Far from the Top

When I was 12 or 13, I had to put up with a church teacher who was openly bigoted named Brent LaMar Top.  He used to make fun of the Community of Christ for having the courage to modify their succession procedures even though they had infinitely better claims to Mormon succession than the Brighamites in Utah.  He also said that they might as well just become a Protestant church after having repudiated offensive elements of Mormon tradition such as the profound racism of the Book of Mormon.  Of course, I was chastised for reasonably asking why the LDS church was mindlessly following seniority in selecting an avowed white supremacist who openly and falsely claimed that the US civil rights movement was a Community conspiracy.  The Southern Poverty Law Center properly condemned these views as "vicous and racist."  That leader then made emphasizing the profoundly racist Book of Mormon the focus of his church presidency before the church dishonestly tried to conceal his incapacitation.  

The bigoted teacher guy also mocked Fawn McKay Brodie while somehow claiming that supposed prophets, seers, and revelators being quick to believe and suppress any claim about their founder's actions no matter how bizarre or fraudulent as demonstrated by the Salamander Letter wasn't a problem.  He thought it perfectly reasonable that his wife's parents weren't allowed by the church to attend their wedding but was dismayed that the people of a developed country such as Denmark with a functional educational and social welfare system had little interest in a 19th century racist text being peddled by an uneducated teenager fresh off the boat from Idaho.  He eventually went on to teach in the religion department at BYU where he wrote on such rigorous topics as accounts of near-death experiences being used to justify LDS beliefs, but even active devout members have always been embarrassed by the lack of rigor and actual knowledge in that non-academic department.   

Oh, and this guy forced twelve year-olds to go out and solicit money for this discredited organization.  For shame!