1985,
Second counselor to President Howard W. Hunter 1993, First Counselor to
President Gordon B. Hinckley, 1995)
“Ensign,” September 1986

Faithful compliance with these revealed welfare principles and
practices have preserved lives in times of crises. An example is found
in the response of Church members to the 1985 earthquake that devastated
parts of Mexico City. Church members and leaders rose to the occasion,
drawing on their own preparedness efforts to help themselves and others
around them.
Another example occured at the time of the Idaho Teton Dam disaster
in the summer of 1976, when thousands of Latter-day Saints gave of their
own reserves to those whose every belonging was swept away in the
floodwaters. We remember also the massive efforts of Church members
following World War II when our own prophet-leader, President Benson,
then a member of the Council of the Twelve, administered the
distribution of more than seventy-five train-carloads of commodities to
needy members in war-ravaged Europe. These outpourings of humanitarian
service were made possible by the faithful adherence of Church members
to the very principles we have just reviewed.
…President Spencer W. Kimball further taught concerning self-reliance:
“The responsibility for each person’s social, emotional, spiritual,
physical, or economic well-being rests first upon himself, second upon
his family, and third upon the Church if he is a faithful member
thereof.
…Perhaps no counsel has been repeated more often than how to _manage
wisely our income._ Consumer debt in some nations of the world is at
staggering levels. Too many in the Church have failed to avoid
unnecessary debt. They have little, if any, financial reserve. The
solution is to budget, to live within our means, and to save some for
the future.
…Recent surveys of Church members have shown a serious erosion in the
number of families who have _a year’s supply_ of life’s necessities.
Most members plan to do it. Too few have begun. We must sense again the
spirit of the persistent instruction given by Elder Harold B. Lee as he
spoke to the members in 1943: “Again there came counsel in 1942….’We
renew our counsel, said the leaders of the Church, and repeat our
instruction: Let every Latter-day Saint that has land, produce some
valuable essential foodstuff thereon and then preserve it’…Let me ask
you leaders who are here today: In 1937 did you store in your own
basements and in your own private storehouses and granaries sufficient
for a year’s supply? You city dwellers, did you in 1942 heed what was
said from this stand?” (In Conference Report, April 1943, p.127.)
…Undergirding this pointed call is the stirring appeal from our own
living prophet, President Ezra Taft Benson, wherein he has given
specific suggestions for putting these teachings into action:
“From the standpoint of food production, storage, handling, and the
Lord’s counsel, wheat should have a high priority….Water, of course,
is essential. Other basics could include honey or sugar, legumes, milk
products or substitutes, and salt or its equivalent. The revelation to
produce and store food may be as essential to our temporal welfare today
as boarding the ark was to the people in the days of Noah.” (Ensign,
Nov., 1980, p.33.)
As has been said so often, the best storehouse system that the Church
could devise would be for every family to store a year’s supply of
needed food, clothing, and, where possible, the other necessities of
life.
In the early church, Paul wrote to Timothy, “If any provide not for
his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the
faith, and is worse than an infidel.” (1 Tim. 5:8.) It is our sacred
duty to _care for our families, including our extended families._

Ezra Taft Benson
October Conference, 1987

Fathers, another vital aspect of providing for the material needs of
your family is the provision you should be making for your family in
case of an emergency. Family preparedness has been a long-established
welfare principle. It is even more urgent today. I ask you earnestly,
have you provided for your family a year’s supply of food, clothing,
and, where possible, fuel? The revelation to produce and store food may
be as essential to our temporal welfare today as boarding the ark was to
the people in the days of Noah.
…Yes, brethren, as fathers in Israel you have a great responsibility
to provide for the material needs of your family and to have the
necessary provisions in case of emergency.

Ezra Taft Benson
April Conference, 1988

And what about family preparedness? Family preparedness has always
been an essential welfare principle in perfecting the Saints. Are each
if us and our families following, where permitted, the long-standing
counsel to have sufficient food, clothing, and where possible, fuel on
hand to last at least one year?

Encyclopedia of Mormonism, Vol.1,
CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

While LDS scripture reinforces the traditional Christian duty of
“respect and deference” to civil laws and governments in general as
stem “instituted of God for the benefit of man” (D&C 134:1, 6), Latter-day
Saints attach special significance to the Constitution of the United
States of America. They believe that the Lord “established the
Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom [he] raised up
unto this very purpose” (D&C 101:80). The Prophet Joseph Smith once
described himself as “the greatest advocate of the Constitution of the
United States there is on the earth” (Hc 6:56-57). All of his successors
as President of the Church have reaffirmed the doctrine of an inspired
Constitution. This consistent endorsement is notable, for basic LDS
teachings are far removed from the premises of American liberalism, and
largely as a result of these differences, Latter-day Saints suffered
considerable persecution before achieving an accommodation with
mainstream America.
The idea of an inspired Constitution is rare in contemporary public
discourse and wholly absent from contemporary constitutional and
historical scholarship. Seeking to discern the hand of divinity in
America’s beginnings, however, was once common not only in popular
rhetoric but also among eminent nineteenth-century historians such as
George Bancroft. Perhaps even more important is the repeated
acknowledgment of divine aid by America’s founding fathers. Notably,
George Washington frequently expressed gratitude to God for felicitous
circumstances surrounding the rise of the United States and chose the
occasion of his first inaugural address to recognize the providential
character of the framing of the Constitution:
No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand
which conducts the affairs of men, more than the People of the United
States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an
independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of
providential agency. And in the important revolution just accomplished
in the system of their united government, the tranquil deliberations and
voluntary consent of so many distinct communities, from which the event
has resulted, cannot be compared with the means by which most
governments have been established, without some return of pious
gratitude, along with an humble anticipation of the future blessings
which the past [blessings] seem to presage [W. Allen, ed., George
Washington: A Collection, p. 461. Indianapolis, Ind., 1988].
LDS teaching and revelation are in harmony with this
self-understanding of the founding generation. Latter-day Saints believe
that the Lord established the Constitution, not by communicating
specific measures through oracles, but by raising up and inspiring wise
men to this purpose (see D&C 101:80). This emphasis on the extraordinary
character of the American founders–and perhaps, more generally, on the
founding generation as a whole–accords with assessments by
contemporaries, as well as by later students of the period. Thomas
Jefferson, then U.S. ambassador to France, described the Constitutional
Convention of 1787 as “an assembly of demigods.” More than forty years
later, Alexis de Tocqueville, the noted French observer of American
society, included the American people as a whole in his praise of the
founding:
That which is new in the history of societies is to see a great
people, warned by its lawgivers that the wheels of government are
stopping, turn its attention on itself without haste or fear, sound the
depth of the ill, and then wait for two years to find the remedy at
leisure, and then finally, when the remedy has been indicated, submit to
it voluntarily without its costing humanity a single tear or drop of
blood [Vol. 1, p. 113].
This understanding of the divine inspiration of the Constitution as
mediated through the human wisdom of the founders and the founding
generation invites the inference that new needs and circumstances might
require the continued exercise of inspired human wisdom by statesmen
and citizens alike. LDS leaders have taught that the Constitution is not
to be considered perfect and complete in every detail (as evidenced most
clearly by its accommodation with slavery, contrary to modern scripture;
e.g., D&C 101:79) but as subject to development and adaptation. It was
part of the wisdom of the founders to forbear from attempting to decide
too much; they therefore provided constitutional means for
constitutional amendment. President Brigham Young explained that the
Constitution “is a progressive–a gradual work”; the founders “laid the
foundation, and it was for after generations to rear the superstructure
upon it” (JD 7:13-15).
If the wisdom embodied in the Constitution is considered open to
future development, so must it be understood as rooted in the past. J.
Reuben Clark, Jr., perhaps the most thorough expositor of the
Constitution among past LDS Church leaders, emphasized the dependence of
the founders’ wisdom on “the wisdom of the long generations that had
gone before and which had been transmitted to them through tradition and
the pages of history” (1962, p. 3). He saw the Constitution as the
product of Englishmen’s centuries-long struggle for self-government.
This historical perspective fits well with the account of the Book of
Mormon, according to which the Lord guided the discovery, colonization,
and struggle for independence of America (1 Ne. 13:12-13), in order to
establish it as a “land of liberty” (2 Ne. 10:11). Latter-day Saint
teaching differs from the traditional providential view of the founding
chiefly in holding this liberty not only a blessing in itself but also a
condition for the restoration of the fulness of the gospel of Jesus
Christ.
LDS teaching about the wisdom of the founders readily acknowledges
that it was both conditioned by the past and open to the future. But
there can be no question of completely reducing the Constitution to its
historical conditions. If the document framed in 1787 remains a
touchstone today, this is because, in some admittedly imperfect way, it
aims at “the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and
holy principles” (D&C 101:77). Church President David O. McKay affirmed
that “there are some fundamental principles of this republic which, like
eternal truths, never get out of date. . . . Such are the underlying
principles of the Constitution” (p. 319).
The scriptural reference to “just and holy principles” appears to
locate these fundamentals in certain “rights.” Section 98 of the
Doctrine and Covenants recommends friendship to constitutional law based
on the harmony between freedom under its law and freedom under God (D&C
98:6, 8). Similarly, revelation links human “rights” with the
opportunity to “act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity,
according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every
man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment” (D&C
101:78). In this way, the reverence of Latter-day Saints for the
Constitution is anchored in the fundamental doctrine of free agency, or
the idea that God makes possible people’s progress toward eternal life
in part by exposing them to the consequences, good or bad, of their
choices. LDS scholars who have examined the Constitution from the
standpoint of this fundamental interest in moral freedom have exhibited
its connection with the basic principles of the rule of law (Reynolds,
Hillam) and of the separation of powers (Hickman, in Hillam), both of
which concepts are connected with the ideal of limited government.
If “moral agency” stands at the core of the doctrine of an inspired
Constitution, then one might say that whereas LDS teaching in the
nineteenth century emphasized the agency, Church leaders in the
twentieth century have increasingly stressed the moral foundations of
the Constitution, echoing the prophet Mosiah2 in the Book of Mormon: “If
the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then
is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you” (Mosiah
29:26-7; cf. Ether 2:8-12). Their praise of the Constitution has often
been paired with warnings against the evils of Marxist communism, a
system opposed to the Constitution and moral freedom.
LDS attachment to the Constitution has been further encouraged by an
important oral tradition deriving from a statement attributed to Joseph
Smith, according to which the Constitution would “hang by a thread” and
be rescued, if at all, only with the help of the Saints. Church
President John Taylor seemed to go further when he prophesied, “When the
people shall have torn to shreds the Constitution of the United States
the Elders of Israel will be found holding it up to the nations of the
earth and proclaiming liberty and equal rights to all men” (JD 21:8). To
defend the principles of the Constitution under circumstances where the
“iniquity,” or moral decay, of the people has torn it to shreds might
well require wisdom at least equal to that of the men raised up to found
it. In particular, it would require great insight into the relationship
between freedom and virtue in a political embodiment of moral agency.

Well, that’s the end of what I have typed in so far. I have more
waiting to be entered into the computer (mostly more recent i.e., in the
past couple of years), so if you would like a copy of those when I’ve
finished typing them e-mail me and I’ll hurry them right along. If you
have more quotes you’d like to contribute (I’m planning on donating this
list to Rafleet’s site eventually, and anyone else’s who would like to
house it) please feel free to e-mail them. I hope this has been as
informative and helpful to you as I intended it to be. God bless!