Latter-day Skeptics

Or how avoiding the truth about the nature of the Mormon Church may provide room for you to co-exist within the faith but won’t ever excuse the fact that you’re basically gaming the system.

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There’s quite a movement among so-called “internet Mormons” and “cafeteria Mormons” to make room in Mormonism for a diversity of faith mingled with and influenced by the modern findings of historians, philosophers, and scientists. It’s a thing to behold as a more resourceful (read: intellectually disposed and exposed) class of Latter-day Saints struggle to reconcile their proven faith in secular-humanist endeavors with the desire to retain an intimate connection with the faith and community of their ancestors. This struggle is often eased by resorting to making distinctions between what is true and what is useful; a kind of segregation of acceptable and unacceptable aspects of the church in order to promote détente between the warring factions within their minds and thus continue as beneficiaries of some aspects of church membership.

But I don’t think truth and utility can be so readily dis-joined, rather, these two appear organically correlated. If we suppose that “some truths are not very useful,”  to paraphrase the rather infamous words of an LDS general authority, then “some useful things are not very true” might seem the fruit of a more mature perspective. Instead, I think, this represents a surrender to convention and status quo in exchange for the unilateral hope that the church will eventually shed all the less truthful and undesirable aspects, leaving only that which still works. The rallying cry is for a “third” or “middle way” of neither orthodoxy nor abandonment, but of co-existence based on subjective experience and needs — in fact, a “true church” within the larger church.

However, in thinking that the truth is largely subjective (and I agree that it largely is, but let’s not forget that feelings of subjective truth arise from objective facts about our integration with the physical world) ”internet Mormons” declare their independence from a church which teaches and was founded on the idea that certain things are objectively true whether they “ring” true or not. Interestingly, I think, things like polygamy and anti-homosexuality and many other “not so true sounding” ideas are enforced and sustained by drawing on our natural sense of truth around subjects like authority and common sexual aversions. Declaring such independence while seeking to remain in the system is tantamount (from the perspective of the system) to treason, known more commonly in religious circles as heresy.

To enable this heresy, one must ignore or trivialize the vital importance of a vigorous and abiding orthodoxy, even fundamentalism within the church. The church institutionalizes the  idea of binding things that are commonly held as subjectively true with a whole slew of other things. Eg, if you feel that something you read in the Book of Mormon rings true, then the book is true, the prophet is true, the restoration is true, and the church is true — objectively, fundamentally true — thus forcing people to embrace much more than they otherwise would, including such ideas as: “I’m a better person because of the church,” “without Jesus I’m lost,” “by paying tithing I become worthy to attend the temple where families are saved,” “god has some inscrutable knowledge about blacks and gays and women that I’m not privy to, but if god says so then there must be good reason (you know, other than my own personal biases),” “obedience is the first law of heaven,” “the church is the only true and living church on the face of the earth” etc, etc. What is trivialized is that the church has both its power and appeal in binding subjective truths to ideas that promote loyalty, dependence, and orthodoxy. The Mormon Church, more than most, promotes a unity of faith because the Mormon Church is a relatively modern fundamentalist and literalist tradition.

In light of this fact, I don’t think it’s productive in the long-term to merely continue as if the church will tolerate the heresy of so-called “cafeteria Mormonism” beyond a certain fringe; as if choosing what works for you and rejecting all the rest is viable for the church membership on the whole. Honestly, I think staying in the church in this post-modernist way is a form of cheating or gaming the system. Sure, you can get away with it as long as you are in a very small and marginalized and/or anonymous minority. But to act as if this is the solution for all the church’s problems? That if you just persist in this, you and all your friends will be able to get the church to come your way? Well, I think this is a gross misunderstanding of what drives popular religious movements in general and Mormonism in particular.

This author recommends either being a Mormon, true and blue, because this is what makes the Mormon church appealing, or getting the hell out and starting your own movement. By refusing to do so you waste the opportunity to move the world forward while ruining what made Mormonism appealing in the first place.

See you on the net, my fellow heretics.