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.
