Perhaps we are seeing the Church pull back its esoteric space a bit, trending towards an insistence on obedience to the milk of repentance and baptism before even learning about the existence of temples.

Another simple explanation for delaying talk of exaltation is that because it is defined in Sec. 132, it too easily leads to questions about polygamy.

Given that about 50% of marriages end in divorce and the remain 50% are not necessarily even happy, it’s wise to tone down that rhetoric.

But, what if someone wants to live with Heavenly Father forever but just doesn’t want to be married, or just doesn’t want to be married to his/her particular spouse? As they said in Star Child, “Forever is a loooon, loooong time.” Not everyone wants to be married to his/her spouse forever and ever. Fifty years without divorce might be long enough. And yet both people might be very faithful members of the Church and partakers of the gospel.

I never have quite understood what romantic love, dating, marrige and sex have to do with being Christlike. I know other members who insist that to be exalted, Mother Teresa will have to be married. Hmmmm. And what of all the ancestors of hundreds of thousands of years ago–yes, 100s of thousands, not just six thousand–who never married their life partners at all, or who had children by multiple people, or who had their slave masters’ children, or had children for their mistresses (i.e. masters’ wives), sold their babies, etc.? Sometimes we Mormons like to see the ideal family life/Exaltation in a 19th or 20th century American life, when in fact there are more people throughout history than not who can be sealed into nice tight packages for all eternity. Sealing makes no sense, which is another reason the Church is probably toning down the Exaltation mumbo-jumbo. Soon the Church will look no different than your average run of the mill Christian church, with a little Unitarianism mixed in.

Last point: who really wants to be exalted, anyway? Being a god, married to maybe multiple partners, listeneing to prayers all day, working, working, working, presiding, watching your kids mess up day after day and being powerless to help them (powerless or unwilling); waiting thousands of years for a small fraction of your children to come home…

The more the leadership waters down the curriculum, the more we look like a nice lil ol’ Christian church but with the casual ease of a Unitarian anything-goes church. We already say “bring what you have and we’ll add to it.” Sounds like the UUs to me.

First I have one quibble with something J said earlier:

and even the nature of exaltation itself have changed over the course of a century.

I think it is important to note that the nature of exaltation will never change — the things that change in the church are popular understandings/conceptions of what exaltation is and means, etc. We are allowed to be wrong in the church and in this probation in general and we use that right quite often I think. Some thelogical and doctrinal points are just not completely revealed to us by God yet.

I think that applies most of our theological complaints, G. If you think exaltation sounds awful, but God tells us it is very desirable, then that probably means you are incorrectly envisioning it. (The administrative version of exaltation you described does indeed sound awful, btw)

I’m waiting for someone to take a stand on whether what I am noting (if, in fact, I am accurately noting it) is just a change in message or whether there is an actual doctrinal change going on. I think it’s just a change in message, and G seems to agree in a roundabout way. Evangelicals, too, have done this. A big megachurch I drive past from time to time displays a huge banner: “We’re here for you!” That’s ad-slogan talk, their soft-pedaled message to bring people in.