LDS Mormonism is a corporation: The Corporation of the Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While many liberals see corporations as sinister entities, working evil in the world in a godless quest for the almighty dollar, corporations are tools of human fashioning. We do have the power to regulate them. At least I hope we do.
I have been reading up on Scientology. It is an unusual belief system, but as a Mormon I have very little room to criticize it for its strangeness. One reporter in Rolling Stone magazine suggested that Scientology inflates its membership numbers. There are, so she claims, far fewer Scientologists than they have led people to believe.
Still, they have plenty of money. So much money that they have been able to fund several large headquarters in different US cities. The real estate alone must be incredibly expensive. Where do they get all their money? For one thing, their "e-meter" sessions cost a fair amount, and like Freemasonic initiation, the price increases the higher you advance in the system. They have no problem encouraging clients to go into debt for their treatments.
They also have some high profile, celebrity members (Tom Cruise, Beck, Isaac Hayes) who have undoubtedly contributed some serious cash to the cause.
Being a corporate entity, like the Mormon Church, it is conceivable that Scientology could sustain itself through its investments and business possessions. I have no idea what kind of portfolio they have, nor do I care to know. I simply find the possibility of a corporate church with vast holdings and diminishing members extremely intriguing. Theoretically, one could have a guilded temple with no parishoners.
The LDS Church brings in over several billion dollars a year in tithing. Members, like my wife and I, pay ten percent of our income to the LDS Church every year. On top of that we are expected to pay additional offerings to feed the poor in the local unit. The latter I have little issue with. The former, according to personal belief, is presumed to belong to God. Business has been very kind to the Almighty, at least in the case of the LDS Church. Different parties have estimated their holdings to be tens of billions of dollars in value.
Like Scientology, they have some wealthy members: CEOs, owners of giant corporations, and the like. If these folks tithe, then they are contributing far more than I ever will. But again, is it possible that the LDS Church could sustain itself as a corporation as its members dwindle in number? The LDS Church also inflates its numbers. It allegedly counts everyone in its records, some long after they have removed their names, or converted to another religion. How can they keep up with all of that change anyway?
No harm, no foul. I guess. It bothers me to think that the tithing we pay may be committed to the fight against gay marriage, or some other worthless project like that. I have no problem giving God his due. I just wish he would find nicer estate managers.
Monday, March 27, 2006
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Theocracy
For some time there has been a minor feud between two LDS apologists: Daniel C. Peterson and Kevin Graham. Peterson for various understandable reasons has greater support among the apologist denizens of the FAIR universe. He is better known, more published, a professor at BYU, and an excellent writer. Kevin, for his part, is a solid thinker and a decent writer. Both men believe in the truth of Mormonism and have undertaken to defend it against its critics.
Numerous threads at FARMS provide evidence of the rancor that has arisen between them. Oddly, the subject about which most of this ill will exists is Islam, not Mormonism. Peterson, a professional Islamicist, is understandably sympathetic toward and protective of the culure of his expertise. Kevin Graham, although not an expert, is a quick study and has made a number of excellent points which are critical of Islam.
Mormons fall on different sides of political issues that touch on Islam, as the Peterson/Graham debate illustrates. Still, I think there are reasons why some informed LDS people sympathize with elements of fundamentalist Islam. I think one of these reasons can be encapsulated in the word theocracy.
A few nations like Iran have succeeded in establishing Islamic regimes that reflect the strict values established in the Koran. While most Americans distrust these governments and abhor the terrorist acts supported by them, there is a certain blindness to the role religion has played in this matrix of theocracy and violence. Why the blindness on the role of religion? I believe that one reason is because on a certain level some Christians and Mormons abhor the violence while envying the limited success of theocracy in shaping the lives of the peoples of these countries according to the precepts of highly conservative religious minorities.
The Mormon marriage with American government was once viewed as partial and ideally temporary. God revealed to Joseph Smith the Lord's tolerance of the Church 'befriending' constitutional government in the United States, but at the same time Joseph Smith had himself anointed king of the kingdom of God on earth--this as he was beginning to mount his campaign for the U.S. presidency. Joseph may not have seen the contradiction between establishing theocracy and participating in American democracy, but few Americans today could stomach a presidential candidate who engineered his own kingship in a shadow world government scheme.
Oddly, Mormonism, it would seem, is a belief system that has continued to produce would-be American monarchs. James Strang, leader of a Mormon schismatic group in the early post-Smith years, fashioned himself as the theocratic monarch of Beaver Island, Michigan. In more recent years, a Mormon convert from Greek Orthodox Christianity--Alex Joseph--began to practice polygyny and proclaimed himself a monarch in Southern Utah. These men did not remain members of the LDS Church, but they were inspired by the example of Joseph Smith.
Is it possible that some Mormons envy elements of Islamic theocracy? I would say yes, but I doubt that any prominent LDS person would openly espouse such views. Some Mormons believe that they will rescue the Constitution of the United States from grave danger, although, as in the case of many prophecies, they are short on specifics. Yet, one should not confuse their view of saving the US Constitution with upholding American government in its current form. Sure, some Mormons who put stock in this prophecy believe exactly that, but some also see the US Constitution as but a precursor to the millennial government by the sovereign Christ.
How do some of these Mormons envision their rescue the of Constitution and ushering in of God's kingdom? Simply put, their objective is to peacefully transform our country's laws and institutions to conform to their vision of the kingdom of God. In defensive terms, this means protecting our country from legalizing sin, and in an assertive fashion this means legislating against sin. It also means fighting the atheists and secularists who seem to them to want to take God out of government. Indeed, it means refashioning society through legal means to conform to a Christian-Mormon ideal.
Wouldn't you think that these folks have some plan in mind for forming their own government?
There are a few differences between a Mormon theocrat and an Islamic theocrat. The most important is that the Mormon theocrat will likely work within established institutions of government to achieve his ends. Violent Mormon revolution is unlikely. The second is that Mormons are such a small minority everywhere except in the population-challenged states of the West like Utah and Idaho that they pose a relatively small threat even in the unlikely event that they should get restive. Finally, Mormonism no longer advocates conflict and agitation the way it used to. Even in the days when Mormons battled with the 'Gentile' mobs, Mormon violence never reached the status of a general imperative.
Some Mormons do cooperate with likeminded right-wing Christians to achieve a more fundamentalist Christian nation. The LDS Chiurch itself has poured millions of dollars into fighting against the cause of women's rights and gay rights. Earlier than this, prominent Latter-day Saints (like former LDS Church president Ezra Taft Benson) were among the most fearful of the phantoms of communism in this country. They basically have an apocalytic world view in which they anticipate the end of the United States and their own role in saving the world. These beliefs make them very motivated to push their own political agenda now.
Update: Since Daniel Peterson brought up this post on FAIR, I decided to revisit it to clarify the language and remove certain unfelicitous imprecisions. Dan believes that I have accused him of being an "aspiring Mormon theocrat who finds inspiration in the Islamic Republic of Iran and in the former Taliban." I have no idea whether Dan is an "aspiring Mormon theocrat" or that he does find such inspiration in these groups. Neither did I accuse him of such.
Numerous threads at FARMS provide evidence of the rancor that has arisen between them. Oddly, the subject about which most of this ill will exists is Islam, not Mormonism. Peterson, a professional Islamicist, is understandably sympathetic toward and protective of the culure of his expertise. Kevin Graham, although not an expert, is a quick study and has made a number of excellent points which are critical of Islam.
Mormons fall on different sides of political issues that touch on Islam, as the Peterson/Graham debate illustrates. Still, I think there are reasons why some informed LDS people sympathize with elements of fundamentalist Islam. I think one of these reasons can be encapsulated in the word theocracy.
A few nations like Iran have succeeded in establishing Islamic regimes that reflect the strict values established in the Koran. While most Americans distrust these governments and abhor the terrorist acts supported by them, there is a certain blindness to the role religion has played in this matrix of theocracy and violence. Why the blindness on the role of religion? I believe that one reason is because on a certain level some Christians and Mormons abhor the violence while envying the limited success of theocracy in shaping the lives of the peoples of these countries according to the precepts of highly conservative religious minorities.
The Mormon marriage with American government was once viewed as partial and ideally temporary. God revealed to Joseph Smith the Lord's tolerance of the Church 'befriending' constitutional government in the United States, but at the same time Joseph Smith had himself anointed king of the kingdom of God on earth--this as he was beginning to mount his campaign for the U.S. presidency. Joseph may not have seen the contradiction between establishing theocracy and participating in American democracy, but few Americans today could stomach a presidential candidate who engineered his own kingship in a shadow world government scheme.
Oddly, Mormonism, it would seem, is a belief system that has continued to produce would-be American monarchs. James Strang, leader of a Mormon schismatic group in the early post-Smith years, fashioned himself as the theocratic monarch of Beaver Island, Michigan. In more recent years, a Mormon convert from Greek Orthodox Christianity--Alex Joseph--began to practice polygyny and proclaimed himself a monarch in Southern Utah. These men did not remain members of the LDS Church, but they were inspired by the example of Joseph Smith.
Is it possible that some Mormons envy elements of Islamic theocracy? I would say yes, but I doubt that any prominent LDS person would openly espouse such views. Some Mormons believe that they will rescue the Constitution of the United States from grave danger, although, as in the case of many prophecies, they are short on specifics. Yet, one should not confuse their view of saving the US Constitution with upholding American government in its current form. Sure, some Mormons who put stock in this prophecy believe exactly that, but some also see the US Constitution as but a precursor to the millennial government by the sovereign Christ.
How do some of these Mormons envision their rescue the of Constitution and ushering in of God's kingdom? Simply put, their objective is to peacefully transform our country's laws and institutions to conform to their vision of the kingdom of God. In defensive terms, this means protecting our country from legalizing sin, and in an assertive fashion this means legislating against sin. It also means fighting the atheists and secularists who seem to them to want to take God out of government. Indeed, it means refashioning society through legal means to conform to a Christian-Mormon ideal.
Wouldn't you think that these folks have some plan in mind for forming their own government?
There are a few differences between a Mormon theocrat and an Islamic theocrat. The most important is that the Mormon theocrat will likely work within established institutions of government to achieve his ends. Violent Mormon revolution is unlikely. The second is that Mormons are such a small minority everywhere except in the population-challenged states of the West like Utah and Idaho that they pose a relatively small threat even in the unlikely event that they should get restive. Finally, Mormonism no longer advocates conflict and agitation the way it used to. Even in the days when Mormons battled with the 'Gentile' mobs, Mormon violence never reached the status of a general imperative.
Some Mormons do cooperate with likeminded right-wing Christians to achieve a more fundamentalist Christian nation. The LDS Chiurch itself has poured millions of dollars into fighting against the cause of women's rights and gay rights. Earlier than this, prominent Latter-day Saints (like former LDS Church president Ezra Taft Benson) were among the most fearful of the phantoms of communism in this country. They basically have an apocalytic world view in which they anticipate the end of the United States and their own role in saving the world. These beliefs make them very motivated to push their own political agenda now.
Update: Since Daniel Peterson brought up this post on FAIR, I decided to revisit it to clarify the language and remove certain unfelicitous imprecisions. Dan believes that I have accused him of being an "aspiring Mormon theocrat who finds inspiration in the Islamic Republic of Iran and in the former Taliban." I have no idea whether Dan is an "aspiring Mormon theocrat" or that he does find such inspiration in these groups. Neither did I accuse him of such.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
"BYU is an Auschwitz of the mind." --D. Michael Quinn
I spent far too many years at BYU, something which may partially explain my anger with the LDS Church. In my many years at BYU, I had some fine experiences, and a few that convinced me something is indeed rotten in Denmark. First, I was fortunate to have Hugh Nibley as a teacher. Regardless of what you may think of Dr. Nibley, the man was a genius. He may have been 'off' about many things, but he was off in that way that only the brilliant are capable of. We may disagree utterly with his methodology and conclusions, but we ought not to gainsay his intelligence.
Hugh Nibley described BYU best when he shared his vision of hell. "Hell is like Disneyland," he said, "filled with a bunch of nicely dressed Mormons telling you where to sit and when to laugh." I think that really sums up BYU nicely. BYU and Disneyland do have much in common. Both institutions are dedicated to the appearance of learning without the cultivation of critical thinking skills. Both strive to affect a sentimental emotional response that is carefully cultivated in the maintenance of an illusory image.
For BYU, it isn't just the dress code, or the Honor Code. The truth of the lie is located somewhere in the conjunction of many different restrictions and requirements that coalesce in the creation of an artificial Zion for public consumption. Where Disney offers an artificial utopia of mind-numbing entertainment, BYU offers the illusion of an educational Zion. In reality, Disney is devoted to a Brave New World of uncritical consumers, and BYU suffers from nearly the same malady, except in this case the institution equates unthinking obedience with true education. At BYU, integrity is the obligation of the individual and part of his or her sacrifice to the institution. The institution, on the other hand, takes no other commitment as more important than the insuring of students' continuing belief in the truth of Mormonism.
What makes such a pleasant place so odious?
1) Independent journalism has been harassed and effectively wiped from the community.
2) Academic freedom is not observed, or it is so severely limited as not to qualify for its own name.
3) Students have been required to write personal statements of loyalty to the university which smack of similar Nazi practices.
4) Students voluntarily police professors, holding them to a standard of adherence to Church commandments that curtails the professors' ability to cover their subject material in full.
5) Non-Mormons are not sought as permanent employees unless they are uniquely prestigious.
6) Mormon employees must qualify for a temple recommend to maintain their jobs, which also entails that they remit 10% of their income to the LDS Church.
7) The university acts as the intellectual attack dog and support for extreme conservative causes that promote inequality and the limitation of civil rights for certain groups.
8) The apologetic organization FARMS has been drawn under the BYU banner, thus compromising scholarly credibility for doctrinaire and polemical ends.
Hugh Nibley described BYU best when he shared his vision of hell. "Hell is like Disneyland," he said, "filled with a bunch of nicely dressed Mormons telling you where to sit and when to laugh." I think that really sums up BYU nicely. BYU and Disneyland do have much in common. Both institutions are dedicated to the appearance of learning without the cultivation of critical thinking skills. Both strive to affect a sentimental emotional response that is carefully cultivated in the maintenance of an illusory image.
For BYU, it isn't just the dress code, or the Honor Code. The truth of the lie is located somewhere in the conjunction of many different restrictions and requirements that coalesce in the creation of an artificial Zion for public consumption. Where Disney offers an artificial utopia of mind-numbing entertainment, BYU offers the illusion of an educational Zion. In reality, Disney is devoted to a Brave New World of uncritical consumers, and BYU suffers from nearly the same malady, except in this case the institution equates unthinking obedience with true education. At BYU, integrity is the obligation of the individual and part of his or her sacrifice to the institution. The institution, on the other hand, takes no other commitment as more important than the insuring of students' continuing belief in the truth of Mormonism.
What makes such a pleasant place so odious?
1) Independent journalism has been harassed and effectively wiped from the community.
2) Academic freedom is not observed, or it is so severely limited as not to qualify for its own name.
3) Students have been required to write personal statements of loyalty to the university which smack of similar Nazi practices.
4) Students voluntarily police professors, holding them to a standard of adherence to Church commandments that curtails the professors' ability to cover their subject material in full.
5) Non-Mormons are not sought as permanent employees unless they are uniquely prestigious.
6) Mormon employees must qualify for a temple recommend to maintain their jobs, which also entails that they remit 10% of their income to the LDS Church.
7) The university acts as the intellectual attack dog and support for extreme conservative causes that promote inequality and the limitation of civil rights for certain groups.
8) The apologetic organization FARMS has been drawn under the BYU banner, thus compromising scholarly credibility for doctrinaire and polemical ends.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Lingering LDS racism: one example
Some time ago a little web-essay entitled, "Who are the Signaturi", came to my attention. It is a delightful little piece (gag) that characterizes Mormon intellectuals in a very unflattering fashion. In the process of writing a piece for my blog, I revisited this thing.
In my re-reading of it I stumbled across an idea that offers one of the clearest examples of lingering racism in the LDS Church. Redelfs has a list of characteristics of people he calls the Signaturi. Number nine on that list is the one I want you to consider:
"9) Generally, they think the ban on blacks holding the Priesthood, which the Lord lifted in 1978, was the result not of God's law and revelation but culturally induced racial prejudice and bigotry on the part of the prophets and apostles."
There you have it, folks. In the enlightened view of Mr. Redelfs, the "Signaturi" erroneously attribute the ban on blacks holding the priesthood to the weakness of men, when it is clearly, at least clearly to Mr. Redelfs, the case that God was behind the whole thing. Case closed.
Never have I been more proud to be numbered among the Signaturi. I want no part in the company or sympathy of those who think that God is a respecter of persons, and that the gospel is not a free gift to all, "whether black or white."
Addendum: I have been informed that it was BYU professor and Mormon apologist William Hamblin who coined the term 'Signaturi'.
In my re-reading of it I stumbled across an idea that offers one of the clearest examples of lingering racism in the LDS Church. Redelfs has a list of characteristics of people he calls the Signaturi. Number nine on that list is the one I want you to consider:
"9) Generally, they think the ban on blacks holding the Priesthood, which the Lord lifted in 1978, was the result not of God's law and revelation but culturally induced racial prejudice and bigotry on the part of the prophets and apostles."
There you have it, folks. In the enlightened view of Mr. Redelfs, the "Signaturi" erroneously attribute the ban on blacks holding the priesthood to the weakness of men, when it is clearly, at least clearly to Mr. Redelfs, the case that God was behind the whole thing. Case closed.
Never have I been more proud to be numbered among the Signaturi. I want no part in the company or sympathy of those who think that God is a respecter of persons, and that the gospel is not a free gift to all, "whether black or white."
Addendum: I have been informed that it was BYU professor and Mormon apologist William Hamblin who coined the term 'Signaturi'.
Gnostics: the Ancient Signaturi
Most of today's closet LDS intellectuals have something in common with the ancient Gnostics. No, they don't generally share a dizzyingly complex cosmogony, write their own scriptures, or think of the OT God as an inferior being. Like the ancient Gnostics they exist within the LDS Church and find themselves at odds with it.
The ancient Gnostics were kind of arrogant about their self-perceived superiority. Or, at least, this is how the Church Fathers like to portray them. From a patristic perspective, these folks were looking down their noses at the average member of the Church, because these average types didn't possess the secret doctrines and interpretations of scripture that marked out the enlightened Gnostic.
Indeed, the some Gnostics (it can be dangerous to generalize too much) thought that they alone had the divine spark that marked them out as worthy of salvation. Most everyone else was simply not quite so bright. Now, I do think that the Signaturi (the Mormon intellectuals) of today can be arrogant. My modest knowledge of Church history and World history sometimes has me metaphorically clucking my tongue at some of the ignorance I encounter in Church.
If anything, however, modern Mormon intellectuals are haunted by that sinking feeling that they are out of step. After all, the leadership of the Church likes to make people who see things a little differently feel that way. The very act of picking up an unofficial Mormon magazine has been stigmatized over the pulpit by an apostle of the Church. Then one sees scholars being excommunicated or disfellowshiped because of their research. Someone like Michael Quinn, a historian who had a strong testimony and whose work explicitly avowed allegiance to the leaders of the Church, gets excommunicated as part of a small purge of Mormon scholars and intellectuals. Another apostle identifies intellectuals as one of the three great threats to the Church.
Since it is apparent that freedom of speech has little place in modern LDS Mormonism, I think it is necessary to do what many ancient Gnostics did in order to survive--go underground. What does this mean? It means that you essentially have to keep your mouth shut about your real thoughts to your fellow members and local leaders.
The early Church Fathers who wrote against the Gnostics were frustrated because they 'masqueraded' as regular Church members. Given the efforts of these Fathers to root out Gnostics and Gnostic teachings from the Church, one can understand why they needed the disguise. The situation for them was something like this. Others were defining with greater strictness what it Christianity should mean for everyone. These others were not the approved Church leaders in the LDS sense. They were self-appointed rhetorical bullies.
Unfortunately, such bullies exist in the LDS Church today, and a few of them were and are numbered among the Lord's servants. Here are some names: Elder Bruce R. McConkie, Elder Mark E. Peterson, Elder Boyd K. Packer, and, sadly, Elder Dallin H. Oaks. I say sadly on the last one because I generally really like Elder Oaks, but his positions on unofficial LDS publications and the historicity of the Book of Mormon are narrow and unforgiving. Still, I am not aware that he has personally initiated any disciplinary action against scholars like Elder Packer has.
With the power of the LDS Church arrayed against intellectuals (i.e. Signaturi), one can either get out or go 'Gnostic' (and I think of this in terms of being underground and in a sense adversarial). Now, the leaders of the Church paint those who differ in opinion with them as apostates, since they take 'authority' as the center of their Gospel creed. The important thing, in their minds, is not so much the independent truth value of an idea as its origin and function. If a truth does not 1) serve the purposes of the LDS Church as the leadership define it, 2) originate from them or one of their various organs, 3) serve to paint the Church and its claims in unmitigatedly rosy fashion, then it is not 'truth' by their definition.
Scholars who discover truths that are not convenient to the Church quickly learn that these truths are not very valuable in the minds of those who run it. The fact that Joseph Smith received the Mechezidek priesthood authority from God's voice and not at the hands of Peter, James, and John is one such inconvenient truth. After all, the idea of resurrected beings laying their physical hands on Joseph Smith's head to give him these keys and authority works well when the 'hands-on' method is the one employed today. Problem is, there is no real good evidence for the claim that hands were used until years after the events transpired.
Publishing or delivering a paper that delves into the actual historical development of priesthood authority and claims is the kind of thing that lands one in a disciplinary council very quickly. Grant Palmer was disfellowshiped for his book which contains a chapter on the subject.
So what is one to do? Publish and perish (in LDS terms) or be silent and perish (in psychological terms). Not the best options. But what are you going to do?
The ancient Gnostics were kind of arrogant about their self-perceived superiority. Or, at least, this is how the Church Fathers like to portray them. From a patristic perspective, these folks were looking down their noses at the average member of the Church, because these average types didn't possess the secret doctrines and interpretations of scripture that marked out the enlightened Gnostic.
Indeed, the some Gnostics (it can be dangerous to generalize too much) thought that they alone had the divine spark that marked them out as worthy of salvation. Most everyone else was simply not quite so bright. Now, I do think that the Signaturi (the Mormon intellectuals) of today can be arrogant. My modest knowledge of Church history and World history sometimes has me metaphorically clucking my tongue at some of the ignorance I encounter in Church.
If anything, however, modern Mormon intellectuals are haunted by that sinking feeling that they are out of step. After all, the leadership of the Church likes to make people who see things a little differently feel that way. The very act of picking up an unofficial Mormon magazine has been stigmatized over the pulpit by an apostle of the Church. Then one sees scholars being excommunicated or disfellowshiped because of their research. Someone like Michael Quinn, a historian who had a strong testimony and whose work explicitly avowed allegiance to the leaders of the Church, gets excommunicated as part of a small purge of Mormon scholars and intellectuals. Another apostle identifies intellectuals as one of the three great threats to the Church.
Since it is apparent that freedom of speech has little place in modern LDS Mormonism, I think it is necessary to do what many ancient Gnostics did in order to survive--go underground. What does this mean? It means that you essentially have to keep your mouth shut about your real thoughts to your fellow members and local leaders.
The early Church Fathers who wrote against the Gnostics were frustrated because they 'masqueraded' as regular Church members. Given the efforts of these Fathers to root out Gnostics and Gnostic teachings from the Church, one can understand why they needed the disguise. The situation for them was something like this. Others were defining with greater strictness what it Christianity should mean for everyone. These others were not the approved Church leaders in the LDS sense. They were self-appointed rhetorical bullies.
Unfortunately, such bullies exist in the LDS Church today, and a few of them were and are numbered among the Lord's servants. Here are some names: Elder Bruce R. McConkie, Elder Mark E. Peterson, Elder Boyd K. Packer, and, sadly, Elder Dallin H. Oaks. I say sadly on the last one because I generally really like Elder Oaks, but his positions on unofficial LDS publications and the historicity of the Book of Mormon are narrow and unforgiving. Still, I am not aware that he has personally initiated any disciplinary action against scholars like Elder Packer has.
With the power of the LDS Church arrayed against intellectuals (i.e. Signaturi), one can either get out or go 'Gnostic' (and I think of this in terms of being underground and in a sense adversarial). Now, the leaders of the Church paint those who differ in opinion with them as apostates, since they take 'authority' as the center of their Gospel creed. The important thing, in their minds, is not so much the independent truth value of an idea as its origin and function. If a truth does not 1) serve the purposes of the LDS Church as the leadership define it, 2) originate from them or one of their various organs, 3) serve to paint the Church and its claims in unmitigatedly rosy fashion, then it is not 'truth' by their definition.
Scholars who discover truths that are not convenient to the Church quickly learn that these truths are not very valuable in the minds of those who run it. The fact that Joseph Smith received the Mechezidek priesthood authority from God's voice and not at the hands of Peter, James, and John is one such inconvenient truth. After all, the idea of resurrected beings laying their physical hands on Joseph Smith's head to give him these keys and authority works well when the 'hands-on' method is the one employed today. Problem is, there is no real good evidence for the claim that hands were used until years after the events transpired.
Publishing or delivering a paper that delves into the actual historical development of priesthood authority and claims is the kind of thing that lands one in a disciplinary council very quickly. Grant Palmer was disfellowshiped for his book which contains a chapter on the subject.
So what is one to do? Publish and perish (in LDS terms) or be silent and perish (in psychological terms). Not the best options. But what are you going to do?
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Mormon Newspeak
Today my wife brought home the "2006 Outline for Sharing Time and the Children's Sacrament Meeting Presentation." Catchy title, huh? It is a fairly bland tribute to the principle that LDS people should not be allowed to think for themselves, since now even Sharing Time for Primary children demands a scripted outine.
And lest the children be led astray by all those ignorant adults with their false doctrines, this fun little booklet provides a doctrinal glossary that comes straight from Elder Packer's greatest hits. We all know what a fun-loving guy Elder Packer is. Here are the items we are not to be in confusion about. I add my comments in square brackets:
Accountability: Accepting responsibility for our actions [because the atonement just ain't gonna cover them].
Agency: The ability to choose and act for one's self. Use the term agency rather than free agency to describe our freedom to choose [because we don't want that freedom to sound too free]. Agency is the term used in the scriptures (see D&C 29:36; Moses 7:32).
Apostacy [one that every child can fully grasp]: A falling away from the gospel of Jesus Christ [as presently constituted in manuals such as this one].
Heavenly Father's Plan: Our Heavenly Father presented the plan of life and salvation in the Grand Council in Heaven. Only one [my emphasis] plan was presented. Jehovah (Jesus Christ) sustained the plan of our Heavenly Father [hopefully with a great deal more enthusiasm than that which I have when I 'sustain' items of business]. Lucifer (the devil, Satan, [el Diablo, ol' Scratch]) attempted to change the plan [damn him to hell anyway].
Jehovah: Jesus Christ, also known as Jehovah [in case you didn't get it the first time], is the God of the Old Testament [thanks to the wonders of non-LDS theology as imported into the LDS faith by James E. Talmage].
These items are marked with an asterisk (*) throughout this outline [whew!].
So there it is. No big deal, right? Sure. But I'll write a little about it for kicks and giggles.
First, free agency has been 'free' agency for some time now. The increasing discomfort of Elder Packer with the idea that anything could be free inspired him to remind his fellow GAs that the scriptures do not use the adjective free in connection with agency, which is more correctly called "moral agency" or simply "agency". Take a look at Brother Spencer J. Condie's article in the September '95 issue of the Ensign. Under the rather telling subtitle "The Price of Agency", Brother Spencer tells us how he was practically administered an Elder Packer smack-down so he would drop this hippie crap about 'free' agency. After all, so he continues and I paraphrase, the scriptures say we are "bought with a price" (1 Cor. 6:19-20). Brother Condie, and you have to love this, showed some real backbone and kept calling agency 'free agency' anyways.
It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside to consider how metaphors of slavery are so easily translated into metaphors of market capitalism in the Global Age. This works well now that we are no longer slaves to human masters, but the wage slaves of multi-national corporations, which simply exercise the rights of human individuals in a legal fiction of imposture that continually strengthens. But, I digress. You see, in Joseph Smith's day, agency was seen in the light of American constitutional democracy. 'Free' in this context had less to do with not being paid, and more to do with the freedoms associated with inalienable rights endowed by the Creator.
These days, however, in the new society of the Temple of Commerce, we are continually reminded by the Temple's moral wing--Commerce Christianity--, which supplies what little moral fiber the amoral system of Capitalism has (at least for the sake of keeping the masses docile), that we are bought and paid for by the Savior. What we are, even in the metaphysical sense, is not free. Agency comes with a high price-tag--complete submission to the right Master.
Sure, there is a certain truth in the metaphor. What bothers me is not the relative usefulness of it. It is instead the pervasiveness of the market metaphor and our inability to interrogate it that gets my dander up. Everyone just takes it for granted that their 'souls' are a commodity like anything else. In Mormon terms you have agency, but that agency is not free. If you exercise it incorrectly, you will lose your job (salvation). Let's face it, people were not calling agency free because they did not value it. They were calling it free because they associated it with freedom. So why change back? Simply to pull ourselves back in line with Joseph Smith's usage? Or is it that we are so stuck on market metaphors that we only associate free with money rather than human rights?
Moving on, I have a much bigger problem with all of this business about 'Our Heavenly Father's Plan.' One thing that continually bugs the living hell out of me is the obviously bogus statement the leaders of the Church make with regard to the primacy of the scriptures. They are wont to say, and I paraphrase, that their every teaching must square with the canon of scripture. This position is patently false, and nowhere more so than in the case of 'The Plan of Our Heavenly Father.'
Here's the deal folks: it ain't scriptural. If you go to Abraham 3:24-26, you read the following:
24 And there stood one among them that was like unto God, and he said unto those who were with him: We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell;
25 And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them;
26 And they who keep their first estate shall be added upon; and they who keep not their first estate shall not have glory in the same kingdom with those who keep their first estate; and they who keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever.
That's the plan. So here's the question: whose plan is it? One who is like unto God, which is, coincidentally, the equivalent of an English translation of the Hebrew name Michael. Setting that tidbit of info aside, what is the likelihood that the author of this passage intended us to read 'God' where he wrote "one who is like unto God. My guess is that he, whoever he is, did not.
Is this person Jesus? Well, Jesus certainly does appear later in the passage as "one...who is like unto the son of Man." Now, I would think that if the 'one who is like unto God' were the same person as the 'one who is like unto the son of Man', the author would not use two entirely different descriptions to refer to him, especially when the lack of names in the passage makes any descriptors crucial for properly differentiating separate identities.
So the first problem is that the plan is definitely not the plan of Heavenly Father. It is likely not even the plan of Jesus Christ. I think the best answer to the problem of the first speaker's identity is Michael. Son of Man is a New Testament title of Jesus. One who is like unto God is really a translation of the Hebrew Michael. Now, at this point the only way I can see that Michael's plan is Heavenly Father's is to side with Brigham Young on the identity of God, which would make God Adam (i.e. Michael). Something tells me the Brethren won't want to go there either.
Our Primary Glossary, the original spark for this blaze of ranting, was very specific about the number of plans presented: "only one plan was presented." Unfortunately for our trusty misreaders of latter-day scripture, the Book of Moses (chapter 4) seems to paint quite a different picture:
1 AND I, the Lord God, spake unto Moses, saying: That Satan, whom thou hast commanded in the name of mine Only Begotten, is the same which was from the beginning, and he came before me, saying—Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.
***
3 Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down;...
The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following among its definitions of plan: 3.a. A formulated or organized method according to which something is to be done; a scheme of action, project, design; the way in which it is proposed to carry out some proceeding. Also in weakened sense: Method, way of proceeding.
Now, I'm not saying that ol' Scratch had a Power-point presentation or a flowchart on a big dry-erase board, but it sounds like he had a plan to me. His plan, which is different from Michael's (sorry, I couldn't help myself), is that he will redeem humankind such that not one soul will be lost. In return, he wants God's honor. Evidently, the guarantee that all souls would 'make it' required that they not have agency, i.e. the ability to choose for themselves. Even if el Diablo's vision was essentially similar to Michael's except for these points: no agency, no loss, and 'all hail Satan!', it was certainly quite different in these few respects. In fact, I would say it was sufficiently different to qualify for the status of a separate plan entirely.
So why call Michael's plan Heavenly Father's Plan? Because it is the plan that God chose for his children, not the one he initiated. A relatively open dialogue seems to have been allowed in the first place to come up with a plan.
Now, if, in the spirit of Elder Packer, we want to be real sticklers about language, neither Moses nor Abraham use the word plan to describe Michael's proposal, Lucifer's tongue wagging, or Jesus' statement of allegiance. Moses uses the phrase plan of salvation to refer to the atonement (6:62). Abraham uses the word plan for the spiritual creation (4:21). The Book of Mormon refers to the "plan of redemption", the "plan of our God", the "plan of salvation", etc. If we want to preserve the context chronology of the scriptures, and not their production chronology, the plan became God's when he adopted it. From that point on it could be called "Heavenly Father's Plan" and not before.
By the way, here we have in the "Plan" narrative one of those many instances in mythology when some crafty character tries to deceive the head god, and pays dearly for it. Other examples include Prometheus, king Numa, and Loki. Satan falls in line with this tradition when he tries to slip the part about humans losing their agency past Hevenly Father. Heavenly Father is just too smart to fall for it. So he chooses Jesus as savior, who essentially says, "I'll have it your way, God." See, even here it is clear that Jesus has no plan. In fact, it seems that just about every major player except Jesus has one.
Why on earth are the Brethren so concerned that there only be one plan, and that that plan come from Heavenly Father? Well, my guess is that they want to reinforce the image of their own authority as emanating from the voice of the prophet alone. No one is to have a plan except the guy at the top, and everyone who knows what's good for him or her is to follow along. The actual scriptural stories present situations that are much less neat. A composite of Moses and Abraham shows that different figures are proposing different plans, and that God is the final decision maker.
Everyone is already exercising the eternal gift of agency in what they are doing (including employing their own initiative) in the Grand Council. Satan exercises his own agency in proposing his plan, but he hopes to rob everyone else of theirs thereby. This is where he goes wrong, not in suggesting something different. What is true, it seems, is that there wasn't anything like a vote. After God decided which plan he was going to adopt, people had the choice to exercise their agency by defecting to Satan or by assenting to the plan God had adopted.
The way I read between the lines of the Church's interpretation is that Satan was wrong in that he said anything and that that anything contradicted God's plan. You might say he was insubordinate. He didn't have a plan. He was just one of those annoying naysayers you see at any bad meeting who keeps anything substantive from getting done by carping at absolutely everything. Jesus had the right idea when he said, "What you said, Boss." This reading fits what we see in the LDS Church today.
There is a plan in Mormonism, and you didn't have any say in it. And guess what, you still don't have any say in it. Once the Gang of Fifteen has adopted it, and has sent it out to the stakes of Zion, your part is to say, "what you said, boss," and then proceed to do it. The worst thing you can do is to discuss openly any other idea for how things are or should be. Then you are consigned to that lowest circle of Mormon hell occupied by Sunstoners, Signaturi, and all other such apostates.
And lest the children be led astray by all those ignorant adults with their false doctrines, this fun little booklet provides a doctrinal glossary that comes straight from Elder Packer's greatest hits. We all know what a fun-loving guy Elder Packer is. Here are the items we are not to be in confusion about. I add my comments in square brackets:
Accountability: Accepting responsibility for our actions [because the atonement just ain't gonna cover them].
Agency: The ability to choose and act for one's self. Use the term agency rather than free agency to describe our freedom to choose [because we don't want that freedom to sound too free]. Agency is the term used in the scriptures (see D&C 29:36; Moses 7:32).
Apostacy [one that every child can fully grasp]: A falling away from the gospel of Jesus Christ [as presently constituted in manuals such as this one].
Heavenly Father's Plan: Our Heavenly Father presented the plan of life and salvation in the Grand Council in Heaven. Only one [my emphasis] plan was presented. Jehovah (Jesus Christ) sustained the plan of our Heavenly Father [hopefully with a great deal more enthusiasm than that which I have when I 'sustain' items of business]. Lucifer (the devil, Satan, [el Diablo, ol' Scratch]) attempted to change the plan [damn him to hell anyway].
Jehovah: Jesus Christ, also known as Jehovah [in case you didn't get it the first time], is the God of the Old Testament [thanks to the wonders of non-LDS theology as imported into the LDS faith by James E. Talmage].
These items are marked with an asterisk (*) throughout this outline [whew!].
So there it is. No big deal, right? Sure. But I'll write a little about it for kicks and giggles.
First, free agency has been 'free' agency for some time now. The increasing discomfort of Elder Packer with the idea that anything could be free inspired him to remind his fellow GAs that the scriptures do not use the adjective free in connection with agency, which is more correctly called "moral agency" or simply "agency". Take a look at Brother Spencer J. Condie's article in the September '95 issue of the Ensign. Under the rather telling subtitle "The Price of Agency", Brother Spencer tells us how he was practically administered an Elder Packer smack-down so he would drop this hippie crap about 'free' agency. After all, so he continues and I paraphrase, the scriptures say we are "bought with a price" (1 Cor. 6:19-20). Brother Condie, and you have to love this, showed some real backbone and kept calling agency 'free agency' anyways.
It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside to consider how metaphors of slavery are so easily translated into metaphors of market capitalism in the Global Age. This works well now that we are no longer slaves to human masters, but the wage slaves of multi-national corporations, which simply exercise the rights of human individuals in a legal fiction of imposture that continually strengthens. But, I digress. You see, in Joseph Smith's day, agency was seen in the light of American constitutional democracy. 'Free' in this context had less to do with not being paid, and more to do with the freedoms associated with inalienable rights endowed by the Creator.
These days, however, in the new society of the Temple of Commerce, we are continually reminded by the Temple's moral wing--Commerce Christianity--, which supplies what little moral fiber the amoral system of Capitalism has (at least for the sake of keeping the masses docile), that we are bought and paid for by the Savior. What we are, even in the metaphysical sense, is not free. Agency comes with a high price-tag--complete submission to the right Master.
Sure, there is a certain truth in the metaphor. What bothers me is not the relative usefulness of it. It is instead the pervasiveness of the market metaphor and our inability to interrogate it that gets my dander up. Everyone just takes it for granted that their 'souls' are a commodity like anything else. In Mormon terms you have agency, but that agency is not free. If you exercise it incorrectly, you will lose your job (salvation). Let's face it, people were not calling agency free because they did not value it. They were calling it free because they associated it with freedom. So why change back? Simply to pull ourselves back in line with Joseph Smith's usage? Or is it that we are so stuck on market metaphors that we only associate free with money rather than human rights?
Moving on, I have a much bigger problem with all of this business about 'Our Heavenly Father's Plan.' One thing that continually bugs the living hell out of me is the obviously bogus statement the leaders of the Church make with regard to the primacy of the scriptures. They are wont to say, and I paraphrase, that their every teaching must square with the canon of scripture. This position is patently false, and nowhere more so than in the case of 'The Plan of Our Heavenly Father.'
Here's the deal folks: it ain't scriptural. If you go to Abraham 3:24-26, you read the following:
24 And there stood one among them that was like unto God, and he said unto those who were with him: We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell;
25 And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them;
26 And they who keep their first estate shall be added upon; and they who keep not their first estate shall not have glory in the same kingdom with those who keep their first estate; and they who keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever.
That's the plan. So here's the question: whose plan is it? One who is like unto God, which is, coincidentally, the equivalent of an English translation of the Hebrew name Michael. Setting that tidbit of info aside, what is the likelihood that the author of this passage intended us to read 'God' where he wrote "one who is like unto God. My guess is that he, whoever he is, did not.
Is this person Jesus? Well, Jesus certainly does appear later in the passage as "one...who is like unto the son of Man." Now, I would think that if the 'one who is like unto God' were the same person as the 'one who is like unto the son of Man', the author would not use two entirely different descriptions to refer to him, especially when the lack of names in the passage makes any descriptors crucial for properly differentiating separate identities.
So the first problem is that the plan is definitely not the plan of Heavenly Father. It is likely not even the plan of Jesus Christ. I think the best answer to the problem of the first speaker's identity is Michael. Son of Man is a New Testament title of Jesus. One who is like unto God is really a translation of the Hebrew Michael. Now, at this point the only way I can see that Michael's plan is Heavenly Father's is to side with Brigham Young on the identity of God, which would make God Adam (i.e. Michael). Something tells me the Brethren won't want to go there either.
Our Primary Glossary, the original spark for this blaze of ranting, was very specific about the number of plans presented: "only one plan was presented." Unfortunately for our trusty misreaders of latter-day scripture, the Book of Moses (chapter 4) seems to paint quite a different picture:
1 AND I, the Lord God, spake unto Moses, saying: That Satan, whom thou hast commanded in the name of mine Only Begotten, is the same which was from the beginning, and he came before me, saying—Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.
***
3 Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down;...
The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following among its definitions of plan: 3.a. A formulated or organized method according to which something is to be done; a scheme of action, project, design; the way in which it is proposed to carry out some proceeding. Also in weakened sense: Method, way of proceeding.
Now, I'm not saying that ol' Scratch had a Power-point presentation or a flowchart on a big dry-erase board, but it sounds like he had a plan to me. His plan, which is different from Michael's (sorry, I couldn't help myself), is that he will redeem humankind such that not one soul will be lost. In return, he wants God's honor. Evidently, the guarantee that all souls would 'make it' required that they not have agency, i.e. the ability to choose for themselves. Even if el Diablo's vision was essentially similar to Michael's except for these points: no agency, no loss, and 'all hail Satan!', it was certainly quite different in these few respects. In fact, I would say it was sufficiently different to qualify for the status of a separate plan entirely.
So why call Michael's plan Heavenly Father's Plan? Because it is the plan that God chose for his children, not the one he initiated. A relatively open dialogue seems to have been allowed in the first place to come up with a plan.
Now, if, in the spirit of Elder Packer, we want to be real sticklers about language, neither Moses nor Abraham use the word plan to describe Michael's proposal, Lucifer's tongue wagging, or Jesus' statement of allegiance. Moses uses the phrase plan of salvation to refer to the atonement (6:62). Abraham uses the word plan for the spiritual creation (4:21). The Book of Mormon refers to the "plan of redemption", the "plan of our God", the "plan of salvation", etc. If we want to preserve the context chronology of the scriptures, and not their production chronology, the plan became God's when he adopted it. From that point on it could be called "Heavenly Father's Plan" and not before.
By the way, here we have in the "Plan" narrative one of those many instances in mythology when some crafty character tries to deceive the head god, and pays dearly for it. Other examples include Prometheus, king Numa, and Loki. Satan falls in line with this tradition when he tries to slip the part about humans losing their agency past Hevenly Father. Heavenly Father is just too smart to fall for it. So he chooses Jesus as savior, who essentially says, "I'll have it your way, God." See, even here it is clear that Jesus has no plan. In fact, it seems that just about every major player except Jesus has one.
Why on earth are the Brethren so concerned that there only be one plan, and that that plan come from Heavenly Father? Well, my guess is that they want to reinforce the image of their own authority as emanating from the voice of the prophet alone. No one is to have a plan except the guy at the top, and everyone who knows what's good for him or her is to follow along. The actual scriptural stories present situations that are much less neat. A composite of Moses and Abraham shows that different figures are proposing different plans, and that God is the final decision maker.
Everyone is already exercising the eternal gift of agency in what they are doing (including employing their own initiative) in the Grand Council. Satan exercises his own agency in proposing his plan, but he hopes to rob everyone else of theirs thereby. This is where he goes wrong, not in suggesting something different. What is true, it seems, is that there wasn't anything like a vote. After God decided which plan he was going to adopt, people had the choice to exercise their agency by defecting to Satan or by assenting to the plan God had adopted.
The way I read between the lines of the Church's interpretation is that Satan was wrong in that he said anything and that that anything contradicted God's plan. You might say he was insubordinate. He didn't have a plan. He was just one of those annoying naysayers you see at any bad meeting who keeps anything substantive from getting done by carping at absolutely everything. Jesus had the right idea when he said, "What you said, Boss." This reading fits what we see in the LDS Church today.
There is a plan in Mormonism, and you didn't have any say in it. And guess what, you still don't have any say in it. Once the Gang of Fifteen has adopted it, and has sent it out to the stakes of Zion, your part is to say, "what you said, boss," and then proceed to do it. The worst thing you can do is to discuss openly any other idea for how things are or should be. Then you are consigned to that lowest circle of Mormon hell occupied by Sunstoners, Signaturi, and all other such apostates.
Friday, March 10, 2006
The deadly power of SILENCE
A friend of mine has recently suggested that silence plays a largely unrecognized, but powerful, role in Mormonism. He hopes to devote future research and writing to the subject, but in the meantime I will share some of my thoughts on it.
Joseph Smith looked to the example of Jesus when he instructed others to hold special experiences close to their chests. The restoration of the Aaronic priesthood through the ministration of John the Baptist was largely unknown until 1835--six years after the event occurred. Why? Because Joseph Smith seems to have instructed Oliver Cowdery to keep quiet about it. Even David Whitmer, a close relative of Cowdery's by marriage, did not learn of the event until 1835. This silence led to doubts that the event ever happened.
Silence played a vital role in one of the most controversial aspects of early Mormon history--polygamy. Joseph Smith started engaging in polygynous relationships in 1832, i.e. only a couple of years after the Church was organized. Yet the fact that Joseph practiced polygamy was kept secret from so many, that even after his death many of the saints did not know. Those who formed the Reorganized Church were thus able to convince their members that Brigham Young was responsible for the practice and that Joseph had never engaged in it at all.
The endowment ritual was one means Joseph used to keep his polygamous relationships silent. Joseph endowed those people who knew about his plural wives, and these people were thereby placed under oaths of secrecy and loyalty to the kingdom of God, whose earthly head was Joseph Smith. I am not the first person to propose such a thing, and it is not proposed here for the purpose of darkening Joseph's reputation. I think Joseph did believe that he was religiously justified in his practice of plural marriage, and I think that the steps he took to protect himself and his close friends were religiously motivated as well.
The Reorganized Church, now the Community of Christ, is one of the most easily recognizable results of Joseph's use of silence. It is clear that until Brigham had solid control of his followers in the West very few people knew much of what was going on in the inner circles of the Mormon elite. Many remained unaware of some things thereafter too, and some do to this day (in spite of the availability of great historical material). I was accused of spouting "anti-Mormon garbage" when I informed someone on a discussion board that the early prophets of Mormonism had themselves crowned king of the kingdom of God on earth.
The Reorganized Church kept its own silence. As mentioned earlier, they conspired to keep their membership in the dark about Joseph's plural marriages. When one of Joseph's own sons, David, went out west to do missionary work among the 'Brighamites', the discovery that his mother and friends had lied to him about his father's marital practices may have been a contributing factor in his subsequent mental illness.
Silence in Mormonism has not only been a tool for exercising control and asserting privilege, it has also led to major doctrinal changes. It was the desire to keep certain doctrines hidden from the world that led to the abandonment of Adam-God and the belief that polygamy was a requirement for exaltation. The irony is that the men who kept silence on these matters believed them and held them sacred. Thinking it necessary to keep their silence about matters too sacred for general consumption, these men were responsible for the bulk of the Church and its leadership forgetting these teachings. Thus Bruce R. McConkie was able to deny their existence for years.
It was the temple ritual that spread the veil of silence ever broader among the rank and file members of the LDS Church. Through the temple initiation of thousands of Mormons, the injunction to keep quiet about certain things became a regular feature of LDS worship. It was also the means to creating a kind of spiritual class system that is largely unrecognized but surely present in the Church. Certain Church offices and responsibilities are only entrusted to those who share in the sacred temple ritual. The unitiated are eligible for lesser 'callings' and a lesser salvation. Only through initiation into ritual silence can one qualify for all of the privileges and blessings of the kingdom of God.
Since the leaders of Mormonism, even on the local level, are instructed in the ways of Mormon silence, the result is a society in which communication on many matters is conducted on a 'need to know' basis. And the truth is, very people are deemed to need to know. These few are usually restricted to the ward council and the presidencies of the priesthood quorums and various auxiliaries. There is nothing sinister about this limitation of communication, but by its very nature it leaves most ward members in the dark about much of what is happening in the local congregation.
One important reason for silence among the local leadership is that members share intimate personal information with these leaders. The Church advises or commands them to discuss personal sins with the bishop and his councilors. If the bishop were not enjoined to keep silence, such personal information would become common knowledge. Unfortunately, it sometimes still does. When this happens, sensitive personal information becomes part of a ward gossip underground that emanates from the ward council and auxiliary leaders. Understandably, silence is sometimes not maintained. Loose lips carry the information in the form of whispers through the social cliques that form in any ward.
On a 'macro' level, the top leaders of the Church use commandments of silence to keep certain matters out of general Church discussion and publication. To paraphrase President Hinckley's statment on Larry King, "the members can believe whatever they want, so long as they don't publish." A handful of LDS scholars and BYU professors have found themselves disciplined or fired because they did speak openly or publish views about sensitive issues regarding Church history and doctrine. These actions were coordinated from the top, and one of them at least involved the use of long past sexual transgressions as a means of excommunicating a scholar in the present (Simon Southerton). The power of silence is evident in how the Church treats scholars. They both enjoin scholars to avoid sensitive issues, and they discipline those who do not comply.
This enforced silence on doctrinal matters is one of the factors that has led to the stultification of discussion on the local level. Members are either increasingly ill informed about the history and doctrines of Mormonism, a fact that would not be surprising given the dismal state of Church educational materials, or they choose not to engage in discussions that go beyond the surface level, or worse, beyond the oversimplified and misleading spiritual propaganda that in Church educational materials substitutes for real information. People now say very little in an LDS chapel that even warrants a listen. It is usually the same pablum repeated ad nauseam in a liturgical fashion.
The word 'liturgical' brings to mind the temple again. The temple is a location of rich symbolism and mythological narrative. Yet over the years it has undergone a number of changes, one being the striking removal of ritual actions and words. The culture of silence in Mormonism prevents people from discussing the temple at any length in a public forum, or even a Church-only forum, since LDS folk generally believe that everything connected to the ritual is too sacred to discuss outside of the walls of the House of the Lord. In reality, the ritual injunctions against public speech or action related to the temple involve direct reference to the signs and tokens imparted to the initiate.
Unfortunately, silence on these few aspects of the ritual has expanded to cover almost all aspects of the endowment. Furthermore, there is really no mechanism for fostering discussion of the endowment within the temple either. There is no helpful literature in which aspects of the endowment are discussed. In a sense there is a distinct advantage to this. It allows the temple to be uniquely yours, and not subject to the tyranny of outside opinion. As Mormons are generally conditioned to look to authority figures for interpretations of scripture and guidance in practice, surely the temple would be defined by the General Authorities were it not for the fact that no one discusses it.
There are some real downsides to this silence, however. The first, and one of the most important, is that members are so poorly prepared for the temple that their first experience sometimes comes as a real unpleasant shock. In not a few cases a person's first experience with the temple is so jarring, that the person never returns to the temple, or may even leave the LDS Church over it. Another downside is that people never really mentally or emotionally engage in the temple ritual because they have almost no means of contextualizing it within the rest of their religious lives. Most references to the temple ritual in LDS literature are by allusion alone. If a person is not a keen student, and an avid, talented reader of Church literature, that person may miss out on the only discourse on the endowment in the LDS world.
The result is waning temple activity. The Church has tried to address this problem by building more temples, editing unpopular elements out of the endowment, and encouraging its members to attend on a regular basis. In my opinion all of these efforts were largely in vain. The real problem is silence. Without meaningful discussion and writing about the temple, the temple experience remains isolated from the rest of the Mormon worship experience. The symbols become empty, the drama becomes boring, and the initiates participate less and less. Only the few who serendipitously learn to engage in thoughtful, prayerful meditation in the temple continue to find it meaningful and enjoyable. In a society like ours, where meditation is almost unheard of, few people ever gain that kind of appreciation for temple service.
I have a couple of ideas that I think would improve the temple experience and increase temple attendance. 1) Talk about the temple more and in greater detail. One can maintain silence on the signs and tokens and still discuss much of what goes on in the temple. 2) Foster publications which discuss the temple. Do not place the imprimature of authority on the publications. Allow the writers wide berth to discuss and speculate so long as they do not reveal the elements that one covenants to keep secret. 3) Make space for libraries and lecture rooms in the temples. Allow members to go to special places within the temple where they can study and discuss their thoughts and insights. Sponsor lectures where people come to share their research on the temple. Provide libraries where books on sacred subjects are placed at the disposal of the endowed. 4) Offer temple preparation courses that provide substantive information about the temple experience. If people are sufficiently prepared, they will be less shocked when they participate in the actual ceremony.
The culture of silence has become so pervasive in Mormonism that it has choked out much substantive discourse and has alienated members from one another. Strong emphasis on elementary principles expressed in an attitude of strict orthodoxy increases the problem dramatically. The temple, althought one of the richest loci for symbolic expression in the LDS Church, is quarantined from the rest of the Mormon experience. The end result is that members are losing enthusiasm, leaving the Church in greater numbers, and abandoning temple service. The LDS Church could reverse these trends if it took a more open, and liberal stance toward discussion, scholarship, and temple cult.
Joseph Smith looked to the example of Jesus when he instructed others to hold special experiences close to their chests. The restoration of the Aaronic priesthood through the ministration of John the Baptist was largely unknown until 1835--six years after the event occurred. Why? Because Joseph Smith seems to have instructed Oliver Cowdery to keep quiet about it. Even David Whitmer, a close relative of Cowdery's by marriage, did not learn of the event until 1835. This silence led to doubts that the event ever happened.
Silence played a vital role in one of the most controversial aspects of early Mormon history--polygamy. Joseph Smith started engaging in polygynous relationships in 1832, i.e. only a couple of years after the Church was organized. Yet the fact that Joseph practiced polygamy was kept secret from so many, that even after his death many of the saints did not know. Those who formed the Reorganized Church were thus able to convince their members that Brigham Young was responsible for the practice and that Joseph had never engaged in it at all.
The endowment ritual was one means Joseph used to keep his polygamous relationships silent. Joseph endowed those people who knew about his plural wives, and these people were thereby placed under oaths of secrecy and loyalty to the kingdom of God, whose earthly head was Joseph Smith. I am not the first person to propose such a thing, and it is not proposed here for the purpose of darkening Joseph's reputation. I think Joseph did believe that he was religiously justified in his practice of plural marriage, and I think that the steps he took to protect himself and his close friends were religiously motivated as well.
The Reorganized Church, now the Community of Christ, is one of the most easily recognizable results of Joseph's use of silence. It is clear that until Brigham had solid control of his followers in the West very few people knew much of what was going on in the inner circles of the Mormon elite. Many remained unaware of some things thereafter too, and some do to this day (in spite of the availability of great historical material). I was accused of spouting "anti-Mormon garbage" when I informed someone on a discussion board that the early prophets of Mormonism had themselves crowned king of the kingdom of God on earth.
The Reorganized Church kept its own silence. As mentioned earlier, they conspired to keep their membership in the dark about Joseph's plural marriages. When one of Joseph's own sons, David, went out west to do missionary work among the 'Brighamites', the discovery that his mother and friends had lied to him about his father's marital practices may have been a contributing factor in his subsequent mental illness.
Silence in Mormonism has not only been a tool for exercising control and asserting privilege, it has also led to major doctrinal changes. It was the desire to keep certain doctrines hidden from the world that led to the abandonment of Adam-God and the belief that polygamy was a requirement for exaltation. The irony is that the men who kept silence on these matters believed them and held them sacred. Thinking it necessary to keep their silence about matters too sacred for general consumption, these men were responsible for the bulk of the Church and its leadership forgetting these teachings. Thus Bruce R. McConkie was able to deny their existence for years.
It was the temple ritual that spread the veil of silence ever broader among the rank and file members of the LDS Church. Through the temple initiation of thousands of Mormons, the injunction to keep quiet about certain things became a regular feature of LDS worship. It was also the means to creating a kind of spiritual class system that is largely unrecognized but surely present in the Church. Certain Church offices and responsibilities are only entrusted to those who share in the sacred temple ritual. The unitiated are eligible for lesser 'callings' and a lesser salvation. Only through initiation into ritual silence can one qualify for all of the privileges and blessings of the kingdom of God.
Since the leaders of Mormonism, even on the local level, are instructed in the ways of Mormon silence, the result is a society in which communication on many matters is conducted on a 'need to know' basis. And the truth is, very people are deemed to need to know. These few are usually restricted to the ward council and the presidencies of the priesthood quorums and various auxiliaries. There is nothing sinister about this limitation of communication, but by its very nature it leaves most ward members in the dark about much of what is happening in the local congregation.
One important reason for silence among the local leadership is that members share intimate personal information with these leaders. The Church advises or commands them to discuss personal sins with the bishop and his councilors. If the bishop were not enjoined to keep silence, such personal information would become common knowledge. Unfortunately, it sometimes still does. When this happens, sensitive personal information becomes part of a ward gossip underground that emanates from the ward council and auxiliary leaders. Understandably, silence is sometimes not maintained. Loose lips carry the information in the form of whispers through the social cliques that form in any ward.
On a 'macro' level, the top leaders of the Church use commandments of silence to keep certain matters out of general Church discussion and publication. To paraphrase President Hinckley's statment on Larry King, "the members can believe whatever they want, so long as they don't publish." A handful of LDS scholars and BYU professors have found themselves disciplined or fired because they did speak openly or publish views about sensitive issues regarding Church history and doctrine. These actions were coordinated from the top, and one of them at least involved the use of long past sexual transgressions as a means of excommunicating a scholar in the present (Simon Southerton). The power of silence is evident in how the Church treats scholars. They both enjoin scholars to avoid sensitive issues, and they discipline those who do not comply.
This enforced silence on doctrinal matters is one of the factors that has led to the stultification of discussion on the local level. Members are either increasingly ill informed about the history and doctrines of Mormonism, a fact that would not be surprising given the dismal state of Church educational materials, or they choose not to engage in discussions that go beyond the surface level, or worse, beyond the oversimplified and misleading spiritual propaganda that in Church educational materials substitutes for real information. People now say very little in an LDS chapel that even warrants a listen. It is usually the same pablum repeated ad nauseam in a liturgical fashion.
The word 'liturgical' brings to mind the temple again. The temple is a location of rich symbolism and mythological narrative. Yet over the years it has undergone a number of changes, one being the striking removal of ritual actions and words. The culture of silence in Mormonism prevents people from discussing the temple at any length in a public forum, or even a Church-only forum, since LDS folk generally believe that everything connected to the ritual is too sacred to discuss outside of the walls of the House of the Lord. In reality, the ritual injunctions against public speech or action related to the temple involve direct reference to the signs and tokens imparted to the initiate.
Unfortunately, silence on these few aspects of the ritual has expanded to cover almost all aspects of the endowment. Furthermore, there is really no mechanism for fostering discussion of the endowment within the temple either. There is no helpful literature in which aspects of the endowment are discussed. In a sense there is a distinct advantage to this. It allows the temple to be uniquely yours, and not subject to the tyranny of outside opinion. As Mormons are generally conditioned to look to authority figures for interpretations of scripture and guidance in practice, surely the temple would be defined by the General Authorities were it not for the fact that no one discusses it.
There are some real downsides to this silence, however. The first, and one of the most important, is that members are so poorly prepared for the temple that their first experience sometimes comes as a real unpleasant shock. In not a few cases a person's first experience with the temple is so jarring, that the person never returns to the temple, or may even leave the LDS Church over it. Another downside is that people never really mentally or emotionally engage in the temple ritual because they have almost no means of contextualizing it within the rest of their religious lives. Most references to the temple ritual in LDS literature are by allusion alone. If a person is not a keen student, and an avid, talented reader of Church literature, that person may miss out on the only discourse on the endowment in the LDS world.
The result is waning temple activity. The Church has tried to address this problem by building more temples, editing unpopular elements out of the endowment, and encouraging its members to attend on a regular basis. In my opinion all of these efforts were largely in vain. The real problem is silence. Without meaningful discussion and writing about the temple, the temple experience remains isolated from the rest of the Mormon worship experience. The symbols become empty, the drama becomes boring, and the initiates participate less and less. Only the few who serendipitously learn to engage in thoughtful, prayerful meditation in the temple continue to find it meaningful and enjoyable. In a society like ours, where meditation is almost unheard of, few people ever gain that kind of appreciation for temple service.
I have a couple of ideas that I think would improve the temple experience and increase temple attendance. 1) Talk about the temple more and in greater detail. One can maintain silence on the signs and tokens and still discuss much of what goes on in the temple. 2) Foster publications which discuss the temple. Do not place the imprimature of authority on the publications. Allow the writers wide berth to discuss and speculate so long as they do not reveal the elements that one covenants to keep secret. 3) Make space for libraries and lecture rooms in the temples. Allow members to go to special places within the temple where they can study and discuss their thoughts and insights. Sponsor lectures where people come to share their research on the temple. Provide libraries where books on sacred subjects are placed at the disposal of the endowed. 4) Offer temple preparation courses that provide substantive information about the temple experience. If people are sufficiently prepared, they will be less shocked when they participate in the actual ceremony.
The culture of silence has become so pervasive in Mormonism that it has choked out much substantive discourse and has alienated members from one another. Strong emphasis on elementary principles expressed in an attitude of strict orthodoxy increases the problem dramatically. The temple, althought one of the richest loci for symbolic expression in the LDS Church, is quarantined from the rest of the Mormon experience. The end result is that members are losing enthusiasm, leaving the Church in greater numbers, and abandoning temple service. The LDS Church could reverse these trends if it took a more open, and liberal stance toward discussion, scholarship, and temple cult.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Does President Hinckey really have a testimony?
The question sounds ludicrous, I know. Recently I was listening to Tal Bachman's address to the annual meeting of the ExMormon Foundation, when I heard him relate the most unusual story from his former stake president. When Tal, in full heartbreak from his discoveries about the LDS Church, presented a letter of his issues to his stake president, the stake president replied by saying the President Hinckley had told a meeting of bishops that NO RELIGION COULD WITHSTAND HISTORICAL SCRUTINY, NOT EVEN OURS, but that the Church still makes us better husbands and fathers.
The chronological context of this statement is important to consider. It was made between the purchase of the Salamander Letter, and the discovery that it was a fraud. So perhaps Hinckley was feeling particularly downhearted about the Salamander business, or maybe he was finally being open about a problem he has known about for a long time, but has not previously been compelled to admit. Either way, the fact that the prophet of the LDS Church could say such a thing at all is astounding to me. Obviously he does consider it possible that the Church is not 'true' in the sense that your average TBM would.
I think it is altogether possible that Gordon B. Hinckley does not have a testimony by the usual definition. Consider also the relative ease with which he personally waffles on important LDS doctrines in public fora, and authorizes Church spokesmen to lie by omission about Church beliefs. You probably recall how President Hinckley fudged on the longstanding belief in the exaltation of the being we worship as God in Mormonism. I recall a Church spokesman waffling on our belief in visions on National Public Radio. I was astounded at how he evaded the question.
It should be a sobering thought to all of the extreme TBMs out there that the prophet may not be a member of their ranks. This is especially interesting given the fact that he has better access to the restricted documents possessed by the Church, and that he knows the leadership's inner workings most thoroughly. It is also the case that while many TBMs out there imagine face-to-face meetings taking place between the resurrected Lord and the prophet, they must accept the fact that President Hinckley openly stated that the days of open vision have passed.
So here we have it folks, a Mormon prophet who argues the truth of the Church based on its utility in making better men (a questionable claim to say the least, and one equally true for Freemasonry), whose stance is unclear regarding formerly precious doctrines, and claims that the days of such miracles as visions to the LDS prophets are over. I don't know whether to be relieved that my uber-conservative Mormon friends no longer have much of a position to protect, or to be sad that Mormonism's vitality is waning. In either case, I am left with little reason to think that the much vaunted Restoration was at all necessary.
The chronological context of this statement is important to consider. It was made between the purchase of the Salamander Letter, and the discovery that it was a fraud. So perhaps Hinckley was feeling particularly downhearted about the Salamander business, or maybe he was finally being open about a problem he has known about for a long time, but has not previously been compelled to admit. Either way, the fact that the prophet of the LDS Church could say such a thing at all is astounding to me. Obviously he does consider it possible that the Church is not 'true' in the sense that your average TBM would.
I think it is altogether possible that Gordon B. Hinckley does not have a testimony by the usual definition. Consider also the relative ease with which he personally waffles on important LDS doctrines in public fora, and authorizes Church spokesmen to lie by omission about Church beliefs. You probably recall how President Hinckley fudged on the longstanding belief in the exaltation of the being we worship as God in Mormonism. I recall a Church spokesman waffling on our belief in visions on National Public Radio. I was astounded at how he evaded the question.
It should be a sobering thought to all of the extreme TBMs out there that the prophet may not be a member of their ranks. This is especially interesting given the fact that he has better access to the restricted documents possessed by the Church, and that he knows the leadership's inner workings most thoroughly. It is also the case that while many TBMs out there imagine face-to-face meetings taking place between the resurrected Lord and the prophet, they must accept the fact that President Hinckley openly stated that the days of open vision have passed.
So here we have it folks, a Mormon prophet who argues the truth of the Church based on its utility in making better men (a questionable claim to say the least, and one equally true for Freemasonry), whose stance is unclear regarding formerly precious doctrines, and claims that the days of such miracles as visions to the LDS prophets are over. I don't know whether to be relieved that my uber-conservative Mormon friends no longer have much of a position to protect, or to be sad that Mormonism's vitality is waning. In either case, I am left with little reason to think that the much vaunted Restoration was at all necessary.
Monday, March 06, 2006
FAIR: an oxymoronic acronym.
'The' big cyber-hangout for Mormons and their critics these days is at FAIR (Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research. 'The' place used to be ZLMB, but nearly all of the apologists fled the scene, citing their frustration with constant attacks from Mormonism's critics. FAIR's discussion board was deliberately designed as a safe haven for apologists, particularly for its 'star' posters, BYU professors Dan Peterson and Bill Hamblin. The 'stars' get VIP treatment in the way the threads they post to are moderated. Often, when a discussion gets heated, the 'star' has more leeway to say what he wants in his post. The person on the other end of the argument gets especially close scrutiny.
Knowing as I do the excesses of some Mormon critics, I can understand how ZLMB imploded. Frankly, there are a number of critics, particularly of the Evangelical persuasion, whose facile criticisms of Mormonism could just as easily be turned back on Christianity. The problem is, Evangelicals never seem to want to admit that problem. Enter the secular critics of Mormonism. These critics often have no religious belief to be hypocritical about. Still some of them can be immoderate and insulting in their approach, and they are not immune from indulging in empty diatribes against Mormonism.
Still, it is from the secular camp that some of the best material comes. The secularists, instead of aiming to prove that Mormonism is not Christian (a pointless waste of time), often look to demonstrate that the Mormonism of the past is not as the Church of the present represents it. To a degree one can claim that this fact goes without saying. Churches change over time, and they move as society moves, responding to new challenges in an ever-morphing environment. It is the application of secular scholarly methods to the material, however, that is guaranteed to bring the most new insights. Take the new Bushman biography, for example. Without the insights of a Quinn, who used secular methods in spite of his believer status, I doubt Bushman would have ever included much of the material on Joseph's early years of religious experience. Men like Quinn and Vogel made such research and writing a must for even the more conservative Bushman.
When scholarly controversy can lead to such great benefits, it is perhaps ironic that both the LDS Church and its self-appointed defenders are intent upon killing the debate. Without disagreement and challenges, we would be mired in outdated books about LDS topics. The critics have done more to advance LDS scholarship on LDS topics than any other force. Without critics, we might be left with only masturbatory panegyric on how wonderful Joseph Smith was, etc. It was the hard work of the Tanners that re-historicized the revelations of the D&C. I generally don't even like the Tanners, but I have to admit that they have been really good for Mormon scholarship.
It is more than a shame, then, that FAIR is so unfair in its moderating. It has been my belief for some time that the rhetoric of FARMS reviews was damaging to the Church for the same reason that missionaries claim that anti-Mormonism is a boon for missionary work. If you have to play nasty, there must be something wrong with your position. At the very least it will appear that something is wrong. Grant Palmer was ridiculed by Davis Bitton for claiming to be an 'insider'. Yes, clearly Grant did not understand that the only insiders in the Church are the fifteen men who sit at the pinnacle of its leadership structure. Can we honestly blame Grant, as a lifelong professional employee of the LDS Church, for claiming he was an insider?
FAIR is the 30-second commercial to FARMS Review's sitcom. FAIR's discussion board is superior inasmuch as it allows some response to the apologists. The forum, however, is so tightly controlled that responses to apologists are curbed before they get dangerous. The 'stars' come out to shine by ridiculing the critics (both critics of the Church and critics of apologists like me) and then they hide behind a suitable moderator avatar to fix the odds. Dunamis is at least 3 or 4 different people, who have variously praised and pilloried my contributions to the discussion, depending on who had the helm at that moment. So FAIR moderating looks schizophrenic at best and like some bizarre form of rhetorical terrorism at its worst.
My days at FAIR have probably reached their end. I was put on their queue (a poster on the queue will have their posts reviewed and (dis)approved) for using the expression 'cutesy-poo' in an exchange with Dan Peterson on the Hedgeses' farcical review of Vogel's Smith biography. I note with some frustration that Dan Peterson had earlier used that phrase to dismiss one of my posts on another thread. But, as I was reminded, I had earlier used the forbidden phrase 'rhetorical diarrhea' to describe one of Brant Gardner's encyclopedic posts. Clearly I have a potty mouth and must be disciplined. When the quality of moderating at a board is this bad, they deserve the vapid content they get. Their vapid content is exactly what I described earlier: auto-erotic panegyric. Any kooky theory that supports the 'right' conclusion gets accolades.
Knowing as I do the excesses of some Mormon critics, I can understand how ZLMB imploded. Frankly, there are a number of critics, particularly of the Evangelical persuasion, whose facile criticisms of Mormonism could just as easily be turned back on Christianity. The problem is, Evangelicals never seem to want to admit that problem. Enter the secular critics of Mormonism. These critics often have no religious belief to be hypocritical about. Still some of them can be immoderate and insulting in their approach, and they are not immune from indulging in empty diatribes against Mormonism.
Still, it is from the secular camp that some of the best material comes. The secularists, instead of aiming to prove that Mormonism is not Christian (a pointless waste of time), often look to demonstrate that the Mormonism of the past is not as the Church of the present represents it. To a degree one can claim that this fact goes without saying. Churches change over time, and they move as society moves, responding to new challenges in an ever-morphing environment. It is the application of secular scholarly methods to the material, however, that is guaranteed to bring the most new insights. Take the new Bushman biography, for example. Without the insights of a Quinn, who used secular methods in spite of his believer status, I doubt Bushman would have ever included much of the material on Joseph's early years of religious experience. Men like Quinn and Vogel made such research and writing a must for even the more conservative Bushman.
When scholarly controversy can lead to such great benefits, it is perhaps ironic that both the LDS Church and its self-appointed defenders are intent upon killing the debate. Without disagreement and challenges, we would be mired in outdated books about LDS topics. The critics have done more to advance LDS scholarship on LDS topics than any other force. Without critics, we might be left with only masturbatory panegyric on how wonderful Joseph Smith was, etc. It was the hard work of the Tanners that re-historicized the revelations of the D&C. I generally don't even like the Tanners, but I have to admit that they have been really good for Mormon scholarship.
It is more than a shame, then, that FAIR is so unfair in its moderating. It has been my belief for some time that the rhetoric of FARMS reviews was damaging to the Church for the same reason that missionaries claim that anti-Mormonism is a boon for missionary work. If you have to play nasty, there must be something wrong with your position. At the very least it will appear that something is wrong. Grant Palmer was ridiculed by Davis Bitton for claiming to be an 'insider'. Yes, clearly Grant did not understand that the only insiders in the Church are the fifteen men who sit at the pinnacle of its leadership structure. Can we honestly blame Grant, as a lifelong professional employee of the LDS Church, for claiming he was an insider?
FAIR is the 30-second commercial to FARMS Review's sitcom. FAIR's discussion board is superior inasmuch as it allows some response to the apologists. The forum, however, is so tightly controlled that responses to apologists are curbed before they get dangerous. The 'stars' come out to shine by ridiculing the critics (both critics of the Church and critics of apologists like me) and then they hide behind a suitable moderator avatar to fix the odds. Dunamis is at least 3 or 4 different people, who have variously praised and pilloried my contributions to the discussion, depending on who had the helm at that moment. So FAIR moderating looks schizophrenic at best and like some bizarre form of rhetorical terrorism at its worst.
My days at FAIR have probably reached their end. I was put on their queue (a poster on the queue will have their posts reviewed and (dis)approved) for using the expression 'cutesy-poo' in an exchange with Dan Peterson on the Hedgeses' farcical review of Vogel's Smith biography. I note with some frustration that Dan Peterson had earlier used that phrase to dismiss one of my posts on another thread. But, as I was reminded, I had earlier used the forbidden phrase 'rhetorical diarrhea' to describe one of Brant Gardner's encyclopedic posts. Clearly I have a potty mouth and must be disciplined. When the quality of moderating at a board is this bad, they deserve the vapid content they get. Their vapid content is exactly what I described earlier: auto-erotic panegyric. Any kooky theory that supports the 'right' conclusion gets accolades.
Friday, March 03, 2006
Robert Kirby's 13 Particles of Faith
MY 13 PARTICLES OF FAITH
I believe in God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, and in mankind's innate inability to tell the difference between them and, oh, a giant ball of fire or even an extremely intolerant political party.
I believe that men will be punished for their own transgressions, including stuff we did completely by accident or because of testosterone. Women will probably just get probation.
I believe that through the atonement of Christ, everyone will one day be able to tell annoying church authorities where to get off.
I believe that the first principles and ordinances of the church are: boring speakers, meetings that last forever, music that sounds like someone giving a whale a sonogram, food storage gone bad, and idiotic bickering over caffeine and movie ratings.
I believe that a man must be called by God, by prophecy, and by the laying on of hands, by those who are in authority, and that only regular long distance rates will apply. Meanwhile, women answer only to a biological clock.
I believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive Church, viz.: deacons, teachers, centurions, lepers, thieves, virgins, lunatics, mustard seeds, and demonically possessed swine.
I believe in the gift of tongues and would die a happy man if, just once, some smart-ass would have the guts to try it when I was around.
I believe the Bible and the Book of Mormon to be the word of God as far as I personally can translate them correctly, which I try not to do much because it scares me.
I believe all that God has revealed, all that he does now reveal, and I believe he will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the colossal foolishness of the entire human race.
I believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes, most of whom will work for Microsoft; that Zion will be built on this (the United States) continent by undocumented migrant labor, and that Christ will eventually rain personality on the church.
I claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to it being none of your damn business, and allow all men the same privilege, except for Pat Robertson, Louis Farrakhan, and most cannibals.
I believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers and magis. . . . wait, no I don't.
I believe in being honest to a point, true to myself, chased by the police, benevolent to deserving people, virtuous on the
Internet, and in doing whatever my wife tells me to do; indeed, I may say that I follow the admonition of Paul in believing, hoping and enduring-and that all of this damn well better be worth it in the end.
I believe in God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, and in mankind's innate inability to tell the difference between them and, oh, a giant ball of fire or even an extremely intolerant political party.
I believe that men will be punished for their own transgressions, including stuff we did completely by accident or because of testosterone. Women will probably just get probation.
I believe that through the atonement of Christ, everyone will one day be able to tell annoying church authorities where to get off.
I believe that the first principles and ordinances of the church are: boring speakers, meetings that last forever, music that sounds like someone giving a whale a sonogram, food storage gone bad, and idiotic bickering over caffeine and movie ratings.
I believe that a man must be called by God, by prophecy, and by the laying on of hands, by those who are in authority, and that only regular long distance rates will apply. Meanwhile, women answer only to a biological clock.
I believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive Church, viz.: deacons, teachers, centurions, lepers, thieves, virgins, lunatics, mustard seeds, and demonically possessed swine.
I believe in the gift of tongues and would die a happy man if, just once, some smart-ass would have the guts to try it when I was around.
I believe the Bible and the Book of Mormon to be the word of God as far as I personally can translate them correctly, which I try not to do much because it scares me.
I believe all that God has revealed, all that he does now reveal, and I believe he will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the colossal foolishness of the entire human race.
I believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes, most of whom will work for Microsoft; that Zion will be built on this (the United States) continent by undocumented migrant labor, and that Christ will eventually rain personality on the church.
I claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to it being none of your damn business, and allow all men the same privilege, except for Pat Robertson, Louis Farrakhan, and most cannibals.
I believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers and magis. . . . wait, no I don't.
I believe in being honest to a point, true to myself, chased by the police, benevolent to deserving people, virtuous on the
Internet, and in doing whatever my wife tells me to do; indeed, I may say that I follow the admonition of Paul in believing, hoping and enduring-and that all of this damn well better be worth it in the end.
Let's get wacky!
I got sidetracked in my last post because I was so intense about describing the problem. And, I think I am still preoccupied with the defintion of the 'problem'. In short, the problem is that Mormonism is becoming dead dull in all of the wrong ways. Some of my acquaintances are happy to see doctrinal speculation go the way of the dodo. For them all of the crazy doctrine was irrational, and at the root of a lot of contention. What they longed for was a rational faith. I have real sympathy for their feelings and thoughts on the subject.
The problem is that a large part of me thinks that their vision of the Mormonism of the future is ill conceived. The direction that LDS doctrine has gone since the passing of Brigham Young has been increasingly Protestant. Brigham's theology was about as far from normative Christian as Gnostic cosmology is from the Gospel of Matthew. Gnostic cosmology and the teachings of Brigham Young on the nature of Deity also share the dubious honor of succumbing to Christianity. The truth is, Christianity is easier for the average person to grasp, and these other systems seem needlessly complicated.
My view of Brigham's "theology" is that he taught a plurality of gods in an endless genealogical chain. Humanity has its origins in Adam and Eve, two deified beings, which made their home on this planet after they, with other gods, created it. They ate the fruits of this lower sphere and became mortal so that they could provide bodies for human spirits. Brigham seems to have had a funny hierarchy of gods that started with Elohim, either the highest ranking of the gods pertinent to this creation, or the council of deities. Next in line came Jehovah, whose son Michael became Adam. Jehovah and Michael created the earth together. Jehovah is not Jesus. Jesus is actually the son of the divine Michael. All beings human and divine are continually progressing as they acquire knowledge and intelligence. Elohim was once a regular human, who progressed to become Elohim. One day some human beings will be gods just as Elohim is God today. Yes, it is confusing and highly heterodox by Christian standards.
Since Brigham's death LDS theology has become increasingly Christian in that 1) Jehovah has been equated with Jesus, 2) Michael has been made subordinate to Jesus, since Jesus is Jehovah, 3) Michael is not a god, but a noble human spirit, 4) the Trinity of Father (Elohim)/Son (Jehovah)/Holy Spirit (?) is preserved. The big Mormon distinction in number 4 is that the philosophical doctrine of Trinity as worked out in the authoritative creeds of Christianity is not accepted. God has a body like man's, but perfect. Man is truly made in the image of God as he is God's offspring. One of the most recent developments is the abandonment of the notion that God is a perfected man. Now certain people are leaning to the idea that the current God has always been God and that He is supreme. He is the origin of all creation.
In short, having deviated from Protestant Christianity pretty radically, Mormonism is being pulled back in. It is somewhat predictable. Protestants may be converted to the idea that God called a modern prophet (Joseph Smith). They are less likely to accept that God was not God at some long past time. As heterodox within my own faith tradition as I am, and as much as I think of myself being functionally agnostic most of the time, I have a problem with our drift to normative Christianity. In my opinion, Mormonism is succumbing to cultural imperialism. It may not be conscious, but all the same, Mormonism is selling out its unique identity for success in spreading itself. Again, this is probably inevitable, and the ultimate results are not determined, but I would guess they involve further sacrifice of much of the Mormonism many thought we knew.
My suggestion is that everyone spontaneously engage in wild theological speculation, quote liberally from the Journal of Discourses, and then simply say, "of course, this isn't doctrine, it's just my opinion." If you have an unusual spiritual experience, by all means, share it at Church! If you feel uncomfortable doing it, don't, but if you want to, be my guest! Tell us how the Three Nephites saved your dog from the neighborhood kids. Don't be shy about your investment in the Dream Mine. If your wife used your priesthood to save the family cat while you were away, testify! Tell us all who the Holy Ghost is! If you are really gutsy, you will speculate in great detail about the details of Mother in Heaven's role in your personal salvation. Here you are on shaky ground, but if you get into trouble, you can always promise your bishop that you will refrain from sharing your Heavenly Mother theology in the future.
Believe it or not, I am not being facetious in the least. If you don't share your idiosyncratic doctrinal views and personal experiences with the rest of us, you are robbing us. You are contributing to the apostacy of your fellow saints. You see, right now people are more likely to leave because they are bored out of their minds than because you are completely insane and the bishop can't seem to catch you in time to stop you. Did I call you insane? Yeah, I did. But hey, I am insane too. What is sane, after all? Was Bruce R. McConkie the least bit sane? Would you want to be sane if that's what sane is about?
Think about it. Time is running short. Act now.
The problem is that a large part of me thinks that their vision of the Mormonism of the future is ill conceived. The direction that LDS doctrine has gone since the passing of Brigham Young has been increasingly Protestant. Brigham's theology was about as far from normative Christian as Gnostic cosmology is from the Gospel of Matthew. Gnostic cosmology and the teachings of Brigham Young on the nature of Deity also share the dubious honor of succumbing to Christianity. The truth is, Christianity is easier for the average person to grasp, and these other systems seem needlessly complicated.
My view of Brigham's "theology" is that he taught a plurality of gods in an endless genealogical chain. Humanity has its origins in Adam and Eve, two deified beings, which made their home on this planet after they, with other gods, created it. They ate the fruits of this lower sphere and became mortal so that they could provide bodies for human spirits. Brigham seems to have had a funny hierarchy of gods that started with Elohim, either the highest ranking of the gods pertinent to this creation, or the council of deities. Next in line came Jehovah, whose son Michael became Adam. Jehovah and Michael created the earth together. Jehovah is not Jesus. Jesus is actually the son of the divine Michael. All beings human and divine are continually progressing as they acquire knowledge and intelligence. Elohim was once a regular human, who progressed to become Elohim. One day some human beings will be gods just as Elohim is God today. Yes, it is confusing and highly heterodox by Christian standards.
Since Brigham's death LDS theology has become increasingly Christian in that 1) Jehovah has been equated with Jesus, 2) Michael has been made subordinate to Jesus, since Jesus is Jehovah, 3) Michael is not a god, but a noble human spirit, 4) the Trinity of Father (Elohim)/Son (Jehovah)/Holy Spirit (?) is preserved. The big Mormon distinction in number 4 is that the philosophical doctrine of Trinity as worked out in the authoritative creeds of Christianity is not accepted. God has a body like man's, but perfect. Man is truly made in the image of God as he is God's offspring. One of the most recent developments is the abandonment of the notion that God is a perfected man. Now certain people are leaning to the idea that the current God has always been God and that He is supreme. He is the origin of all creation.
In short, having deviated from Protestant Christianity pretty radically, Mormonism is being pulled back in. It is somewhat predictable. Protestants may be converted to the idea that God called a modern prophet (Joseph Smith). They are less likely to accept that God was not God at some long past time. As heterodox within my own faith tradition as I am, and as much as I think of myself being functionally agnostic most of the time, I have a problem with our drift to normative Christianity. In my opinion, Mormonism is succumbing to cultural imperialism. It may not be conscious, but all the same, Mormonism is selling out its unique identity for success in spreading itself. Again, this is probably inevitable, and the ultimate results are not determined, but I would guess they involve further sacrifice of much of the Mormonism many thought we knew.
My suggestion is that everyone spontaneously engage in wild theological speculation, quote liberally from the Journal of Discourses, and then simply say, "of course, this isn't doctrine, it's just my opinion." If you have an unusual spiritual experience, by all means, share it at Church! If you feel uncomfortable doing it, don't, but if you want to, be my guest! Tell us how the Three Nephites saved your dog from the neighborhood kids. Don't be shy about your investment in the Dream Mine. If your wife used your priesthood to save the family cat while you were away, testify! Tell us all who the Holy Ghost is! If you are really gutsy, you will speculate in great detail about the details of Mother in Heaven's role in your personal salvation. Here you are on shaky ground, but if you get into trouble, you can always promise your bishop that you will refrain from sharing your Heavenly Mother theology in the future.
Believe it or not, I am not being facetious in the least. If you don't share your idiosyncratic doctrinal views and personal experiences with the rest of us, you are robbing us. You are contributing to the apostacy of your fellow saints. You see, right now people are more likely to leave because they are bored out of their minds than because you are completely insane and the bishop can't seem to catch you in time to stop you. Did I call you insane? Yeah, I did. But hey, I am insane too. What is sane, after all? Was Bruce R. McConkie the least bit sane? Would you want to be sane if that's what sane is about?
Think about it. Time is running short. Act now.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Not crazy enough.
It used to be that one could sit in an LDS ward and be regaled with speculations about the location of the Lost Ten Tribes or hear the latest mundane duties of the Three Nephites (jump-starting cars, etc.). If there is one thing we can thank (?) Christian anti-Mormons for, its the complete desiccation of the Mormon mythological imagination. Sure, they aren't the only culprits.
There are plenty of people in every ward who have little tolerance for anything that smacks of imagination or creativity. These people, like most Mormons, have not figured out that Joseph Smith was a mythographer par excellence. Instead they prefer the parched diatribes of a pompous Bruce R. McConkie, who seems to have honestly believed there was such a thing as Mormon doctrine, and who took it upon himself to define that for everyone else.
It used to be, however, that Mormon doctrine had more to do with which General Authority happened to have written that year's priesthood manual than anything else. As a result you got B.H. Roberts' Seventies Course in Theology or Widstoe's Rational Theology, both of which make contemporary LDS manuals look like the ingredients to a bar of soap. Since the definition of Mormon theology was so fluid, people seemed to understand that there was an element of personal interpretation to it. Therefore, they unabashedly engaged in public speculations right in the ward house.
Sadly, Correlation put an end to interesting manuals and more unforunately yet, Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine was the final book by a GA to claim to explicate doctrine. Without another Widstoe or Roberts to follow, the book that should never have been (the prophet, David McKay, told BRM not to publish it) evolved into the armchair theologian's guide to putting everyone else in their place. This led to the oft-heard refrain "well, McConkie said . . ." that rang in LDS meetinghouses across the land for decades.
The other option was,"well, Nibley said . . ." which was heard far less often, and for very good reasons: 1) hardly anyone could understand what Nibley was saying, 2) Nibley was not a GA, and 3) to anyone who cared to listen and could understand, it was clear that Nibley was really a Brigham Young Marxist. Still, one might hear the Nibley name, if only in reference to trouncing anti-Mormons somehow (the anti-Mormons are still puzzled by his responses too).
As this was all happening, the Church was flooded with new converts, who came from a predominantly Protestant background. These people came with a hard-won testimony of Joseph Smith's prophetic calling and the the truth of the Book of Mormon as a witness of Christ. What they did not bargain for was odd tales about how the Three Nephites mowed the lawn just in time for the ward picnic or some such.
The more vocal among them started registering their complaints. They joined forces with the retreating McConkieites with the exclamation, "THAT'S NOT DOCTRINE!," which for them was in reality, "if that's anything close to what we're about, I'm outta here!" For these folks it was necessary to quote C.S. Lewis liberally as a mediation between the Christianity they formerly believed in, and the Christianity avec Smith that they had now embraced. By processing it all through Lewis, the wonkie bits were thankfully shaved off.
The coup de grace, however, came from the multi-pronged attack of the Church, the BYU Religion Department, and FARMS. The Church made its contribution through the production of utterly vacuous, white-washed "prophet" manuals, and statements on the primacy of Mormon canon in the establishment of doctrine. Between these two moves it became clear that Mormon doctrine was now a matter of plausible deniability. Since no one can afford, or really wants to wade through the vast, murky swamp of the Journal of Discourses, the fact that Brigham Young had much more colorful things to say than "Jesus is the Savior" is lost on most people. Brigham is so much easier to deal with when you can edit him down to stuff like that.
Some of the faculty at BYU's Religion Department have decided that the time has come to make overtures to the rest of the Christian world. They have invited Evangelicals to speak on BYU campus. They have written books about Jesus that help others understand how truly Christian we are. Stephen Robinson co-authored a book entitled, How Wide the Divide which seemed to me to be an exercise in defining Mormonism as narrowly as possible so as not to appear un-Christian in any way. In reality the divide is much wider than Robinson let on.
The chimaerical beast called FARMS makes its contributions too. Plausibility is the first and last word in FARMS apologetics. At FARMS it is not what one can prove, but that one can make a case for the inability of others to disprove Mormon claims that is really the important thing. FARMS is about so many things, all of them much more dreadfully tedious than Three Nephite and Danite tales. If you drop by the nasty, younger-sibling version of FARMS called FAIR, you will be treated to their chant, "You Can't Prove It!" Oddly, the things we can't prove are the Mormonism that most of us got to know through our ancestors and Church history. Now that this version is too explosive for the masses, it is apparently necessary to pretend that it either never existed or was horribly misconstrued.
All of these forces have contributed to the rendering of ward meetings into a sure-fire cure for insomnia. Everyone sits around either avoiding dangerous (read "interesting") statements or trying to make answers like "prayer," "the Spirit," and "obedience" sound fresh for the billionth time. The new refrain at Church is, "we are repeating simple things because we still haven't learned how to live them." Behind every instance of that statement lies the sad realization that church is destined to be a mind-numbing waste of too much time for the rest of our short lives.
There are plenty of people in every ward who have little tolerance for anything that smacks of imagination or creativity. These people, like most Mormons, have not figured out that Joseph Smith was a mythographer par excellence. Instead they prefer the parched diatribes of a pompous Bruce R. McConkie, who seems to have honestly believed there was such a thing as Mormon doctrine, and who took it upon himself to define that for everyone else.
It used to be, however, that Mormon doctrine had more to do with which General Authority happened to have written that year's priesthood manual than anything else. As a result you got B.H. Roberts' Seventies Course in Theology or Widstoe's Rational Theology, both of which make contemporary LDS manuals look like the ingredients to a bar of soap. Since the definition of Mormon theology was so fluid, people seemed to understand that there was an element of personal interpretation to it. Therefore, they unabashedly engaged in public speculations right in the ward house.
Sadly, Correlation put an end to interesting manuals and more unforunately yet, Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine was the final book by a GA to claim to explicate doctrine. Without another Widstoe or Roberts to follow, the book that should never have been (the prophet, David McKay, told BRM not to publish it) evolved into the armchair theologian's guide to putting everyone else in their place. This led to the oft-heard refrain "well, McConkie said . . ." that rang in LDS meetinghouses across the land for decades.
The other option was,"well, Nibley said . . ." which was heard far less often, and for very good reasons: 1) hardly anyone could understand what Nibley was saying, 2) Nibley was not a GA, and 3) to anyone who cared to listen and could understand, it was clear that Nibley was really a Brigham Young Marxist. Still, one might hear the Nibley name, if only in reference to trouncing anti-Mormons somehow (the anti-Mormons are still puzzled by his responses too).
As this was all happening, the Church was flooded with new converts, who came from a predominantly Protestant background. These people came with a hard-won testimony of Joseph Smith's prophetic calling and the the truth of the Book of Mormon as a witness of Christ. What they did not bargain for was odd tales about how the Three Nephites mowed the lawn just in time for the ward picnic or some such.
The more vocal among them started registering their complaints. They joined forces with the retreating McConkieites with the exclamation, "THAT'S NOT DOCTRINE!," which for them was in reality, "if that's anything close to what we're about, I'm outta here!" For these folks it was necessary to quote C.S. Lewis liberally as a mediation between the Christianity they formerly believed in, and the Christianity avec Smith that they had now embraced. By processing it all through Lewis, the wonkie bits were thankfully shaved off.
The coup de grace, however, came from the multi-pronged attack of the Church, the BYU Religion Department, and FARMS. The Church made its contribution through the production of utterly vacuous, white-washed "prophet" manuals, and statements on the primacy of Mormon canon in the establishment of doctrine. Between these two moves it became clear that Mormon doctrine was now a matter of plausible deniability. Since no one can afford, or really wants to wade through the vast, murky swamp of the Journal of Discourses, the fact that Brigham Young had much more colorful things to say than "Jesus is the Savior" is lost on most people. Brigham is so much easier to deal with when you can edit him down to stuff like that.
Some of the faculty at BYU's Religion Department have decided that the time has come to make overtures to the rest of the Christian world. They have invited Evangelicals to speak on BYU campus. They have written books about Jesus that help others understand how truly Christian we are. Stephen Robinson co-authored a book entitled, How Wide the Divide which seemed to me to be an exercise in defining Mormonism as narrowly as possible so as not to appear un-Christian in any way. In reality the divide is much wider than Robinson let on.
The chimaerical beast called FARMS makes its contributions too. Plausibility is the first and last word in FARMS apologetics. At FARMS it is not what one can prove, but that one can make a case for the inability of others to disprove Mormon claims that is really the important thing. FARMS is about so many things, all of them much more dreadfully tedious than Three Nephite and Danite tales. If you drop by the nasty, younger-sibling version of FARMS called FAIR, you will be treated to their chant, "You Can't Prove It!" Oddly, the things we can't prove are the Mormonism that most of us got to know through our ancestors and Church history. Now that this version is too explosive for the masses, it is apparently necessary to pretend that it either never existed or was horribly misconstrued.
All of these forces have contributed to the rendering of ward meetings into a sure-fire cure for insomnia. Everyone sits around either avoiding dangerous (read "interesting") statements or trying to make answers like "prayer," "the Spirit," and "obedience" sound fresh for the billionth time. The new refrain at Church is, "we are repeating simple things because we still haven't learned how to live them." Behind every instance of that statement lies the sad realization that church is destined to be a mind-numbing waste of too much time for the rest of our short lives.
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