"The Mormons" on PBS

I hope you've all heard about this by now - there's a 4-hour documentary on PBS tomorrow and Tuesday night (2 hours each night) by Frontline about the Church. It's on at 9 pm Eastern, so check your local listings to see when it's on for you. Our ward mission leader is encouraging everyone to watch it, if for no other reason than to know what was shown if people have questions about it.

As far as I know, Church leaders did cooperate with the making of this film, and it is supposed to be very fair. BYU-TV had commercials for it between sessions at General Conference. Adam and I just watched the preview on the internet, and the section talking about the missionaries had lots of clips from the "Called to Serve" video.

The preview is here: www.pbs.org/mormons/ We thought some things were a bit off on the phrasing. I find it odd that they said the exodus to Utah was the Mormons telling the US government to kiss off, and then we apparently "decided later" that we wanted to "come back" to the US. Mmm hmm. That would be why we sent people on the Mormon Battalion DURING the exodus to Utah to help the US military, and why Utah applied for statehood 800 times before they granted it 40 years later or something stupid. And the picture of the Angel Moroni, when referencing the visions about receiving the gold plates, had to be from anti-LDS stuff because that was super creepy. But for the most part, it looks like it will be okay.

Hope you get a chance to watch at least part of it, and please share later if you get in any missionary-type conversations about it.