So it’s coming up on Saturday evening and once again I am at a loss as to what to teach my Valiant 10 class in Primary tomorrow. This is my third time teaching Doctrine and Covenants in Primary. It’s my third year teaching from the Come Follow Me curriculum. And I have to tell you that the Doctrine and Covenants Come Follow Me manual is the absolute worst manual I have ever used. And I taught Young Women in the 1990s.

Most of the manuals the church produces are not great, Bob. In fact, when I am not teaching Doctrine and Covenants, I rarely use the manual. I just take whatever scriptures the manual is meant to cover that week and I figure something out. It’s not that difficult when you have decent material. I mean, I only have twenty minutes to kill. The problem with the Doctrine and Covenants is that it’s not decent material. I tried to read the Quran once. There was some stuff about a cow and I didn’t understand it, and I’m afraid I lost interest. The Doctrine and Covenants doesn’t even have cows. It’s just God telling Edward Partridge to go to the Ohio or whatever, over and over again. Everything that is worthwhile in the Doctrine and Covenants is covered more eloquently in other books of scripture. But wait, Rebecca, what about the Word of Wisdom? What about all the stuff about church organization and priesthood keys and the three degrees of glory? I SAID WHAT I SAID. Quick, think of your favorite scripture from the Doctrine and Covenants. Now think of your favorite scripture from literally any other standard work, including the Pearl of Great Price. For that matter, think of your favorite episode of Touched by an Angel. Is there really any comparison? I rest my case.

Do you know what my favorite scripture from the Doctrine and Covenants is? It’s Section 132:54. “But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord.” It speaks to me on a deep level. Cross-stitch that crap on a throw pillow and give it to me for Christmas.

If you look at the CFM Primary manual for Doctrine and Covenants, most of the lesson material is based on snippets of verses taken out of context. Sometimes the manual for Individuals and Families or the manual for Sunday School gives more context, but not always, and it’s almost never helpful. Do you know what tomorrow’s lesson is on? Doctrine and Covenants sections 106-108. (I know, right?) For those of you who don’t remember those scintillating passages, Section 106 is a revelation for Warren A. Cowdery (Oliver’s brother), telling him to preach the gospel. Section 108 is a revelation for Lyman Sherman, telling him to preach the gospel. (Neither one was going to the Ohio, as it turned out, so fine.) Section 107 is one hundred verses explaining the offices of the Melchizedek and Aaronic priesthoods. CLANK. Oh, sorry, that was my head hitting the next available hard surface because I was so bored, I fell asleep. /sarcastic Homer Simpson voice

The manual suggests I talk about how the priesthood helps us return to God. Do you know where it says in Doctrine and Covenants 107 that the priesthood helps us return to God? That’s right, it doesn’t. Doctrine and Covenants 107 is about how the priesthood is organized, and the difference between the Aaronic Priesthood and the Melchizedek Priesthood. (Do you know why they call it the Melchizedek Priesthood? “Because Melchizedek was such a great high priest.” Direct quote. Probably on your missionary plaque.) It’s about how only a literal descendant of Aaron can be a bishop, unless you’re a high priest, in which case, never mind. It’s about the duties of the First Presidency, Twelve Apostles, and the Seventy. (Who are the Seventy and how are they different from the Twelve Apostles? It’s unclear.) It’s about how Adam ordained Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, and Methuselah, and how old each was when he was ordained. Don’t get me wrong, some of them were really old, and I find that fascinating, but there’s nothing here about how the priesthood helps us return to God. The manual recommends I focus the lesson on something entirely divorced from the text the lesson is supposedly based on. Because Doctrine and Covenants is the worst. That’s it. That’s the blog post.

Fortunately, each Primary class is required to have two teachers, so I only have to teach every other Sunday, and fortunately, there are only fourteen Sundays left in 2021, and fortunately, one of those Sundays is General Conference and another of those Sundays is stake conference, so I really only have to teach six more lessons from the Doctrine and Covenants, and then I will be free from this monstrous responsibility for another four years.

Brothers and sisters, the time is now yours to tell me what the frick I should talk to a room full of eleven-year-olds about for 20 minutes tomorrow.

I was talking the other day with a couple of friends, exchanging crazy mission stories. A recurring theme is the “comp slipped out at night to go visit his secret local girlfriend”. I’m obsessed with these, primarily from a logistical point of view. HOW?? How is the missionary slipping out in the night, undetected? I want to hear from people who either slipped out at night or got slipped out on. Please explain how this was done. It is like some David Blaine-level escape magic.

Back in 2013 I created the Maxwell Institute Podcast with an eye toward constructive or “positive” apologetics. Instead of listing concerns and then giving responses or rebuttals, the show exhibited characteristics like intellectual charity, curiosity, and a faithful seeking style of confidence as opposed to dogmatic certainty.

The show’s style ran against the grain of much that had come before it at the Maxwell Institute and in church productions more broadly, and against the grain of what some church members and some leaders would be comfortable with, although it always stayed within the bounds of appropriate orthodoxy. It was, at the end of the day, a church production. But I believed it could appeal to a wide variety of church members across the culture war divide of conservative/liberal. I know for certain the audience had some very progressive and some very conservative appreciative listeners.

My back catalog is still there, although who knows how long it will stay. The Institute has moved on from past projects before, and my work will probably someday find itself among the jettisoned remnants of past approaches. (I have copies of all my work and retained copyright jointly so no worries!)

I decided to leave BYU at the beginning of the year and found a new job by March. On the side I began production on a podcast that’s similar in spirit to the old Maxwell Institute Podcast, but with a much wider scope. (Kind of like how the MIPodcast was when I started it. More recent directives required me to narrow its scope.) The new show is called Fireside with Blair Hodges. I wanted it to be something that believing and practicing members could enjoy as much as doubting people, and even some former members who no longer believe. People across the faith spectrum. It could give people who see things quite differently something they could mutually enjoy.

The latest episode features an author named Mary Rakow. She tells the story of how her life was falling apart, how she became very angry at God, and how she basically swore off religion. But in her time “away,” she wrote a novel that retells various Bible stories. And it’s one of the most spiritually and religiously rich books I’ve ever read. There’s an excerpt from the interview that strikes at an experience of faith that happens in Mormonism, but that isn’t often highlighted in Mormonism.

In this clip I’m talking to her about a scene near the end of the book where a woman decides to go back to Catholic confession after 30 years away. Mary reveals in the interview that the character is based on her own direct experience:

BLAIR HODGES: Your character confesses she doesn’t believe in God any more, and she says to the priest, “I don’t feel I’m committing a sin that I can’t believe in God anymore. I can’t will it. But I really wish it could change. This is why I came.”

MARY RAKOW: And that’s the title of the book. Yes, and that is literally what I said to the guy. And he was sitting on a low bench, and it was very humble. So he’s looking up at me. And he did say—you know, he had to do the formulary. And so he did give me absolution and things like that. But he never debated that. I mean, it was a very legitimate thing. And I felt it was a profound experience to me—

BLAIR HODGES: —Then you make this remarkable statement. That the woman in the book—and now we know you’re speaking for yourself—she says she “wants her integrity and her faith, both at the same time.”

MARY RAKOW: Everyone wants that. A seven-year-old wants that. A ninety-year-old wants that. Who doesn’t want that? We all want that. I mean, who wants a fake god? Who wants a god that is too small? Who wants a god who does stuff we wouldn’t even do in our humanity? I mean, we still have mercy! We want a god who is at least as good as we are at our best! We want something way, way, way beyond our imagining. And if we don’t have experience of that, or we don’t have teachings that lead us toward that, then it’s the moral thing to say, “This is not a god I accept.” That’s a very religious thing to do.

In a church that so strongly privileges the idea of achieving religious certainty, I felt so moved by Mary’s book, and by her own experience. I used to be one who testified with certainty, but I lost that ability long ago. And I believe that is a way of being faithful, too. When you talk like this at church you are bound to receive correction. People will be eager to insist that they know, and that you can (they really mean should) know, too. But hope is enough. Belief is enough. It is enough. Even if it carries you to unexpected places. The negotiation between integrity and faith continues, whether within or outside the LDS Church.

The episode is here, and it includes a full transcript for people who can’t or who prefer not to listen to podcasts. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. I strongly recommend it to fellow travelers in this group who desire your integrity and your faith at the same time.

Few figures in the development of Mormon studies during the late-twentieth century are more significant than D. Michael Quinn. Educated at Brigham Young University, the University of Utah, and Yale University, Quinn was among scholars who revisited and revised the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He worked as a researcher under Church Historian Leonard Arrington and produced a series of significant works emblematic of the New Mormon History. At times Quinn’s work sparked backlash, and his identity as queer, Chicano, and independent put him at odds with his surrounding culture. His controversial scholarship and activities led, first, to his forced resignation as a full professor at BYU and then, later, to his excommunication from the church. 

Quinn’s legacy has only grown with time. His many articles and books continue to inform and influence scholarship today. The Mormon studies community mourned when he passed on April 21, 2021, at the age of seventy-seven.

We will hold a one-day conference examining the life and legacy of D. Michael Quinn on March 25, 2022, at the University of Utah. Sessions will explore both his experiences as a historical figure as well as his impact on historiography. 

While most panels will be composed of invited speakers, one session will be reserved for junior scholars as a tribute to Quinn’s dedication to mentoring younger generations. We therefore seek paper proposals from those currently in school or less than three years removed from receiving their degree who are working in fields related to those on which Quinn published. These fields include, but are not limited to, Mormon power structures, gender and sexuality, religion and folk culture, post-manifesto polygamy, dissent, and religion and capitalism. Please submit a 250-word abstract and brief CV to quinnconference@gmail.com by December 1, 2021. Decisions will be made by January 15.

Limited funding will be available to assist with travel costs for those whose papers are accepted but lack institutional support. A final program will be announced in January 2022.

Conference Organizer

Benjamin E. Park, Sam Houston State University

Paper Selection Committee

Gary Bergera, Smith-Pettit Foundation

Barbara Jones Brown, Mormon History Association

Carter Charles, Brigham Young University

Lindsay Hansen Park, Sunstone Foundation

Taylor Petrey, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought

Conference Sponsors

Dialogue Foundation

Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies, Claremont Graduate University

Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture, Utah State University

Mormon History Association

Mormon Studies Initiative, University of Utah

Smith-Pettit Foundation

Sunstone Foundation

A quick follow-up to one of my previous posts: a federal judge dismissed James Huntsman’s fraud lawsuit against the church on Friday.

This may not have been an absolutely forgone conclusion, but it comes pretty close to one. Remember, Huntsman was suing to get his tithing money back from the church. That’s a tough ask in the first place because, other than conditional gifts, US law treats charitable donations as belonging to the recipient. Just because you later regret having made the donation doesn’t mean you can rescind it.

So Huntsman alleged that the church had fraudulently induced him to pay tithing. He relied, he said, on several statements from the church that it did not using tithing money to build City Creek when, in fact, it did use tithing money to build City Creek.

The problem with this allegation, as courts often point out, is that fraud is easy to allege but difficult to prove. And the court held that this case didn’t need to go to trial because there was no dispute by the parties about any material fact and, based on the facts and allegations, no reasonable jury could find that the church misrepresent any facts.

Huntsman pointed to Hinckley’s assertion that no tithing funds would be used to build City Creek as a misrepresentation on which he relied. The court pointed out that Huntsman did “not properly consider the full statement made by Hinckley.” Yes, Hinckley said that tithing would not be used. But he also said that earnings on reserve tithings would, in fact, be used. And that was precisely what happened.

Huntsman also brought in a statement by David Neilson, the 2019 Ensign Partners whistleblower, saying that Ensign Partners referred to all of its funds under management as “tithing.” Neilson’s statement, he said, created an issue of material fact that should go to a jury.

The court again disagreed. First, it doesn’t matter how EPA internally referred to its assets under management. Hinckley expressly differentiated tithing from return on invested tithing in the statement that Huntsman claimed to have relied on, and a colloquial view by someone else didn’t affect that. Second, EPA allocated money to City Creek in 2004, 2007, and 2009. Neilson didn’t start working at EPA until 2010, so he didn’t have any firsthand knowledge.

Huntsman also challenged a $600 million allocation to Beneficial Life. But, the court pointed out, he acknowledged that he didn’t recall any specific statement by the church regarding Beneficial Life. And you can’t have fraud if there is no specific misstatement you point toward. In that case, you’re just objecting to the use of the money and, like I said above, the fact that you regret donating doesn’t let you get your money back.

I was startled to realize recently that I had never read a mainstream novel by and about an LDS woman, despite holding a PhD in English. Although many contemporary LDS writers have achieved national recognition in science fiction and young adult literature, it remains rare for a national press to publish a book by an LDS author in which their religion features prominently–a fact that many have attributed to the lack of national interest in Mormonism, the suspicion with which members often receive unofficial books that deal with the Church, and the lack of robust institutional structures for supporting LDS literature. Those that are published (many of which are excellent) often derive their marketability by playing into sensationalized tropes about Mormonism held by outsiders, particularly those that depict LDS women as in need of rescue from their culture. Rosalyn Eves’ Beyond the Mapped Stars (Knopf, 2021) is a significant achievement, because Eves has written a young adult historical novel published by a national press that both satisfies the hunger of LDS young women to recognize themselves in literature while focusing on themes and events that have universal appeal.

Beyond the Mapped Stars tells the story of Elizabeth Bertelsen, an aspiring astronomer from a rural, polygamous LDS family who wonders whether her aspiration is compatible with the competing desires she feels towards her religion, family and romance. Her journey from home to assist a pregnant sister takes unexpected turns that allow her to meet fellow female astronomers and witness an eclipse. Along the way, she confronts her complicity with racism and struggles with how to present herself when people she encounters are skeptical of the religion she values. While Elizabeth faces setbacks, she remains open to seizing unexpected opportunities.

First and foremost, the novel is fun. It takes us on adventures in which incidents like a train robbery and appearances by famous characters like Thomas Edison and notable LDS ones like Jane Manning James routinely occur. The novel imports into its historical context our moment’s greater awareness of and aspirations to overcome sexism and racism, but this element of fantasy is often one of the novel’s strengths. Its historical context makes the novel anthropologically interesting (and safely insulated from direct discussion of contemporary religious and political debates–this is not a book that will spark a controversy at your Thanksgiving table), while it appeals to a broader range of readers by eschewing religious discussions that might be too particular to Mormonism in favor of more general themes about balancing dreams with social expectations and confronting discrimination. As such, Eves accomplishes what few LDS novels have done: treating everyday LDS experience with seriousness and respect while insisting that it has something to offer outsiders, too.

Beyond the Mapped Stars fills a void by providing LDS young women with a novel that takes their religion and their concerns seriously. It also serves as a potential model for how LDS writers might include their religion in national fiction. It’s a book we should buy because it’s worth reading. And it’s a book we should buy, share and review in order to prove to national publishers that LDS literature has an eager audience.

I suspect that we’ll never find a definitive explanation of how the proscribed “hot drinks” in D&C 89 came to be interpreted by the church as referring purely and solely to tea and coffee. Today, of course, that is the church’s official interpretation of what “hot drinks” means, but early in the history of the D&C that wasn’t entirely obvious.

In fact, in January 1838—almost five years after Joseph’s receipt of the revelation—prominent members of the church on the high council disagreed about whether the Word of Wisdom’s invocation of “hot drinks” referred to tea and coffee. During a high council meeting, W.W. Phelps said he had not broken the Word of Wisdom. Oliver Cowdery, by contrast, said he had drunk tea three times a day during the winter as a result of his poor health. David and John Whitmer piped in that they didn’t drink tea or coffee, but also that they didn’t consider either to be hot drinks as referred to in Joseph’s revelation.

That short colloquy tells us a number of things. It tells us first that within early in the history of D&C 89, church members had interpreted hot drinks as referring to (at least) tea and coffee. But it also tells us that prominent church members nonetheless drank them and that the idea that tea and coffee were prohibited was not universally accepted.

It looks like this ambiguity about the meaning of hot drinks persisted for at least another four years. But in May 1842, Hyrum Smith discoursed on the Word of Wisdom. He dedicated two sentences to hot drinks: “And again ‘hot drinks are not for the body, or belly;’ there are many who wonder what this can mean; whether it refers to tea, or coffee, or not. I say it does refer to tea, and coffee.” While he sets the definitive foundation here for the future treatment of tea and coffee, the fact that, even a decade after Joseph’s receipt of the revelation people had questions about what “hot drinks” meant suggests that it wasn’t an obvious reference. Rather, it had to be defined.

So where did this idea of hot drinks (whatever they are) being bad come from? Seventeen years ago (man, time flies!) Nate Oman posited that it may have come from the pre-germ theory idea of humors. Others have theorized that it represented a caution against the extremes of Thompsonian medicine (which apparently liked tea a lot) or the embrace of the theories of Sylvester Graham (who eschewed coffee and tea and also almost any pleasure—he wasn’t the guy you would want choosing a restaurant).

Curious, I did what any right-thinking person on the internet would do: I did a Google Ngram search. I then clicked on the 1800-1850 results. And the results were glorious.

The most on-point was an 1850 editorial in the Millennial Star by the editor of the Deseret News. And I confess that I don’t entirely follow the editor’s reasoning, but it reflects non-Mormon reasoning that we’ll look at it a minute. But basically, the editor argues that, while coffee and tea may be “narcotic poisons,” there’s an additional reason not to drink them: because they’re “HOT.”

Yes, in 1850, a church publication argued that hot drinks literally meant hot drinks. Why? This is where I don’t follow entirely, but he says that hot water makes animal substances elastic; rawhide, leather, and meat(!), when immersed in hot water, can be bent into almost any shape. But it doesn’t have the ability to retain that shape until it cools (and perhaps dries).

Somehow, this heat-induced elasticity means that you could make a stomach into a saddle or a chain and, in any event, a stomach filled with hot water can’t do what a stomach is supposed to do. Instead, food in the stomach lies dormant, and eventually putrefies before the stomach cools off and can start digesting again. This putrefying food leads to headaches, uneasiness, fever, and, eventually, death. (Cold water, he notes, also weakens the “fluids of the system,” but it doesn’t relax the stomach in the same way hot water does. So while it’s better not to drink any water while you eat, if you’re going to drink, cold water is better than hot.)

He then launches into a metaphor of a sponge being stuck quickly into hot water and how it will absorb all of the water and lose the ability to absorb more. And while I can’t figure out how immersing a sponge in hot water differs from immersing it in cold, apparently it does.

Seriously, you need to read this piece. I’m going to give you the link again, just in case you skipped it the first time.

Now, it wasn’t just the Mormons inveighing against the problems of hot drinks; while it doesn’t appear to be universal, there was a fair amount written about the evils of drinks with a hot temperature. And the issues seem to largely fall into two categories: stomach problems and tooth problems.

In a, 1839 article in the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, for example, we read that the stomach is a weak organ. (Seriously: apparently even “too much mental study” will mess with digestion.) Hot drinks “disturb the healthy action of the stomach, and create a diseased state of this vital organ.”

An 1829 article in the New England Medical Review and Journal came to a similar conclusion. Drinks, it says, should ideally be taken at body temperature. Hotter drinks may help people feel better temporarily, but eventually induce “an augmented suffering, by increasing the debility of the stomach, and rendering it less capable of after-digestion.” The article accepts, though, that there may be exceptions to this general rule.

The 1841 book A Treatise on Domestic Economy: For Young Ladies at Home bridges our gap between stomach and teeth. It asserts that if a person drinks hot drinks twice a day, “the teeth, throat, and stomach, are gradually debilitated.” The author believed that Americans’ habit of drinking hot drinks explained why tooth decay was more common among “American ladies” than Europeans. (Of course, these kinds of advice books could be inconsistent: in The Young Mother; or Management of Children in Regard to Health, the author acknowledges that hot drinks are bad for the stomach and cause tooth decay, but he believes that cold drinks are even more dangerous.)

And how do hot drinks damage teeth? Nature’s Own Book, written in 1835, has the answer for us. Substituting hot milk or watter for coffee or tea, it explains, is counterproductive because hot liquid is “relaxing to the solids of the body.” As best I can tell, that means that the heat makes teeth go soft, which leads to decay. And the author can prove it! Cows that ate hot still-slops lost their teeth within a couple years and could no longer eat hay.

There’s no reason, of course, that this means Joseph wasn’t influenced by Grahamism or humorosity or pure revelation. But it’s interesting to see an early 19th century discussion of hot drinks as bad by virtue of temperature itself. And that view seems to have had at least some purchase on church members.

A note before anybody comments: this post is not about whether the lived Word of Wisdom prohibits coffee and tea. It very clearly does. Rather, it’s about where the term “hot drinks” in D&C 89 comes from and what Joseph’s contemporaries were saying about hot drinks.

Got your attention? Great!

As I’m sure you’ve heard, the Supreme Court didn’t stop a Texas law that bans abortions performed by Texas physicians after six weeks from going into effect.

The Texas law is clearly unconstitutional. Whether or not you think the right to abortion should be a constitutional right, there is no question under Supreme Court jurisprudence that it is. And the Supreme Court has never allowed a six-week abortion ban to go into effect before, even temporarily.

So what’s different about this Texas ban? Enforcement. Usually statutes that prohibit abortion are enforced by the state government. That means that procedurally, pre-enforcement challenges are straightforward: you sue the government, which would enforce the law, and your case works its way through the court system. If the courts think you have a reasonable chance of winning, they can issue an injunction, preventing the law from going into effect until there has been a full hearing.

This Texas law functions differently: the Texas government does not enforce it. Rather, the law is enforced through “private civil actions.” What that means is that, instead of the government fining or jailing violators of the law, individuals can sue people who perform or aid and abet the performance of an abortion in violation of the Texas law.

This private right of action enforcement is intended to make pre-enforcement challenges nearly impossible. Why? Because there’s no designated enforcer to bring a case against. (That procedural impediment may be why the Supreme Court declined to prevent the law from going into effect.)

If you’re a U.S. person and you’re interested in constitutional rights, this legislation should terrify you, whether or not you support abortion rights. Why? Because if this works, it provides a template for state governments to circumvent the Constitution. Does Illinois want to ban all guns? Give individuals a private right of action against anybody who owns or sells a gun. Does New York want to prevent citizens from criticizing legislators? They can copy and paste the Texas law, replacing a couple words here and there. Does Missouri regret its rescinding its Extermination Order? Give citizens a private right of action against anybody who organizes or attends a meeting of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

And note that this isn’t a slippery slope argument: I’m not saying that this abortion law will inevitably result in these unconstitutional laws. I’m saying it provides a template that legislators can (and will) use to enact policies they want and will get them enacted at least temporarily.

These unconstitutional laws won’t stick, of course. Eventually someone will sue and the abortion law will be challenged and will, presumably, be struck down. But in the meantime, abortion providers in Texas face the risk of lawsuits. And even if the law gets overturned and they don’t have to pay the plaintiff, they’ve still spent the time and money and faced the emotional costs of defending suits. Similarly, the blanket ban on guns, criticism, or church meetings would, eventually, be overturned. But in the meantime, anybody who had a gun or criticized the legislature or attended church could face serious and debilitating costs. (And those potential serious and debilitating costs would chill peoples’ exercise of their constitutionally-protected rights.)

This post is, I repeat, not about abortion. It’s not about the normative question of whether abortion should be a constitutional right. Rather, it’s about the risk to all of our rights that this Texas legislation, and the Supreme Court’s failure to prevent it from going into effect before it can be fully litigated, poses. And that’s something that all of us in the United States need to worry about, irrespective of our political preferences.

As I received with hard-won indifference a job rejection this week, I contemplated how the do-it-all feminism of the nineties on which I had been raised had rested on two assumptions: (1) that there were plentiful sufficiently-paying and meaningful jobs; and (2) the existence of cheap childcare. The latter, I now understand with a clarity that eluded me in my twenties, was synonymous with the maintenance of a set of class, racial and gender hierarchies in which less-educated and often Black women provided care to professional, often white families. 

At middle age, I am now old enough to have had both of these assumptions thoroughly dispelled. There are some people whose interests and training have been lucky enough to correspond with market demands and structural expectations, but I trained first to be an academic and then (primarily because of the failing academic job market) to be a lawyer. I have stayed home for the last few years due to a combination of desire, complications with remote working and never finding the right job in the same city as my spouse. I cannot presently work firm hours with two children and a limited support network. Although outsiders often suggest that I find a public sector position or hang up my own shingle, I know that such jobs are extremely difficult to get (I’ve been rejected from every one to which I’ve applied) and that starting a business is no easy lift (and one for which I have no passion). Although I wouldn’t consider the dismantling of my career(s) a privilege, I enjoy being with my children far more than I expected. I know that if I went back that I would give up some things I value.

My story, however, is just a personal anecdote in what has become an ongoing generational economic and identity crisis. Since entering adulthood in the early 2000s, I have witnessed two major economic downturns that have left many members of my generation stranded. While some fields have thrived, others like academia have imploded or paid workers less while demanding more, using narratives surrounding careers, difference-making and passion to benefit themselves more than their employees. The pandemic has opened opportunities for remote work that I hope will benefit families, but it has also left childcare in tatters and stretched parents to their limits. Even if the pandemic hadn’t pushed childcare to the brink, however, I can no longer conceal from myself that I am deeply uncomfortable with a society that profits by underpaying or not paying those who raise its children, whatever the individual outcomes for those children might be.

From the vantage point of 2021, it’s impossible to deny the fragility and inequity of our economy, institutions and environment. As these change, so must the metrics with which we assess our lives. Values and feminisms intertwined with a collapsing economic model cannot be the philosophies by which we take stock of our pursuits. Feminist debates that structured and reflected the economics of the Twentieth Century–whether prescriptive arguments in favor of women entering the paid labor market or staying home to provide unpaid labor–no longer matter to me when I cannot even make sense of what a career looks like in the Twenty-First. True, there will always be inspirational stories of women who somehow achieved “balance.” In fact, quite a few recent LDS pieces have wanted to persuade me that this is desirable and possible, but it hasn’t yet worked out for me. Similarly, as I browse books like Clayton M. Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life (2012), I can’t help feeling that while I enjoy his framework and theories that he makes basic assumptions, like the fact that one will have a career, that no longer feel applicable to me.

It’s a humbling admission that I no longer feel that the kind of feminism I grew up meets the needs of this moment given how much I’d previously staked on achieving career goals–and would pray in desperation for permission when they seemed in conflict with the gospel. Ironic, even, when the idea of mothers working for pay finally seems to have morphed from a dangerous idea to a concept now so commonly accepted that even official Church venues routinely highlight women’s career achievements. Feminist aspirations directed towards the workplace that I once (and often still) share have become normalized at the very moment the American workplace is itself being called into question.

And so I find myself asking again and again during this pandemic how to live when almost every aspect of our lives is in a state of crisis. What happens when we discover that our values and aspirations are tied to outdated assumptions? How do we measure our lives, to paraphrase Clayton M. Christensen, when the metrics we used no longer make sense (and, frankly, never worked for many women and other minorities in the first place)? When we begin to see that many of the metrics, philosophies and values to which we have clung are tied to temporary economic conditions that don’t have eternal, or even decades-long, relevance? What should I do–and to what should I aspire–as a woman and a latter-day saint in unstable times?

I’ve changed my politics, of course, in response to the failures I’ve experienced. I now long for a feminism that focuses more on universal safety nets rather than exceptional achievement and values unpaid as well as paid labor. But I’ve found answers about how to live my own life in the most LDS of ways: turning to The Book of Mormon, a book that is less about success than it is about the total destruction of societies due in large part to the same issues we confront today: inequality, racism, corruption, member infighting and political partisanship. It’s a book that models how to live in troubled times, not good ones. It does not offer a consistent political philosophy, which is itself a lesson in what matters to God. Certainly few people in it are succeeding in ways we’d value today. Quite a few are refugees.

What it offers instead are examples of people who, to quote Nephi, were “led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.” What I hear in these words, spoken by a prophet whose entire existence had just been uprooted and whose family would soon splinter apart, is that living well in transitional times means letting go of our preconceptions and being open to unexpected promptings. To not insist on a favored ideology or life plan, but, in the words of our Prophet, to “let God prevail” as He directs a future only He knows. To measure our lives not by temporary metrics but by how well we are willing listen.

*My title is a nod to and critique of Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth and Karen Dillon’s How Will You Measure Your Life? (New York: Harper, 2012).

When I worked at BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute I was aware of Elder Maxwell’s musket analogy that Elder Holland recently borrowed. The Institute had been tasked with fortifying the faith of Latter-day Saints, which includes apologetics, or defending the faith, so we spent a lot of time thinking about it. I helped cultivate a style of apologetics that exhibited charity, curiosity, flexibility, and strength.

Not everyone was satisfied. Elder Maxwell was often cited as calling for more aggression with his metaphors about muskets and slam dunks. But in all my time at the Institute those analogies didn’t resonate with me. I was more drawn to this counsel from then-Elder Henry B. Eyring, who called the one of the Institute’s predecessors (FARMS) to a undertake a ceasefire back in 1994:

Quote #1: Gentleness

“Because you know that the value of your work lies less in convincing and more in inviting people to seek truth by prayer, you have exemplified another virtue. You have tried to be models of kindness in your dialogue with others, especially with those with whom you disagree. You know that a spirit of contention will drive away the very influence by which they can know truth. That has led you to shun ridicule. It has led you to avoid the temptation of playing to the already converted, seeking their applause by trying to make your adversary appear the fool. It is easy to gain the laughter of an appreciative crowd who delight to see the truth defended with boldness and strength, but you have remembered that the heart you wish to touch may hear derision in that laughter and so turn away. Your civility and gentleness could bless all associations of scholars, whatever they may be studying together.” [PDF]

When you look at the context of that address, it becomes clear that Elder Eyring was correcting the apologists with aspirational praise. Too few had been exemplifying what he described. Several apologists frequently exhibited belligerence, arrogance, mockery, and scorn in their publications. Some still do today.

Elder Holland (following Oaks following Maxwell) recently called again for muskets. I’ve seen this play out before. Calling for more muskets only calls forth more muskets all around, creating a spiral of rhetorical violence (to say nothing of the scary threats that some unstable person might be emboldened to carry out under presumed apostolic instruction, including a death threat I received while working at BYU). When we see different people react differently to the call for firearms we’re seeing differences of opinion about what exactly is being called for. Elder Holland left a lot up to the imagination.

When I think of muskets I think of aggression, carnage, revenge. Jerkiness begets jerkiness. I know this because I’ve participated in it. I’ve experienced it. I’m not resisting the musket stuff on the grounds that it makes me feel icky. I resist it because I kind of like it sometimes. I recognize the rhetorically violent impulses in myself and I’m afraid of letting those impulses have full sway.

So why does the musket thing keep getting cited, not something like Eyring’s words? As I said, there are competing models of Latter-day Saint apologetics, especially considering tone and approach. General Authorities have a huge trove of past speeches and sermons to draw from when they write talks today. There are competing views on a number of issues in these old repositories, so although present leaders are bound in some ways by their predecessors they also have options and exercise agency. They can selectively choose who to quote, what to emphasize, and make a point that they already wanted to make. So I believe Elder Holland meant what he said, including the fact that he looks forward to the day when rhetorical swords can be beaten into gardening tools, when we “learn war no more,” borrowing scriptural phrases.

What’s stopping us from doing that right now? Today? The old Primary song, “Kindness begins with me” comes to mind.

According to Elder Holland we’ll have to keep learning war and brandishing muskets/swords because “there will continue to be those who oppose our teachings.” But maybe we don’t have to respond with muskets and swords at all. Sure, there are plenty of examples in Christian and Mormon history of what I’ve elsewhere called smashmouth apologetics. Scripture itself contains plenty of harshness. It also offers reason to resist replicating such harshness. Scripture is complicated. I feel a moral imperative to resist musketry.

Again, I’m not perfect. I have my own snarky thorn in the flesh to contend with. I fight. I sometimes let my anger at what I see as unjust situations boil over into rage at perceived perpetrators. But in my better moments I see how ineffective and soul-poisoning that approach truly is.

Quote 2: Christian courage

So I want to hold to Eyring’s vision and reject the musket. I’m more inspired and much more challenged by the words of Elder Eyring, whose sentiments are also reflected in a Conference address by Elder Robert D. Hales. File these quotes away for reference when other members or leaders call for muskets:

“Recently a group of bright, faithful young Latter-day Saints wrote down some of the most pressing questions on their minds. One sister asked, ‘Why doesn’t the Church defend itself more actively when accusations are made against it?’

“To her inquiry I would say that one of mortality’s great tests comes when our beliefs are questioned or criticized. In such moments, we may want to respond aggressively—to put up our dukes. But these are important opportunities to step back, pray, and follow the Savior’s example. Remember that Jesus Himself was despised and rejected by the world. And in Lehi’s dream, those coming to the Savior also endured mocking and pointing fingers. But when we respond to our accusers as the Savior did, we not only become more Christ-like, we invite others to feel His love and follow Him as well.

“To respond in a Christ-like way cannot be scripted or based on a formula. The Savior responded differently in every situation. When He was confronted by wicked King Herod, He remained silent. When He stood before Pilate, He bore a simple and powerful testimony of His divinity and purpose. Facing the moneychangers who were defiling the temple, He exercised His divine responsibility to preserve and protect that which was sacred. Lifted up upon a cross, He uttered the incomparable Christian response: Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

“Some people mistakenly think responses such as silence, meekness, forgiveness, and bearing humble testimony are passive or weak. But to love our enemies, bless them that curse us, do good to them that hate us, and pray for them which despitefully use us, and persecute us takes faith, strength, and, most of all, Christian courage.”

Quote #3: Conflict versus contention

To Eyring and Hales’s witness we can add Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf’s address delivered at BYU earlier this month:

“Our Lord Jesus Christ—our model of ­perfection—did not live a life free of conflict…What was His response? To some, He did not speak a word. To others, He spoke the simple truth—not in anger but with calm majesty. As others contended with Him, He stood in His place—trusting in His Father, calm in His testimony, and firm in the truth.

“Conflict is inevitable. It is a condition of mortality. It is part of our test. Contention, however, is a choice. It is one way that some people choose to respond to conflict. When we contend with others, we cause discord, dissension, resentment, and even rage. Harmful emotions almost always accompany contention: anger, hurt, jealousy, hostility, revenge, and malice—to name just a few.”

He goes on from there, but you get the point. Latter-day Saints love backing up our claims and actions with quotes from General Authorities. So now you have access to three great sources to invoke when someone tries to enlist you into a rhetorical shootout using the words of apostles. These other leaders (and at other times, Elder Holland himself!) have encouraged us to exemplify greater charity, not seek better artillery, when discussing and defending the Gospel of Peace.

There are more. Add a favorite in the comments!

SOURCES

*Henry B. Eyring, “The Marketplace of Ideas,” An address delivered at the annual FARMS banquet, 13 October, 1994. Speech transcript in my possession.

*Robert D. Hales: “Christian Courage: The Price of Discipleship,” October 2008 General Conference.

*Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “Five Messages That All of God’s Children Need to Hear,” BYU Speeches, August 2021.

Bonus Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 13. Alma 31:5. Doctrine and Covenants 50:17-24.

**PS- It’s nice to be back at BCC!

We owe Robinson Crusoe to the 18^th-century public’s inability to understand satire.

It’s true. Daniel Defoe did not set out to become a writer. He wanted to be a wealthy merchant, and he had all kinds of idea about how to do so. But he was also a dissenting Protestant at a time when conformity to the Church of England was compulsory under the law. In 1702, Defoe wrote an anonymous pamphlet called The Shortest Way with the Dissenters in which he repeated most of the Anglican arguments for coerced conformity and then took them one step further to argue that those who would not conform should be killed.

It was brilliant satire, but very few people got it. Most people thought it was for real, and it caused a huge stir, with some people attacking and others defending the argument. When Defoe was discovered to be the author, he was tried and convicted for irresponsibly calling for the deaths of Her Majesty’s subjects. He tried to argue that it was satire, but the judges ruled that satire was not a defense. Defoe was convicted and placed in the stocks, ruining his credit and his ability to enter business, so he became a writer instead.

When I first heard this story in a graduate seminar, I was incensed for Defoe. How could those silly judges not get the joke? How could they punish a brilliant writer—the guy who basically invented the novel—for meaning exactly the opposite of what he said? This was why the eighteenth century couldn’t have nice things.

But I don’t feel that way now. I wouldn’t vote to make harsh satire like this illegal. I am quite committed to the freedom of speech. But I also think that writers bear some of the blame when their words are misunderstood and even abused. (Just as they get much of the credit when their words make positive changes in the world). Writers employ language to do things, and words can be powerful and dangerous things. Words have consequences. I have been arguing this for some time.

Last week, I had opportunities to argue it twice—in ways that put me on opposite sides of an ecclesiastical fence. Consequently, I was called out by two very different groups of my co-religionists for making statements that, in my mind at least, were entirely consistent with each other.

First, on this blog, I wrote a post defending the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for using the Parable of the Talents—the story of a master who rewarded those servants who invested his money rather than hiding it in the ground—to defend itself for investing money rather than hiding it in the ground.

My point was not that investing money was the only thing that the parable was about; but it was something that the parable was about. As I wrote, “Parables are metaphorical, of course, but the metaphors only work if the core narrative makes sense on its own terms.” Words mean things, and this is something that everyone who uses words has to understand and acknowledge.

The response was immediate and predictable, “How can you possibly say that Jesus wants people to amass money?” the critics asked. “That is a parable about goodness, and love, and serving others. Jesus was always on the side of the poor people. To think that he was on the side of a rich man who wanted more money is a crass misreading of the story.”

My response was, and remains, that, while the vehicle of a metaphor is always a gateway to another meaning, the metaphor itself has to make sense or we can’t get to the larger meaning. The Parable of the Lost Sheep is not really about sheep, but if people don’t recognize that looking for a lost sheep is a good thing, they can’t get to the other meanings of the story. Words mean what they mean on the surface first, and surface meanings can’t be entirely discarded on the way to depth and wisdom.

Just a few days later, I had the opportunity to be part of a Mormon Land podcast from the Salt Lake Tribune. The interviewers asked me about Elder Holland’s recent use of the metaphor of a musket to describe BYU professors who defend the Church, and “friendly fire” do describe those who criticize the Church. This is what I said:

I have no doubt that Holland was using that in good faith as a metaphor. He wasn’t actually telling people to get muskets and shoot their enemies. But I think words and metaphors are important and they have consequences. And in a speech that is is calling for an end to divisiveness and a talk in which he is talking about unity and love and getting along better with each other, to use a marshal metaphor like that, I think really undermines what was the main intent of the speech. . . . . And even though the intent was to use a metaphor, arguing metaphorically for enemies to be killed, that’s a very violent metaphor. And it’s, I think, dramatically at odds with the conciliatory approach that the Elder Holland was making for much of the speech.

I got a number of direct messages on this one asking me why I couldn’t see that Elder Holland was using a metaphor. He didn’t mean actual muskets, and he wasn’t talking about “killing” or “enemies.” He was just trying to make a point about something else.

I agree with this assessment, and I said as much in the interview. But the nature of our metaphors is important because words are important. Language has enormous power to wound and to heal. Using a martial metaphor to describe discussion and disagreement introduces an unnecessary level of violence into the discourse. It makes it harder, not easier, for us to understand each other and work together in love to solve conflicts.

The consistent point that I have been trying to make in these discussions—and I’m going to double down on it here—is that words matter. Language matters. A lot. Meaning matters a lot too, but words are always imperfect conveyors of intention. If people can’t get past our words, they will never know our intentions.  Human beings are language-using animals, which is both a blessing and a curse. It gives us the ability to create cooperation, friendship, poetry, and love. But it also gives us comments sections and Twitter. Language amplifies our power to heal and our power to destroy. Anything this powerful must handled with precision and care.

There are two recent lawsuits filed against the LDS church that are worth taking a look at. Both lawsuits demand that the church return donations to the donor (or the donor’s heirs).

And both face a major impediment: as a general rule, if you make a charitable donation, you can’t get that donation back. And that’s the case even if the you have a falling out with the charitable organization. In fact, that’s the case even if the charitable organization uses your gift in a way that you, personally, find offensive. (In that case, you can certainly stop making charitable donations in the future, of course. But you don’t get your prior donations back.)

There are exceptions to this general rule, of course. And the plaintiffs in the two cases try to get around the rule by using two different exceptions.

Huntsman v. Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

James Huntsman of the well-known Huntsman family, filed a suit (complaint available here) in March asserting that the church had fraudulently induced him to pay tithing and demanding that the church return the tithing that he had paid. One California court (James lives in and paid tithing in California, so California law applies) explained that it is first year contract law that charitable donations cannot be reclaimed unless there’s fraud, violation of a confidential relationship or breach of trust.[fn1]

So James claims he was fraudulently induced to pay his tithing. Specifically, he claims that the church’s statements that it didn’t use tithing money to build City Creek mall was a false statement that he relied on in making his tithing payments.

Now in asserting fraud, James faces a significant hurdle: courts have recognized that “[f]raud is a serious charge, easy to allege and hard to prove.” As a result, federal court requires a heightened pleading standard when a plaintiff asserts fraud.

And what do courts mean by a “heightened pleading standard”? It means it’s not enough to just say in your first filing that the defendant did something wrong and prove it later. In the initial filing, you have to “plead fraud with particularity.” Broadly speaking, that means your very first filing has to lay out specifically the “who, what, when, where and how” of the fraud.

The church’s defense of the suit basically rests on three pillars. In no particular order, the church says that it didn’t lie (which would mean there’s not fraud), the suit is constitutionally impermissible under the First Amendment, and that James didn’t plead fraud with particularity.

The church filed a motion for summary judgment (which basically asks the court to rule on the case without going to trial). This case had a hearing on the motion scheduled for Monday. The judge has cancelled the hearing, though, and says he’ll make a ruling based on the submitted documents.

The ruling could do one of two things: it could grant the church’s motion for summary judgment, which would mean that the case (in its current form at least) is over and the church wins. Or it could deny the motion, which means the case would proceed to trial.

I suspect that the court will grant the motion for summary judgment based on deficiencies in the pleading of fraud. That is, I don’t think James pleaded fraud with the requisite particularity. The judge could, of course, rule on the factual and constitutional matters too, but judges generally like to take care of cases on the narrowest grounds possible. And I suspect that fraud is the narrowest ground possible. (I could clearly be wrong, of course, and we’ll all have to keep an eye on what happens next.)

Teichert v. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

In June, Tim Teichert filed a suit against the church. If his name sounds familiar, it’s because it is—Tim is the grandson of Minerva Teichert. Minerva died intestate (meaning without a will) in 1976. Her husband Herman died intestate in 1982. And Tim was appointed the administrator of his Herman’s estate.

In 1955, Minerva gave four paintings to the Cokeville, Wyoming ward. The paintings were to be displayed at the Cokeville building.

In 2014, the church moved one of the four paintings. In 2020, it moved the other four paintings.

Now, as I said earlier, generally a donor can’t get a donation back. But the suit alleges that these were conditional donations: Minerva and the bishop of the Cokeville ward at the time (Herman K. Teichert, her son) agreed that if the paintings were moved, ownership would revert back to Minerva or, if she had died, her heirs.

The paintings were moved. So will the estate get them back? The answer, I believe, depends on the answers to two questions. The first is, was there an agreement?

But that’s going to be a hard question to answer. The complaint says that Minerva never entered into a written agreement with the church. And, while a contract doesn’t have to be written to be enforceable, a written contract really helps as an evidentiary matter. Absent the written contract, Tim is going to have to present other evidence both that the contract existed and what the terms of the contract were. (And, since he’s the one asserting that there was a conditional contractual gift, the burden will be on Tim to show that there was an agreement and what that agreement said.)

It becomes harder because the two alleged parties to the contract—Minerva and her son Herman—have both died.

Perhaps Tim has other evidence of a contract. And at this stage of the litigation he doesn’t need to show it. But without evidence of a contract, the suit is dead.

That’s a factual impediment. But I suspect there’s also a legal impediment: was Herman an agent of the church in making this agreement.

Oh, sorry: “agent” is a legal term of art. It basically means, did Herman have the right to bind the church to a contract? It’s not obvious that he did. Today, I can imagine at most rare occasions where bishops are agents of the church and can enter into a contract that binds the church. In 1955, when the church was smaller and more centralized in the Mormon Corridor, its possible that bishops had a tighter relationship with the institutional church and that they did act as agents. But it’s possible that they didn’t.

And basically, if Herman didn’t have the legal authority to enter into a contract that bound the church, then even if he did enter into a contract with his mother, that contract would not be binding on the church.

Concluding Thoughts

Both of these cases are, I suspect, uphill battles for the plaintiffs. The rule that you can’t get your charitable donation back is a pretty ironclad rule. The exceptions are limited and narrow and the burden falls on the donor to prove that their case falls within one of the exceptions.

Still, it will be interesting to watch how these cases play out and resolve.

Irrelevant Musical Adendum

I really really wanted to title this post “I Want [It] Back” and use some sort of extended metaphor/riff on the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” to introduce it. That ended up being far too attenuated to make any sense at all, but nonetheless if you want to see an awesome 1970s music video, you should really watch them perform here.

—

[fn1] Word of God Fellowship, Inc. v. Coast Cmty. Coll. Dist., No. G033901, 2005 WL 1491297 (Cal. Ct. App. June 23, 2005), vacated, No. G033901, 2006 WL 1454737 (Cal. Ct. App. May 25, 2006).

Divisiveness is in the news again at the BYU, and, it seems, we must all pick a side. On the one side, we have same-sex marriage, commandeered commencement speeches, disobedience, sin, and disunity. On the other side we have institutional dignity, unequivocal love, loyalty, swords beaten into plowshares, and peace. Easy choice, right? Who wouldn’t want peace? That is, after all, what all disciples of Christ should work for.

But we have to be careful when striving for peace. Like most beautiful and powerful words, “peace” can mean several things, not all of them worth striving for. The ancient world gives us two profound metaphors for peace: the desert and the river. Both deserve careful attention.

The concept of desert peace comes to us from the great Roman historian, Tacitus, speaking about Rome and the much-vaunted Pax Romana. Without any context, his famous phrase “Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” (They make a desert and call it peace) works like a wrecking ball on the idea that peace is always a good thing. It reminds us that one can get to a permanent absence of war simply by destroying every living thing. Where there is no life, there is no conflict.

In its original context, the phrase is even more devastating. It comes in Tacitus’s minor classic, Agricola, a family history of his own father-in-law, who served as a governor of Roman Britain in the early days of the conquest. Though the lines are the invention of Tacitus, he places them in the mouth of Calgacus, the Caledonian chieftain, in a speech addressing his men before a great battle with the Roman invaders:

Making concessions and being moderate isn’t going to save us from their tyranny.  They rape the whole world.   When they’ve finished devastating the land they turn their attentions to the sea.  If their enemies have wealth they want it; if they’re poor, it makes no difference, they still hunger for power.  Nowhere, east or west, is enough for them – they’re the only ones who lust after everything alike, rich or poor.  Abduction, massacre, plunder they misname ‘law and order’.  Where they make a desert they call it ‘peace.’

In this amazing speech, Tacitus lays bare the big lie of empire, which is that its actions can be justified by anything beyond the raw exercise of force—things like “law and order,” “duly constituted authority,” and even “peace.” These are simply the lies that the powerful repeat as they are imposing their will on the powerless. Or, as Thucydides put it 500 years earlier, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

But peace can be something better than a desert. It can be a river. I first encountered the phrase “peace like a river” in the title of a Paul Simon song. And if this weren’t enough (but of course it is), it is also part of a prophecy from Isaiah found in Isaiah 66:12-13, speaking of the ultimate redemption of Jerusalem.

“I will extend peace to her like a river,
and the wealth of nations like a flooding stream;
you will nurse and be carried on her arm
and dandled on her knees.
As a mother comforts her child,
so will I comfort you;
and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.”

And peace isn’t the only thing that flows like a river in the Old Testament. In the book of Amos we see that justice does too. Or at least should: “Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (5:4). I don’t think that this is a coincidence. River peace—the kind of peace that we should always seek and strive to produce—cannot exist without justice.

This was perhaps the major theme of Amos, Isaiah, and all of the Hebrew Prophets. They had no interest in desert-peace, or in peace defined simply as the absence of open conflict. The desire to eliminate conflict comes, not from a desire to create real peace, but from a desire to minimize discomfort. Human beings like to be comfortable, and, when we are not uncomfortable, we often imagine that we are happy.

The elimination of discomfort, however, is not a gospel principle. The gospel is supposed to make us uncomfortable. So is a university education. We don’t grow in our comfort zone. We grow when we allow ourselves to experience discomfort and then try to figure out why. When a BYU student recently used a commencement address to acknowledge that he was “proud to be a gay son of God,” a lot of people were uncomfortable. Some of them wrote angry letters. But some of them also grew spiritually and discovered the expansiveness of God’s love.

I doubt that anybody ever made anybody else more uncomfortable than Amos and Isaiah and the other prophets of the Old Testament made everyone they encountred. They were, as Abraham Heschel has written, “some of the most disturbing people who ever lived.” But they were supposed to be disturbing. They were supposed to annoy and harangue and overwhelm people with God’s anger at their greed and their pettiness. God called the prophets to bring peace to the world, but river-peace, not desert-peace. To create peace they first had to bring about justice.

If we want to define peace as inherently divine, then we must make very sure that, by “peace,” we do not mean the absence of conflict or the elimination of discomfort. Otherwise, we place the burden of everyone’s comfort on the most vulnerable and marginalized members of our community. We create desert-peace, and we make river-peace impossible.  

Dr. Martin Luther King came to just this conclusion when a group of white pastors, who opposed segregation and supported with the goals of the Civil Rights Movement, criticized him for being too divisive. His response to their criticism became the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In it, he wrote:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

Those of us who take seriously the injunction to renounce war and proclaim peace must recognize that, in the absence of justice, “peace”—and its civilian equivalent of “all just getting along”—will usually benefit the powerful at the expense of the powerless. Thus, it joins a large constellation of seemingly good values—including equality, consistency, comfort, civility, decency, and order—that can be invoked against agents of positive change by those with a strong interest in keeping things the way they have always been.

Let us always seek peace like a river—even if, by doing so, we must first disrupt the deserts that have too long passed for peace in the minds of those who have no need of water.

We live at a time when conspiracy theory is spreading. This is my third post on its particularly Mormon manifestations. See the first here and the second here. 

In 1985, James “Bo” Gritz received a patriarchal blessing. According to him, a few years later, it promised “the gift of discernment,” and “the ability to explain in words people will understand. You will have multitudes that will follow you. They will have no allegiance to you. They will only have allegiance to what it is you stand for.”

Regardless of how accurately Gritz reported on the blessing, this was certainly how he liked to perceive himself. He possessed special insight as a result of spiritual gifts; he stood for a Cause, not personal aggrandizement; nonetheless, he was part of a movement.

When Gritz received the blessing he was well past forty, but this was because he was a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His conversion was similarly dramatic—the product, in part, of the same impulses that drove his interpretation of his blessing.

Gritz was a career soldier, a Vietnam veteran, and by all accounts a sterling officer, the recipient of multiple honors and praised all the way up the military chain of command. He retired after thirteen years of service at age forty in 1979. He remained restless, though, and drank deep of the anti-government cynicism that pervaded the 1970s: the product of American withdrawal from Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, and the growing mobilization of conservative thinktanks, funded by major corporations, that steadily blasted regulation as the death of freedom.

****

In the 1980s, Gritz began to mount independent, covert missions to Vietnam looking for the 2,500 American soldiers who were missing in action. He was confident many were still held by the communist Vietnamese regime, and he persuaded an organization of MIA family members to endorse his trips. He rescued no soldiers, but he came back with three convictions.

The first was that there were indeed still living American soldiers held in Vietnam.

The second was that the American government was corrupt. There existed, he said, a “parallel government” that was concerned primarily with profiteering and power. It was slowly chiseling away at American freedom. It knew that those MIA soldiers were still in Vietnam and chose to leave them, because of a devil’s bargain with drug lords in southeast Asia.

Gritz’s third conviction was that God was directing him to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

****

He told a newspaper reporter he had a revelatory experience in the Vietnam jungles. God spoke to him. In 1984 he was baptized. In 1985 he and his wife Claudia were sealed in the St. George temple.

It appears that at least two things about the Church appealed to Gritz. The first was the promise of personal divine revelation. Indeed, Gritz later claimed that “I found great peace and clarity in my celestial communication” as a member of the Church, and he pointed to his patriarchal blessing as an affirmation that God knew him and had a plan for his life.  

Second, Gritz believed that the LDS Church was sympathetic to his emerging political beliefs, which included social conservatism and suspicion of government. In particular, he was sympathetic to the past political writings of Ezra Taft Benson, who became president of the Church the same year Gritz and his wife were sealed. He called Benson “a gentleman and a true patriot,” and said “he has never varied from the views he talked about as an apostle.”

Those views included an important distinction. While Benson indeed was a “conservative” in the American sense–a word that has since the 1960s connoted opposition to large government programs and support for social traditionalism—Benson was also a conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy belief is a third dimension in American politics; it is neither left nor right, but can attach itself to either end of the American political spectrum.

For Benson, and later for Gritz, it attached itself to their conservatism. It elaborated their conservative opposition to large government with belief in a shadowy elite seeking to use that government to destroy American freedom. It built on top of their social traditionalism fear of a plot to destroy the American family. And it was essentially wound into their faith in the Church. Gritz eagerly adopted Benson’s conspiracist reading of the Book of Mormon, seeing contemporary political actors in that book’s “secret combinations.”

Gritz’s conspiracist form of Christianity extended beyond Mormonism. He regularly consorted with Christian Identity, a movement that associated Christianity with white supremacy, and—particularly to Gritz’s liking—believed that the American government was using policies like affirmative action to establish a totalitarian state. He drew many ideas from evangelical conspiracy theorists who believed that the Antichrist was seeking domination over the world through international organizations like the United Nations.

By the mid-1980s, Gritz was speaking and writing about the threat of the “New World Order,” a phrase made popular by the Pentecostal leader Pat Robertson, and had become well known in conspiracist circles. And what circles they were in those years. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a boom time for American conspiracism. The federal government had a number of clashes with so-called “militia” groups and other groups of small, defiant conspiracy believers. The shootout with the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge. The tragedy of the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas. In 1994, the Christian Identity believer Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma. All of these groups merged fear of the United Order with Gritz’s beliefs about the “parallel government” and the racial resentment stoked by Christian Identity.

And in 1988, Bo Gritz was nominated by the conspiracist Populist Party to be the running mate on the presidential ticket of David Duke, the former Louisiana politician and Klansman. After a bit of hesitation Gritz withdrew his name, citing distaste of Duke. But in 1992 he claimed the Populist presidential nomination for himself and burned a United Nations flag on stage, and it was then that his conspiracist beliefs drew him into conflict with the Church.

****

Crucially, for much of the twentieth century Church leaders were “conservative,” but not conspiracist to the extent that Benson and Gritz were. This had, I suspect, much to do with the Church’s desire for respectability, fear of seeming extreme or disreputable on the American public stage, and concern for social stability.

Thus, in 1992 Brigham Young University invited the two major presidential candidates, Bill Clinton and the incumbent George HW Bush to speak. Gritz was furious he did not receive a similar invitation. Increasingly, he grew convinced that his Church was itself wrapped into the conspiracy. “It was painfully clear that LDS Church leaders favored Bush and would do whatever it takes to keep votes from me and the Constitution.”

In the same months that Gritz was running for president, Utah newspapers were reporting that the Church was quietly attempting to repress conspiracy belief in is own ranks. In late November 1992, local leaders of the Church throughout the West began interviewing and in some cases excommunicating or disfellowshipping Church members participating in survivalist, apocalyptic, and conspiracy discussion groups or other organizations. A man named Ronald Garff in Utah was instructed to stop selling his video series “Today through Armageddon,” which concluded the Second Coming would happen in April 2000.

In 1994, the apostle Dallin Oaks condemned what he called “all-consuming patriotism” in a talk. “I caution those patriots who are participating in or provisioning private armies,” he said. “Their excessive zeal for one aspect of patriotism is causing them to risk spiritual downfall as they withdraw from the society of the Church and from the governance of those civil authorities to whom our twelfth article of faith makes all of us subject.” Oaks’s concern for the Church’s participation in mainline American society is evident.

Thus, according to Gritz, his stake president Lewis Hildreth received instructions from Church headquarters to review some of Gritz’s speeches and writings. Hildreth instructed Gritz to stop speaking in Church buildings or at Church gatherings.

Increasingly, Gritz found that the two factors that drew him to the LDS Church—the sympathy he sensed there for his conspiratorial politics and its affirmation of his sense of personal revelation—were coming into conflict.

And like so many conspiracy theorists, he found in this equation that it was the Church itself he could discard.

In 1994 Gritz decided he would no longer file income tax returns, believing the IRS to be unconstitutional and a tool of totalitarianism. In response, his stake president withheld Gritz’s temple recommend. And in response to that, Gritz resigned his membership in the Church.

The LDS Church, he declared, “appears to be more controlled by government than God.” He insisted that the Church had succumbed to a desire for worldly power and sacrificed its commitment to the principles taught by Benson. But he was sure what his path should be. “I choose to use my agency and here is what I believe,” he said. “It’s more important what my personal relationship is with the Savior.”

We can learn a lot from the story of Gritz: in particular, the deep, perhaps unresolvable tension within the Church between its high view of individual agency and personal communion with God and the inherent conservatism of any large institution.

How the ideas surrounding either of these characteristics might lend one critical ballast for conspiracy belief.

The ways language of agency can bolster a certain form of hyper-individualist masculinity that can also contribute to the combative rhetoric of conspiracy belief and a heroic perception of one’s own role in an imagined struggle between good and evil. For many of these sorts, a certain reading of the Book of Mormon figure Captain Moroni is a touchstone, and the world becomes a very black and white place.

That conspiracy belief is a problem endemic to much of white Christianity in the United States since the middle of the last century, and that the rhetorical markers of Gritz’s particular form of conspiracism—fear of totalitarianism, suspicion of “globalism,” hyper-sensitive rhetoric about freedom and individual liberty, apocalypticism—are not new to the particular manifestations we are seeing now, in 2021.

And, perhaps finally, that the Church has the tools to act on it, should they so choose.

****

The various quotations and facts in this piece are drawn from the following sources.

Image from Salt Lake Tribune, January 14, 1991, 5.

Christopher Smith, “Messiah of Grass Roots Politics Makes Second Coming to Utah,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 25, 1992, 1.

Christopher Smith, “Hero-Turned-Heretic?” Salt Lake Tribune, November 29. 1992, 2.

Peggy Fletcher Stack, “LDS Deny Mass Ouster of Radicals,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 4, 1992, 33.

Christopher Smith, “LDS Zealots Muzzling Outspoken to Protect Tax Status, Gritz Says,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 22, 1993, 25.

Christopher Smith, “Gritz Blasts His Fair Weather Friends,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 24, 1994, 18.

Christopher Smith, “Ultraconservative Gritz Remains as Bold As Ever,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 7, 1994, 11.

“Gritz wants Out of the LDS Church,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 22, 1994, 21.

A few months ago, there was a twitter thread about what it means to be an LGBT ally if you are a member of the church. Is it even possible? It gave me pause. I’ve never considered myself much of an ally because, believe it or not, I usually keep my mouth shut and roll my eyes. And it reflects in my friends. I have a few gay friends, but none who are particularly close. I’m sure I have some homophobic tendencies. I am who I am and I’m okay with that. But it made me wonder about why I’m in the church.

I could have left many times. I’ve had close family members actively encouraging me to leave. And, for a time, I didn’t attend. The reasons behind not attending were complicated, but it resulted in my longing for the church. I felt the loss of it intensely; the boring, monotonous, staid, appropriateness of church felt like a kind of lost paradise. I’ve had to fight for the testimony I have. But I also have to wonder if the reason I’m still in is because it isn’t actively harmful to me. And because of that, I’m not capable of imagining the active harm it does to others.

Some people revel in that harm. DezNat has been in the news of late and DezNat is all about harming others. They are also about sharing testimony with each other, but they’re goal has always been to winnow the church members and drive out those who disagree with them. Reading the tweets of Matthias Cicotte, former assistant attorney general of Alaska and active DezNat member, demonstrates the hate behind the movement, its corrosive influence, and the devilish glee with which he provokes outrage. It would seem to be a no-brainer to condemn him but, aside from a tepid Newsroom response claiming no affiliation, there has been no public condemnation of Mr. Cicotte (I don’t think I can consider him my brother at present).

Instead, we get Elder Holland, speaking to BYU yesterday, identifying the source of division in the church as gay folk. By simply being gay and unashamed of it, people are sources of strive and disunity.

I’ve had friends note the irony of people who insisted on prophetic infallibility during the Nov 5 policy era suddenly becoming heterodox at the notion of wearing a mask. Our fellow saints didn’t blink an eye when asked to mistreat our fellow human beings in god’s name (see also Prop 8), but they balked at the minor inconvenience of a mask which could literally save the lives of others.

This is, partially, a matter of how our religious divisions align with our political and other divisions. It is a matter of who we turn to for authoritative information, as Ben Park points out in today’s Washington Post. But it is also a matter of what we imagine a good person to be. Is a party man, loyal to the cause, what constitutes being a good person? Is that the kind of person that Christ was?

Cicotte obviously thought (and thinks) that he did nothing wrong. Since Elder Holland’s talk, he’s been posting musket memes and crowing on Twitter.

The truth is that the church has done this. It has raised men and women in it who believe that if they pay their tithing and pay lip service to the church’s doctrines, they can disparage the downtrodden, shut out the refugee, condemn the imprisoned, and shame the impoverished all as an expression of their faith. They hold up their bigotry, misogyny, and particularly their homophobia as an demonstration of their unity with God as they understand him. And Elder Holland’s speech confirmed their understanding, rather than disturbing it.

So I’m in the church and I’m staying in the church. But the church is not the unsullied force for good that I thought it was in my youth. Instead, it is just another human institution, trying to connect with the divine. I will strive, through my words and deeds, to strengthen that connection so that, one day, it will be Zion, filled with the light of the Lord, having set aside the pride, prejudice, and hate of the devilish world.

I heard the story of the Jesus Interview at church again last Sunday. Once again, as I listened to the story* of the people who didn’t recognize Jesus, I imagined myself flubbing up an interview in a similar way. For one thing, I haven’t spent a lot of time visualizing Jesus sitting behind a desk.

I created a 9-question ‘Tricky Jesus Test’ to help me think about the notion of an elusive God, the kind of Jesus that would dismiss me from the room if I didn’t recognize him in time.

Tricky Jesus Test (9 Questions)

The idea is to score each answer from 0-4.

0 (I never feel this way), 1 (rarely feel this way), 2 (sometimes), 3 (often), 4 (I always feel this way)

1. It’s hard to recognize answers to prayer. 
2. I don’t know if I’m good enough.
3. If I don’t recognize the answer that God’s trying to tell me, God will have to change the answer or stop trying to help, similar to what happened to Joseph Smith and the 116 pages.
4. My patriarchal blessing has coded messages for me, and if I fail to notice these messages, I will veer off my life path.
5. I would have a higher likelihood of going to the celestial kingdom if I died directly after taking the sacrament or attending the temple.
6. The more deep and painful the sacrifices I make, the more likely I will be one of the few who is called and chosen.
7. As I read old conference talks, I find extra commandments that only very diligent saints will notice. Following these lesser-known commandments is a way for me to prove myself.
8. If I’m trying to make a big decision and praying for help, I harbor the fear that God’s answer is somehow right in front of my face, and I can’t see it. 
9. Scriptural phrases like “mysteries of the kingdom” and “hidden treasures of knowledge” make my mouth water.

My Score

I don’t score a “0” on my own tricky Jesus test, although my score is a lot closer to 0 than it used to be. For that matter, I’m not even sure my Tricky Jesus test is a valid test, but it was intriguing to compose.

The Problem with the Jesus-Interview Story

The Jesus-Interview story* is based on the Bible story from Matthew 7 (Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name?…And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you). At least in Matthew 7, unlike the Jesus-Interview story, there is no subterfuge about who is talking to whom. 

The Jesus-Interview story has a great twist at the end, which makes it memorable, but the story communicates the notions of 1) an elusive Jesus and 2) well-meaning people who aren’t smart enough/ calm enough/ insightful enough/ spiritual enough to spot him.

A few well-worn church stories have gone awry, such as the Nails-in-Wood and the Chewed-Gum chastity stories. Is it likewise time to rethink the Jesus-Interview story? 

Which kind of Jesus do we believe in? The seek-and-ye-shall-find Jesus or the seek-and-ye-might-get-burned Jesus? 

My solution

Whenever I hear the Jesus Interview story, I remind myself of the story of Mary at the tomb.

Mary failed to recognize Jesus; she thought he was the gardener. If this was her Jesus Interview, it seems that she would be shown the door and miss her chance. However, instead of dismissing her, Jesus said her first name. She finally saw him.

If I get a Jesus interview, I hope it’s more like Mary’s interview in the garden.

I love other scripture stories about people who didn’t recognize Jesus at first and were given various triggers to help them recognize Jesus in the end.

• Disciples on the road to Emmaus 
• Samuel in bed
• The woman at the well
• The people who wondered, “when saw we thee a stranger and took thee in?”
• The post-resurrection disciples who fished all night (John 21)

How did these characters avoid flubbing up their Jesus interviews, despite their initial failures to discern Jesus? Grace in many forms. Mary needed to hear her name; Emmaus disciples needed a ritual; Samuel needed multiple chances and someone else to explain what was going on. The woman at the well needed to ‘out’ her shame; the people in the parable needed an explanation; and the disciples needed a straight-out miracle. 

Some people might need a formal introduction (“Behold, this is my Beloved Son”) so they know who they are meeting. Other people recognize Jesus by touch, running their hands over his hands and side. The scriptures describe a variety of ways and means for God to help people open their eyes in situations in which they initially failed to recognize the divine.

“For the Lord God giveth light unto the understanding; for he speaketh unto men according to their language, unto their understanding.”

-2 Nephi 31:3

In conclusion and to make my point with Kiwi humour, I recommend the Tricky-Jesus segment from Hunt for the Wilderpeople. “There’s two doors to choose from…he’s tricky like that, Jesus.”

Hunt for the wilderpeople scene (Funeral) 2 min

_____________________________________________

*The Jesus-Interview Story, in the version I remember hearing the most over the years.

Three men died and crossed to the other side. They waited in one room until called, one by one, into another room for an interview.

The first man’s turn came, and he entered the next room. The interviewer asked what the man knew about Jesus Christ. The man said that Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Mary, preached the Gospel, and was crucified on a cross. The interviewer thanked the man and directed him out of the room.

The second man was called for his interview. When he sat down, the interviewer again asked what the man knew about Jesus Christ. The man said Jesus created the Earth, died for the sins of humanity, and was resurrected as an immortal to take his place beside God the Father. The man said he [the man] had regularly attended church and considered himself a Christian in thought and deed. The interviewer thanked the man for his time and dismissed him.

When the third man was called in for his interview, he saw the interviewer, fell to his knees, exclaiming, “Oh, Lord, my God!”

This is not a post about the recent disclosures regarding the LDS Church’s investment in the City Creek Mall, but it is inspired by some of the discussions I have had about those disclosures. More than anything else, it is about the difference between managing (including investing) money and spending money, which, I think, is at the heart of the disagreement. If the Church has been spending tithing dollars on city malls, that is a big problem. If they have been investing savings — wherever the origin —in a in a city mall, then, it seems to me, that is no different than investing in oil companies, or tech stocks, or bitcoin. The management of resources, I think, follows a different set of moral rules than their expenditure.

In support of this seemingly capitalist assertion, I offer a reading of Jesus’s Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30) that goes somewhat against the prevailing Christian orthodoxy. The standard Christian interpretation of this parable inheres in the English language, which uses the word “talent” to mean something like “natural ability,” usually involving music or athletics or some other easily demonstrable ability that can be improved by hard work. The gist of the standard interpretation is that God gives each of us certain gifts, and we dishonor the gift, and God, if we don’t do everything in our power to become great athletes, composers, writers, or whatever else we may have some native ability for.

Anciently, of course, a talent was a large amount of money—about 80 pounds of silver, or more money than most ancient servants would see in their entire lifetime.  For a thousand years or so, Christians have gone to great lengths to interpret the Parable of the Talents in a way that makes it about something other than a large amount of money. It must be about something other than money because money is dirty and commerce is evil. So, the parable becomes about natural abilities, or about the love of God, or about anything other than the thing that it says it is about. Jesus, we know intuitively, doesn’t care about the return on investment.

But what if we are going to metaphor too quickly without considering the surface meaning of the text? What if Jesus meant what he said? What if he is actually talking about how we manage resources (assets to which we have access through no merit of our own) rather than abilities (aptitudes or natural propensities that come as part of our genetic makeup)? What if Jesus thinks it is a good idea—and maybe even a moral choice—to exercise wisdom in managing the resources that we have been blessed with?

One reason to think that this might be the case is that The Parable of the Talents in Matthew comes right after the Parable of the Ten Virgins—another story about managing resources. Oil is a limited resource that all ten virgins had the money to purchase, but five of them mismanaged their resources, and five of them did not—and those who managed well were rewarded, metaphorically, with the Kingdom of Heaven.

The servants in the Parable of the Talents are in a very similar situation. The master gives them wildly unequal amounts of money—five talents, two talents, and one talent—and asks them to manage the resources they have been given. Two of the servants manage wisely and double the amount. One of them simply buries a talent of silver in the ground and then digs it up when the master returns. The first two servants are praised and promoted for their wise management of the master’s stuff. The third is condemned as a “wicked and slothful servant” and cast into outer darkness.

Perhaps the most obvious, surface message of the parable is that hiding 8o pounds of silver in the ground is really stupid.  Imagine somebody taking the same strategy with their retirement savings and hiding $500 a month in a sock for 50 years. Such a person would retire with about $300,000. Putting the same amount of money in a retirement account averaging 6% a year would yield a retirement of around $2,000,000. Simply not being stupid can, over time, dramatically increase our access to resources.

The same holds true for other resources too. Someone who spends two hours a day reading and learning stuff is going to be better educated than someone who spends the same two hours a day playing video games. Somebody who strictly organizes their time is going to have more time for other things than somebody who does not. Countries who keep their air and water clean are going to have more good air and water. Resources often come from the accidents of fortune, but we have the choice to be wise or foolish about how we use them.

Is this a good thing? The text asks us to hold the question of how the resource is ultimately used in abeyance. Making more money is not a morally defensible end in itself. Money, like all resources, amplifies our intentions, good or bad. The fact that the money belongs to the master—who represents God in the parable—allows us to presume that it will be used as God intends, but how the money will be used is not part of our interpretive problem. The parable concerns managing money, not spending it, and the only question we need to ask is, should we be wise or stupid when managing money and other resources?

As a broken person who has to live in a fallen world—one in which resources matter quite a lot for my ability to do anything—I take great comfort in the fact that nearly all of the parables in the New Testament that deal with financial and other resources come down on the side of not being stupid with money.

I don’t have any idea if $100 billion is a good amount for the church to have in its endowment. Personally, I tend to think, given its revenue and expenditures, that the number is high. At least as long as it continues to bring in a significant amount of tithing annually, it feels to me like it doesn’t need a cushion quite that big.

But the thing is, I don’t know. Church leaders are completely opaque in how they’ve made their investment/spending decisions. And to be honest, I suspect that it has been a decision only in the loosest sense. Inertia is a powerful force and decisions made 20 years ago carry a lot of weight.

But arguably the church should communicate its financial thinking better. And I don’t mean that the church needs to tell members exactly how much it has in assets (though it certainly could). But I believe that if the church viewed members as stakeholders, it could and would communicate its thinking to us. What considerations has it made in deciding whether to spend or invest? How did it decide how much it needed for current expenditures and for future expenditures.

I think there would be a lot of power in church leaders saying, “We believe that we need to have a cushion for the next hundred years. Based on our projections, we believe that, as in Alma’s day, the church is going to grow primarily among the poor. While we have positive revenues today, we have projected that in 20 years we’ll be operating at negative cash flow. We debated tapping into our endowment now to [reduce tithing/feed the hungry/something else] but we believe that these future needs will be more compelling.”[fn1]

Ultimately, we may disagree with the church’s analysis and/or its conclusions. And there will certainly be people who use whatever reasoning the church provides as a way to attack its priorities, its truth claims, even its corporate form. But many of those people are equally ready to attack the church for its opacity. There’s no state of the world where everybody will be satisfied.

But the church laying out its reasoning does at least a couple positive things. First, this type of transparency acknowledges that members are legitimate stakeholders in the institutional church. It tells us that the church respects us and wants to give us information.

It also demonstrates that church leaders have thought through these issues. Even if I (or we or some members) believe that the church came to the wrong conclusion, by laying out their reasoning they can demonstrate that came to their conclusion in good faith.

Finally, it gives tithepayers and potential tithepayers important information as they decide how and where to contribute money.

It doesn’t turn over spending and investment choices to the membership at large. And frankly, I don’t think the church should. It would be unwieldy and, given that we all have different priorities, ultimately it would result in gridlock. But this type of transparency evinces a significant level of trust and respect, trust and respect that would be good both the institutional church and its members.

[fn1] Over on Facebook I was having a discussion with Nate Oman; he mentioned that he assumes that future members of the church will be poorer than current members on a per capita basis. And savings and investment ultimately represent a transfer of wealth from people today to people in the future. That’s not to say that future people need our charitable dollars more that current people—in fact, in general we assume that the future will actually be richer than the present. And I believe that the benefits of charitable spending today compound and provide even more benefits in the future. Still, one possible way to frame the church’s investment is that we, the wealthy of 2021, are giving money to the less-wealthy (or even the poor) of 2051.

It’s now been about a week since the First Presidency sent a message to each member’s inbox directly encouraging everyone to get vaccinated against COVID if possible, and to wear masks in any indoor setting where you’re not socially distanced, until the pandemic is over.

Sam’s post today does a great of of explaining why a regulation requiring masks for indoor meetings, religious or not, would not violate anyone’s first amendment rights. But as I read Sam’s post it occurred to me that for many members, the real takeaway from the First Presidency’s instruction last week is not the narrow issue of masks or vaccines at all, or of their the legal issues surrounding governments requiring such precautions. The takeaway is really about epistemology.

Before I say more, I want to acknowledge that over the past week I have seen, anecdotally, people who were on-the-fence or even resistant to vaccination or masks, that have decided to get the vaccine or wear masks at church, or both, since the First Presidency’s statement. I have seen them both on social media and in real life. I don’t have any idea how the percentages break down between those members that were not vaccinated that changed their mind because of the First Presidency’s message, and those who still refuse, but I think its’s important to acknowledge that at least some people that were hesitant before are responding to the First Presidency’s instruction.

But this post isn’t really about that group, it’s about the other group: those who are rejecting or ignoring (or rationalizing) the First Presidency’s message. Despite my anecdotal experience, available data doesn’t seem to show a significant increase in vaccination in Utah since the First Presidency message a week ago. The data may not be sufficient draw firm conclusions; I am no statistician, but it does appear that there are at least some members that are not following the First Presidency’s instruction.

I have not done a survey, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that the majority of the members who are rejecting or ignoring the First Presidency’s message are people who have conflated their political/culture war beliefs with their faith. They have assumed, because the majority of church members around them share the same conservative political views and consume the same cable news shows (or youtube channels, podcasts, or social media feeds), that what the pundits say is essentially no different from what the prophets say.

The growing divide between mainstream American conservatism and church teachings

But while it may have once been true that mainstream conservative views were largely consistent with church teachings, that is less and less the case over the past 5 to 7 years as mainstream conservatism has become more extreme, while church teachings have not.

While church leaders as individuals may be moderate-to-conservative, it simply is not true that the church endorses the extreme (and increasingly bizarre, conspiratorial) ideologies that are becoming increasingly mainstream among conservative culture warriors. The higher educated a person is, the less likely they are to be moved by the type of medically and legally illiterate conspiracy theory that is becoming increasingly mainstream within the conservative movement. And the top council of the church is made up of three highly educated men, one of whom is an experienced medical researcher and physician, and another of whom is one of the most widely experienced and highly credentialed lawyers in the country. And in addition to that, despite their personal political leanings, I believe that these men generally sincerely try to respect the church’s partisan neutrality. It’s not hard to see why they are not as moved by the same culture warrior partisanship that has moved many vaccine-resistant members.

Vaccination and other COVID precautions like masks are now viewed by many as a political issue, because opinions about them seem to break down largely along partisan lines, but they are not a political issue in any coherent traditional sense because there is no real ideologically coherent reason for opinions on medical science to break down on these political lines. The church’s longstanding pro-vaccination position is well-documented, and the fact that medical illiteracy is exacerbating and extending a pandemic and creating a public health crisis of its own, which is itself a moral issue, regardless of its political valence, makes it easy to understand why a medically literate prophet would find it appropriate to reaffirm the church’s pro-vaccination position and offer specific counsel to church members to follow that position.

The epistemological crisis: prophets vs. pundits

As a result, members who are moved by partisan/culture war thinking are finding themselves facing, perhaps for the first time, clear church teachings that plainly contradict the culture war voices that they have for so long assumed are synonymous with the church’s teachings. *

So it isn’t about masks, and it isn’t about vaccines; it’s about the fact that the First Presidency is telling them that the voices they trust–that many of them have considered to be aligned with the prophets–are not trustworthy. That is what’s causing the angst. The spiritual leaders that they have professed to trust are telling them that the political/culture war leaders they listen to are not trustworthy.

In truth, the heart of the angst is probably located less in the specific instruction to get vaccinated and wear masks, and more in the underlying message that the people who say vaccines are bad are not trustworthy, perhaps expressed more clearly in the First Presidency’s counsel to listen to the “wise and thoughtful recommendations of medical experts and government leaders.” The culture warrior voices they listen to and trust have spent the last year or more telling them that it is impossible for medical experts or government leaders to be either wise or thoughtful, that they are inherently untrustworthy. But the First Presidency is essentially telling them they have been deceived.

That is not an easy message to hear or to come to terms with. If trusted voices deceived you about vaccination, what else might they have deceived you on? But prophets are not called to prophesy “smooth things” (Isaiah 30:10). A little epistemological humility goes a long way.

What happens now?

What remains to be seen is how many members who are now facing this epistemological crisis will ultimately choose to realign with the church’s teachings, how many will reject or simply ignore the church’s teachings on this issue, and how many will rationalize the disconnect by engaging in ever more bizarre conspiracy theories about church leadership being muzzled and forced to lie , or encoding secret anti-vax messages in their public statements that only those in the know can see.

I hope, for their own sake, for our community’s sake, and for the sake of public health, that they realign with the church.

* This is not the first time the church has issued a statement in tension with right-wing extreme ideologies. The church has increasingly condemned racism and xenophobia and has called for compassion and the need to keep families together in immigration policy, for example. And the church’s earlier official pro-vaccination policy was careful to emphasize that though the church supports vaccination, it is a personal decision to be made in counsel with competent physicians and prayerfully, and people can seize upon that language to justify their disagreement with the church’ pro-vaccination decision. But this statement arguably presents a clearer conflict because it endorses vaccines without such wiggle room, and because it is issued over the signature of the unanimous First Presidency.

Effective today, the city of Chicago has reinstituted an indoor mask mandate. And we’re not alone: Washington state and Washington, D.C. have them. Dallas appears to have one. Benton County in Oregon has one. And I’m sure there are others and, in light of the Delta variant and the U.S.’s not-so-impressive vaccinate rate, there will be others.

A week ago, the First Presidency sent a letter to all members of the church encouraging us to get vaccinated and wear masks at indoor meetings where we couldn’t social distance.

What does this mean for our church meetings? Well, in light of the First Presidency’s guidance, I would have thought it would be uncontroversial: we’ll return to requiring masks in our meetings, at least in places that have implemented mask mandates.

But I suspect that that’s not always going to be the case, especially in light of the email I received from the Wilmette Stake Presidency last night. (The Wilmette Stake encompasses the north of Chicago and some of the northern suburbs.) The letter begins: “We have continued to gather with caution these last months under the 1st Amendment and under the direction of the First Presidency.” They go on to say that they will encourage ward leaders to open overflow in our buildings to allow distancing, but say nothing about masking. (In the past they have explicitly said they will not require masks.)

If my Stake Presidency is taking a stand against required masks, I suspect that other stakes and wards will too. So in anticipation of that, and in light of the various mask mandates, a quick First Amendment analysis:

In short, there’s nothing in the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment that would prevent states from requiring masks in church.

The standard Free Exercise Clause analysis starts with a 1990 Supreme Court case, Employment Division v. Smith. The Smith case basically says that in a Free Exercise claim, the court will first ask whether a law is neutral and generally applicable. If it is, it doesn’t violate the Free Exercise Clause.

What does that mean? Basically, it means that if the law applies equally to religious and nonreligious conduct (and it’s not aimed at religious conduct but pretending to be neutral), it can regulated religious behavior. And mask mandates (at least all that I’ve seen) are an example of these neutral and generally applicable laws. If a mask mandate said something like masks are required at church but not at indoor basketball games, it wouldn’t be neutral and generally applicable. If it said masks are required at church, whether indoor or outdoor, but not at outdoor concerts, it wouldn’t be neutral and generally applicable. But where the law says you need to be masked at all “indoor public settings” (which is what the Chicago mask mandate says), it doesn’t violate Smith.

So far there’s been limited litigation over masks at religious services (or, at least, limited litigation that has led to published opinions). One religious challenge to Covid regulations made it to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court struck down the New York mandate, but disgraced Gov. Cuomo’s executive order treated religion more harshly than other groups and there was evidence that it had been deliberately gerrymandered in a manner to capture certain religious groups.

In its opinion, though, the Supreme Court expressly invoked Smith‘s “neutral” and “generally applicable” standards.

Which is to say, a mask mandate that requires people to wear masks at all indoor public spaces complies with the First Amendment; a city or state can require people to wear masks when they’re at church as long as doesn’t solely apply to churches.

And it shouldn’t even be a question with our church. Not only do we have the First Presidency endorsing mask-wearing at meetings, we also have our popularly-invoked 12th Article of Faith:

We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.

And lest we think that the nearly two-century-old 12th Article of Faith is no longer relevant, in the spirit of the Articles of Faith, the First Presidency encouraged us to “follow the wise and thoughtful recommendations of medical experts and government leaders.” And that’s not a new pandemic-related position: in April 2020, toward the beginning of the pandemic in the United States, the First Presidency announced that members would “sustain and uphold the laws where they reside.” We’re committed, they said, to being “global good citizens.”

Between the First President’s encouragement of both masks and obeying Covid-related laws, the constitutional permissibility of regulating religion, and our obligation to obey, honor, and sustain the law, I hope that our wards and stakes located under mask mandates will do the right thing, the thing that is beneficial for our members and for the community at large, and require masks.