It is by no means a walk through a park full of rainbows to be gay in most of America, but there are still places around the world where the hand of repression is much more severe for LGBT persons. One such place that has been in the news periodically is the east African nation of Uganda. Since 2009, a legislative bill has surfaced periodically that threatens severe and sweeping penalties associated with homosexuality. The “Kill the Gays bill”, as it is also known, appears to be back on the table at the close of 2012.
I had heard of this bill before, but only today had I taken some time to learn more about the language of the legislation and its history in the context of Ugandan politics. A detailed discussion of the content of the bill and its evolution can be found on the Box Turtle Bulletin website, but here is a very brief synopsis of the alarming points:
- Homosexual acts are punishable with significant prison sentences, or in certain cases, by death.
- Homosexual acts are very broadly defined, so actions very far removed what most people would define as an overtly sexual act might be considered offenses under the language of the legislation.
- Parents, teachers, medical professionals or others who do not report people suspected of homosexual activity can be fined or jailed.
- Ugandan nationals who commit any of the acts encompassed by the legislation while abroad can be extradited back to Uganda for trial.
- Oppression of homosexuals in Uganda could increase even further in the future because the bill gives authority to an “Ethics and Integrity Minister” in the government (currently an anti-gay former Catholic priest) to create regulations to enforce the law.
It is clear in reading about this proposed legislation that it amounts to wholesale oppression of LGB persons and a potential witch-hunt of gay people and their supporters. It appears to be part of a broader problem of homophobia in Uganda, according to this Wikipedia summary.
While I do not generally think that one nation should interfere in the culture or politics of another, egregious violations of human rights are a different matter. Half way around the world, we might have little influence over the course of these events in Uganda, but perhaps adding our voices to the outcry over this legislation may help prevent enactment of this extreme legislation. A few ideas:
- Write or call the US Ambassador to Uganda, Scott DeLisi.
- Write to the Ugandian Parliament Speaker Rebecca Kadaga, a strong supporter of this bill: rakadaga@parliament.go.ug
- Sign this on-line petition to urge the Ugandian President to veto any anti-gay bill passed by parliament.
- Write to your representatives in the senate or house to encourage the US to place diplomatic pressure on Uganda to protect human rights. Since we give monetary aid to Uganda, we have some leverage.
I am fortunate to live in a time and place where my very safety and mental wellbeing is largely protected from these shameful displays of hate and discrimination. Everyone deserves to be freed from oppression based on who they love.
22 November 2012
14 November 2012
The tipping point
Last week’s elections were a
historic moment in public acceptance of same-sex marriage. After thirty some consecutive
defeats in state-level contests, all four states in which marriage equality was
being contested in 2012 gave victory to advocates of same-sex marriage. Maine citizens
overturned their previous rejection of gay marriage. In referenda in Washington
and Maryland, the majority of voters affirmed the same-sex marriage laws passed
by their state legislatures. Minnesota defeated an effort to incorporate a gay
marriage ban into the state constitution.
These state-wide votes were not anomalies, but are part of a more gay-affirming environment that has very recently emerged in the public life of America. In the election last week voters also rejected an effort to unseat a Republican legislator who had supported the legalization of same-sex marriage recently in New York State. Tammy Baldwin was elected as the first openly gay person in the United States Senate. A half year ago, President Obama became the first president ever to give public support for marriage equality. Two recent federal court rulings on DOMA rejected discrimination against LGBT marriages. With repeal of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell" policy gays can now serve openly in the US military.
The political victories of November 2012 are remarkable in light of the long road that gay people have traveled to be accepted here in our broader American society. And they are remarkable because of their speed: our other national civil rights movements to gain full equality under the law and in the workforce have been a long uphill battle that even continues in some degree today.
The tipping point seems to be upon us now. I don’t expect that every legislative debate, court case or state initiative will side with marriage equality from this moment forward, but it is more likely than ever that the coming victories will outnumber the setbacks. Younger Americans are strongly behind marriage equality. My own 10 year old son (with whom I have had very few conversations about homosexuality) said as much as we listened to a discussion of gay marriage on the car radio today. Without any prompting from me, he expressed that anyone should be able to get married regardless of who they are. Yes, on the question of equality, it is that simple.
In a way the gay rights movement is only partly about the right to marry. I think the broader struggle involves the collective aspirations of a minority people that have long been brewing and the consciousness of a nation more ready than ever to make peace with homosexuality. This movement is not just about a list of rights gained when civil authorities recognize a relationship. It is about achieving a society where gay people can walk down the street hand-in-hand with a loved one without shame or fear. It is about the hope that gay Americans have that their public and private realities can be one. It is about freedom from marginalization, shame, criminalization, vilification, misunderstanding and prejudice. It is about a nation, mostly straight, that is identifying the pull of justice on its conscience and finally moving to take public action on that faith. There remains those opposed to this broader movement, but momentum is not on their side. As evidenced at the ballot box and in the other political signs of the times, the tipping point appears to have arrived.
Ref: New York Times, 8 Nov 2012, page P7
These state-wide votes were not anomalies, but are part of a more gay-affirming environment that has very recently emerged in the public life of America. In the election last week voters also rejected an effort to unseat a Republican legislator who had supported the legalization of same-sex marriage recently in New York State. Tammy Baldwin was elected as the first openly gay person in the United States Senate. A half year ago, President Obama became the first president ever to give public support for marriage equality. Two recent federal court rulings on DOMA rejected discrimination against LGBT marriages. With repeal of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell" policy gays can now serve openly in the US military.
The political victories of November 2012 are remarkable in light of the long road that gay people have traveled to be accepted here in our broader American society. And they are remarkable because of their speed: our other national civil rights movements to gain full equality under the law and in the workforce have been a long uphill battle that even continues in some degree today.
The tipping point seems to be upon us now. I don’t expect that every legislative debate, court case or state initiative will side with marriage equality from this moment forward, but it is more likely than ever that the coming victories will outnumber the setbacks. Younger Americans are strongly behind marriage equality. My own 10 year old son (with whom I have had very few conversations about homosexuality) said as much as we listened to a discussion of gay marriage on the car radio today. Without any prompting from me, he expressed that anyone should be able to get married regardless of who they are. Yes, on the question of equality, it is that simple.
In a way the gay rights movement is only partly about the right to marry. I think the broader struggle involves the collective aspirations of a minority people that have long been brewing and the consciousness of a nation more ready than ever to make peace with homosexuality. This movement is not just about a list of rights gained when civil authorities recognize a relationship. It is about achieving a society where gay people can walk down the street hand-in-hand with a loved one without shame or fear. It is about the hope that gay Americans have that their public and private realities can be one. It is about freedom from marginalization, shame, criminalization, vilification, misunderstanding and prejudice. It is about a nation, mostly straight, that is identifying the pull of justice on its conscience and finally moving to take public action on that faith. There remains those opposed to this broader movement, but momentum is not on their side. As evidenced at the ballot box and in the other political signs of the times, the tipping point appears to have arrived.
Ref: New York Times, 8 Nov 2012, page P7
19 October 2012
Name Withheld
Going through some papers this morning (I’m an intellectual packrat and collect information on everything from microorganisms to politics to geologic maps), I came across an article from 2009 published in the LDS Church’s main periodical, the Ensign. Written by the sister of a lesbian who was in a same-sex relationship, this re-activated member of the Church wrote of struggling to support her sister while maintaining her orthodox beliefs. The devout sister in no way masks the overall self righteous tone of her writing: “I … agonized over my sister’s eternal welfare”, but concludes the article by stating that love is her principle obligation. In the text of the article, the actual name of the lesbian woman was changed and the article was signed “Name Withheld”.
I think I first began to notice short articles written from the Church perspective about gay and lesbian people in the Ensign some 5-8 years ago. I was deeply in the closet at the time. Never appearing very often, I would find one of these articles and my heart would race. I would sneak off to the bathroom or something to digest this new article. Someone was addressing in official Church media, a topic that for so long I was fearful of confronting. Now such articles seem remarkably sanitized and rote, but years ago it was about as far as I would go with homosexuality.
Name Withheld’s article exemplifies a few of the damaging ways in which homosexuality and gay persons are typically addressed in Mormonism. The first issue is sanitization. Many devout Mormons prefer to use the terms “same-gender attracted” or “same-sex attracted” (or worse the acronyms SGA or SSA), in place of gay or lesbian, because they associate the latter label of identity with the homosexual “lifestyle”. These are clinical-like terms, suggestive more of a pathological diagnosis than recognition that sexuality is as much about love, commitment and vulnerability as it is about mere physical and sexual attraction.
The second issue is that orthodox Mormonism prefers abstraction over personification on this issue. In the article I encountered this morning, neither the faithful sister nor her lesbian sister are named. Moreover, the lesbian sister’s partner, is not named either and is described at one point as a “friend”. Without names or faces, these individuals become more distant actors in the homosexual dilemma, Mormon untouchables in a way.
The last issue is the most general and it is simply that of silence. Homosexuality has been almost invisible in Mormonism for so long that I think it has fueled much of the shame that gay Mormons struggle with. I think this tendency was inherited from broader American society, where homosexuality has also been placed on the margins. For decades, more timid gays were relegated to secretive lives (often heterosexual marriages) and more proud gays were sequestered in their own neighborhoods and clubs. Homosexuality has long been the “love that dares not speak its name”.
The disappointing thing is that still, in the 21st century, Mormon culture has been painfully slow to openly talk about homosexuality and the lives and experiences of gay people. Yes, the conversation has recently accelerated pretty remarkably, but like other prominent social issues of the past, the Church has been late to the game. She has long left her LGBT members in dark places of shame. Even if silence has been replaced recently by greater discourse, there is still abstraction, sanitization and even misinformation.
The way that silence perpetuates shame deeply frustrates me. I feel that my own hesitancy about confronting my sexuality for so long was heavily influenced by Mormon silence. Homosexuality was rarely talked about, and if it was, it could never escape the cloud of negativity that comes from linking it to sin. Even to the present day, there are no happy gay couples that are spoken of or held up as role models in Church literature. That gay + in a same-sex relationship can = happy just doesn’t seem to be an option in orthodox Mormon discourse. As for myself, I have to take responsibility for my choice to stay in the closet for as long as I did, but the silence, shame, and sinfulness that surrounded being gay in Mormondom was no easy swamp from which to emerge.
Dear Mormons everywhere: please, no more articles with “Name Withheld”. We are real people with names, faces, families, accomplishments, mistakes and love. We don’t want to live in a world of shame. Most of us don’t want to be in your face, but we want to be confident and happy with who we are.
I think I first began to notice short articles written from the Church perspective about gay and lesbian people in the Ensign some 5-8 years ago. I was deeply in the closet at the time. Never appearing very often, I would find one of these articles and my heart would race. I would sneak off to the bathroom or something to digest this new article. Someone was addressing in official Church media, a topic that for so long I was fearful of confronting. Now such articles seem remarkably sanitized and rote, but years ago it was about as far as I would go with homosexuality.
Name Withheld’s article exemplifies a few of the damaging ways in which homosexuality and gay persons are typically addressed in Mormonism. The first issue is sanitization. Many devout Mormons prefer to use the terms “same-gender attracted” or “same-sex attracted” (or worse the acronyms SGA or SSA), in place of gay or lesbian, because they associate the latter label of identity with the homosexual “lifestyle”. These are clinical-like terms, suggestive more of a pathological diagnosis than recognition that sexuality is as much about love, commitment and vulnerability as it is about mere physical and sexual attraction.
The second issue is that orthodox Mormonism prefers abstraction over personification on this issue. In the article I encountered this morning, neither the faithful sister nor her lesbian sister are named. Moreover, the lesbian sister’s partner, is not named either and is described at one point as a “friend”. Without names or faces, these individuals become more distant actors in the homosexual dilemma, Mormon untouchables in a way.
The last issue is the most general and it is simply that of silence. Homosexuality has been almost invisible in Mormonism for so long that I think it has fueled much of the shame that gay Mormons struggle with. I think this tendency was inherited from broader American society, where homosexuality has also been placed on the margins. For decades, more timid gays were relegated to secretive lives (often heterosexual marriages) and more proud gays were sequestered in their own neighborhoods and clubs. Homosexuality has long been the “love that dares not speak its name”.
The disappointing thing is that still, in the 21st century, Mormon culture has been painfully slow to openly talk about homosexuality and the lives and experiences of gay people. Yes, the conversation has recently accelerated pretty remarkably, but like other prominent social issues of the past, the Church has been late to the game. She has long left her LGBT members in dark places of shame. Even if silence has been replaced recently by greater discourse, there is still abstraction, sanitization and even misinformation.
The way that silence perpetuates shame deeply frustrates me. I feel that my own hesitancy about confronting my sexuality for so long was heavily influenced by Mormon silence. Homosexuality was rarely talked about, and if it was, it could never escape the cloud of negativity that comes from linking it to sin. Even to the present day, there are no happy gay couples that are spoken of or held up as role models in Church literature. That gay + in a same-sex relationship can = happy just doesn’t seem to be an option in orthodox Mormon discourse. As for myself, I have to take responsibility for my choice to stay in the closet for as long as I did, but the silence, shame, and sinfulness that surrounded being gay in Mormondom was no easy swamp from which to emerge.
Dear Mormons everywhere: please, no more articles with “Name Withheld”. We are real people with names, faces, families, accomplishments, mistakes and love. We don’t want to live in a world of shame. Most of us don’t want to be in your face, but we want to be confident and happy with who we are.
21 September 2012
When the improbable is compelling (Part IV)
In a 2007 interview for a PBS documentary about the LDS Church, the late President Gordon B. Hinckley said: “[Our foundation] is either true or false. If it’s false, we’re engaged in a great fraud. If it’s true, it’s the most important thing in the world. Now, that’s the whole picture. It is either right or wrong, true or false, fraudulent or true.” As President Hinckley succinctly stated, Latter-day Saints are taught to accept the Church as a bundled package. There isn’t much middle ground (according to the official viewpoint at least). There is little room for people like me that are inclined to believe about 44% of Mormonism (1).
A lot of modern Christians do not regard belief as such an all-or-nothing proposition. They might look at the contradiction between a literal belief in Genesis in the Bible and current understanding of human history and evolution and choose the latter while enjoying the other benefits of their faith. They may not believe in a literal bodily resurrection of Jesus, but rather view that story in a figurative capacity, whose main purpose is to teach spiritual truths. Because of this doctrinal selectivity, they might be called ‘Cafeteria Christians’. Such fragmentation of belief really doesn’t exist in orthodox Mormonism. It isn’t where Church leaders want members to go.
Belief and compliance are pretty central to Mormonism. The LDS embodiment of belief is a 'testimony'. A testimony is both a public affirmation of belief and a very private affair. Any visit to a testimony meeting (traditionally held on the first Sunday of each month), confirms the central role that testimony plays in Mormon identity and mindset. In these meetings, individual Mormons from the congregation volunteer to share a brief witness of their beliefs to the whole congregation. Testimony meetings are a form of encouraged confirmation bias. When testimonies are shared, the verb ‘know’ is usually used in place of ‘believe’. Even young children will share statements before a congregation such as ‘I know Joseph Smith was a prophet’. Mormons are promised that their testimonies will grow as they share them. The testimony is sacred in Mormonism. It is nourished, protected and shared. Its arch nemesis is doubt.
Mixing testimony, LDS social dynamics, and the strong claims of divine Church origins creates a distinct Mormon fingerprint regarding belief. This common pattern of belief (with individual variation, of course) creates a number of interesting phenomena in Mormon culture. The first is an interesting linkage between faith and personal righteousness (typically termed ‘worthiness’). Doubt is viewed negatively, and while perhaps not a sin technically, it is seen in Mormonism as a weakness. Church leaders have taught that faith and doubt do not co-exist in the same mind simultaneously (2). Members seldom express doubt about Church teachings in public settings. A very prevalent adage says that ‘The Church is perfect but the members are not’. The Mormon linkage between faith and worthiness is also manifest in interviews between lay members and ecclesiastical leaders to determine worthiness to enter into the temples of the Church. In addition to questions about sexual purity, honesty, and abstinence from alcohol or tobacco in these interviews, members are asked if they have a belief in the restoration of the Church, a belief in the Godhead (trinity) and if they affiliate or sympathize with views or organizations that are contrary to official doctrine. So even though doubt can be an important prerequisite for refining human understanding, it is given poor treatment in Mormon culture. In my more skeptical moments, I find the heavy emphasis on certainty in Mormon discourse to be nauseating.
Secondly, criticism of the leadership is viewed very unfavorably in Mormonism. Because the upper hierarchy of the Church is seen as the connection between God and the rest of humanity, these men occupy a distinct position of respect in the theology. Their teachings are often seen as infallible because they come from God. Leaders may from time to time encourage this special deference to their position and viewpoints (3). Furthermore, in LDS temples Mormons make a covenant to avoid “evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed”. At the very least, this culture of deference to authority tempers public expression of alternative doctrinal viewpoints in the Church. In Mormonism, revelation and doctrinal exposition are top-down processes which are closed to significant debate among the lay membership.
Another interesting effect of LDS belief patterns on member behavior is a tendency for some members of the Church to engage in self censorship (4). Because faith is linked with righteousness and one’s standing in the faith community, there is a strong incentive to protect the integrity of that belief system. Many members avoid reading “anti-Mormon literature”, a term that can encompass anything that speaks negatively about the Church. Other members may avoid specific academic subjects that are likely to contain ideas that threaten their testimony of Mormonism. Those could include anthropology, cosmology, evolution or archaeology. More subtly, much spiritual energy can be spent by some members trying to protect their testimonies. I speak of this from experience, having spent many years putting doubts aside, or giving uncomfortable doctrines the benefit of the doubt. A recent study found that BYU professors in fact, in large proportion, avoided researching topics that may put them into conflict with the Church (5).
A final curiosity about the fingerprint of Mormon faith is the phenomenon of apologists in the Church. Apologists seek to sustain and promote official or traditional viewpoints of the scriptures and Mormon beliefs and history by engaging in scholarship. Organizations such as FARMS produce academic works with the purpose of supporting Mormon ideology and history. While these academics may be trained in scientific methodology and do careful detailed research, they may not always approach their subjects in a scientifically-sound manner. Apologists tend to find evidence for questions for which they think they already have the answer. This type of scholarship can be more of a scavenger hunt that an objective enterprise that starts with more open-ended questions. The answer precedes the evidence, not the other way around as should be the case in science. My brief experience with Mormon apologist writings suggests that they can get lost in a forest of details. They may write lengthy papers abounding in footnotes about a single inscription on an ancient stone in Central America in search of credible evidence for Book of Mormon historicity, all the while ignoring abundant DNA and archaeological data that give little credence to a literalist Mormon view of ancient history.
All of the tough stuff of Mormonism – the polygamy and polyandry, similarities between the temple endowment and Masonic ritual, racist policies prior to 1978, multiple and incongruent accounts of Joseph Smith’s first vision, Biblical literalism, the historicity of the Book of Mormon – can put the traditional testimony in jeopardy. Of course members try to deal with these challenges in one way or another (as long as they are aware of them in the first place). Apologists may devise convoluted explanations to support implausible Mormon concepts and rank and file members may just put these questions on a mental shelf filed under ‘unknown’. But in all of the effort devoted to maintain the traditional testimony, I’ve come to believe that other mental values like open-mindedness, intellectual parsimony, and even common sense can get pushed to the wayside. If I had not been a participant in these mental gymnastics myself for some time, I probably wouldn’t be so critical about how more orthodox Latter-day Saints sometimes approach questions of truth.
Not all Latter-day Saints are literalists, and certainly not all are apologists. I am acquainted with individuals who express doubts (even if generally only in private conversation). Other people have let those doubts hold enough sway that they have more or less left the Church all together. But I think it is the core population of Mormonism – those who diligently attend the temple and most of the leadership in the Church – that really believes in the whole package. At least they have convinced themselves that they should believe, because a faithful Mormon is a good Mormon.
In my opinion this black and white view of the world, flavored with the supernatural, breaks down for many people with time. The exit from orthodoxy may start as a simple willingness to ask some hard questions about Church history or specific Mormon beliefs. If the skepticism is coupled with investigation, members are likely to encounter a lot of new information that is at odds with official positions of the Church. It can be time consuming (and perhaps impossible in some cases) to thoroughly investigate all the claims that challenge orthodox Mormonism. But for me at least, the list of concerns and improbabilities began to grow so long and comprehensive that it seemed ever less plausible that Mormonism as a complete package could accurately reflect ultimate truth.
I’ve beat up on Mormonism a fair amount in this post. However, I think it is important to discuss these weaknesses because they are seldom articulated in Church settings. I ask my readers to interpret my criticisms as manifestation of many years of frustration finally venting a little in a public setting, not as blanket condemnation of the Church. Personally, I spent too many hours being silent in church when I was uncomfortable with the certainty, skeptical about the miracles, or dissatisfied with the conformity. My cynicism here doesn’t reflect the totality of my experience with Mormonism; I’ve written briefly about some positives here. Optimism, hard work, service, honesty, sacrifice and a knack for attracting highly motivated and generous individuals are the better fruits of Mormonism.
In this series of posts I’ve discussed tensions between religion and science. Both endeavors make positive contributions to humanity. Belief is a powerful force in the human experience. It can inspire acts of charity. It can bring people together and fuel the flames of optimism. But when incongruent with the truth or used as a social or political weapon, it can lead to dark manifestations of human behavior. When religious tenets and empiricism are in conflict, I’ll side with science with the understanding that it too changes and grows with time and new discoveries. More so than the data it uncovers, it is the method of science that I think has the most to offer all of us seeking truth. The scientific method is self-correcting, progressive, and democratic. Because there is the tendency to hold tightly to the past, religion can use some good housecleaning. It is time to refurbish the improbable and unscientific rooms of religion for a less cluttered and more useful place for the soul to take refuge.
Notes:
1. Somewhat arbitrarily-chosen number. :)
2. See the Lectures on Faith and this article by President Monson.
3. For example, in 1985 Elder Oaks cautioned against “criticiz[ing] or depreciat[ing] a person for the performance of an office to which he or she has been called of God. It does not matter that the criticism is true.” He stated the following year that, “The counsel against faultfinding and evilspeaking applies with special force to criticisms of Church leaders.” Lavina Fielding Anderson chronicled this and other similar statements by Church leaders that discourage intellectual non-conformity or criticism of Church leadership.
4. Censorship is institutionalized to a small degree in the Church as well. At least when I served in the 1990s, missionaries were encouraged to read only from the scriptures and a few pre-approved religious texts. Church members leading classes are admonished to only use a very limited set of Church-approved materials in their instruction. Such homogenization of Church instruction across the world is known as “correlation”, a somewhat Orwellian term and process that may be administratively efficient but one which may significantly suppress theological diversity within Mormonism.
5. Rose, P.M. 1999. The Zion university reverie: A quantitative and qualitative assessment of BYU’s academic climate. Dialogue 32:35-50. An eye-opening statistic from this report: when asked if “BYU professors should not conduct even sound research that may draw into question church or university procedures”, 66.1% of respondents from a randomly-selected sample of faculty answered that they agreed or strongly agreed.
A lot of modern Christians do not regard belief as such an all-or-nothing proposition. They might look at the contradiction between a literal belief in Genesis in the Bible and current understanding of human history and evolution and choose the latter while enjoying the other benefits of their faith. They may not believe in a literal bodily resurrection of Jesus, but rather view that story in a figurative capacity, whose main purpose is to teach spiritual truths. Because of this doctrinal selectivity, they might be called ‘Cafeteria Christians’. Such fragmentation of belief really doesn’t exist in orthodox Mormonism. It isn’t where Church leaders want members to go.
Belief and compliance are pretty central to Mormonism. The LDS embodiment of belief is a 'testimony'. A testimony is both a public affirmation of belief and a very private affair. Any visit to a testimony meeting (traditionally held on the first Sunday of each month), confirms the central role that testimony plays in Mormon identity and mindset. In these meetings, individual Mormons from the congregation volunteer to share a brief witness of their beliefs to the whole congregation. Testimony meetings are a form of encouraged confirmation bias. When testimonies are shared, the verb ‘know’ is usually used in place of ‘believe’. Even young children will share statements before a congregation such as ‘I know Joseph Smith was a prophet’. Mormons are promised that their testimonies will grow as they share them. The testimony is sacred in Mormonism. It is nourished, protected and shared. Its arch nemesis is doubt.
Mixing testimony, LDS social dynamics, and the strong claims of divine Church origins creates a distinct Mormon fingerprint regarding belief. This common pattern of belief (with individual variation, of course) creates a number of interesting phenomena in Mormon culture. The first is an interesting linkage between faith and personal righteousness (typically termed ‘worthiness’). Doubt is viewed negatively, and while perhaps not a sin technically, it is seen in Mormonism as a weakness. Church leaders have taught that faith and doubt do not co-exist in the same mind simultaneously (2). Members seldom express doubt about Church teachings in public settings. A very prevalent adage says that ‘The Church is perfect but the members are not’. The Mormon linkage between faith and worthiness is also manifest in interviews between lay members and ecclesiastical leaders to determine worthiness to enter into the temples of the Church. In addition to questions about sexual purity, honesty, and abstinence from alcohol or tobacco in these interviews, members are asked if they have a belief in the restoration of the Church, a belief in the Godhead (trinity) and if they affiliate or sympathize with views or organizations that are contrary to official doctrine. So even though doubt can be an important prerequisite for refining human understanding, it is given poor treatment in Mormon culture. In my more skeptical moments, I find the heavy emphasis on certainty in Mormon discourse to be nauseating.
Secondly, criticism of the leadership is viewed very unfavorably in Mormonism. Because the upper hierarchy of the Church is seen as the connection between God and the rest of humanity, these men occupy a distinct position of respect in the theology. Their teachings are often seen as infallible because they come from God. Leaders may from time to time encourage this special deference to their position and viewpoints (3). Furthermore, in LDS temples Mormons make a covenant to avoid “evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed”. At the very least, this culture of deference to authority tempers public expression of alternative doctrinal viewpoints in the Church. In Mormonism, revelation and doctrinal exposition are top-down processes which are closed to significant debate among the lay membership.
Another interesting effect of LDS belief patterns on member behavior is a tendency for some members of the Church to engage in self censorship (4). Because faith is linked with righteousness and one’s standing in the faith community, there is a strong incentive to protect the integrity of that belief system. Many members avoid reading “anti-Mormon literature”, a term that can encompass anything that speaks negatively about the Church. Other members may avoid specific academic subjects that are likely to contain ideas that threaten their testimony of Mormonism. Those could include anthropology, cosmology, evolution or archaeology. More subtly, much spiritual energy can be spent by some members trying to protect their testimonies. I speak of this from experience, having spent many years putting doubts aside, or giving uncomfortable doctrines the benefit of the doubt. A recent study found that BYU professors in fact, in large proportion, avoided researching topics that may put them into conflict with the Church (5).
A final curiosity about the fingerprint of Mormon faith is the phenomenon of apologists in the Church. Apologists seek to sustain and promote official or traditional viewpoints of the scriptures and Mormon beliefs and history by engaging in scholarship. Organizations such as FARMS produce academic works with the purpose of supporting Mormon ideology and history. While these academics may be trained in scientific methodology and do careful detailed research, they may not always approach their subjects in a scientifically-sound manner. Apologists tend to find evidence for questions for which they think they already have the answer. This type of scholarship can be more of a scavenger hunt that an objective enterprise that starts with more open-ended questions. The answer precedes the evidence, not the other way around as should be the case in science. My brief experience with Mormon apologist writings suggests that they can get lost in a forest of details. They may write lengthy papers abounding in footnotes about a single inscription on an ancient stone in Central America in search of credible evidence for Book of Mormon historicity, all the while ignoring abundant DNA and archaeological data that give little credence to a literalist Mormon view of ancient history.
All of the tough stuff of Mormonism – the polygamy and polyandry, similarities between the temple endowment and Masonic ritual, racist policies prior to 1978, multiple and incongruent accounts of Joseph Smith’s first vision, Biblical literalism, the historicity of the Book of Mormon – can put the traditional testimony in jeopardy. Of course members try to deal with these challenges in one way or another (as long as they are aware of them in the first place). Apologists may devise convoluted explanations to support implausible Mormon concepts and rank and file members may just put these questions on a mental shelf filed under ‘unknown’. But in all of the effort devoted to maintain the traditional testimony, I’ve come to believe that other mental values like open-mindedness, intellectual parsimony, and even common sense can get pushed to the wayside. If I had not been a participant in these mental gymnastics myself for some time, I probably wouldn’t be so critical about how more orthodox Latter-day Saints sometimes approach questions of truth.
Not all Latter-day Saints are literalists, and certainly not all are apologists. I am acquainted with individuals who express doubts (even if generally only in private conversation). Other people have let those doubts hold enough sway that they have more or less left the Church all together. But I think it is the core population of Mormonism – those who diligently attend the temple and most of the leadership in the Church – that really believes in the whole package. At least they have convinced themselves that they should believe, because a faithful Mormon is a good Mormon.
In my opinion this black and white view of the world, flavored with the supernatural, breaks down for many people with time. The exit from orthodoxy may start as a simple willingness to ask some hard questions about Church history or specific Mormon beliefs. If the skepticism is coupled with investigation, members are likely to encounter a lot of new information that is at odds with official positions of the Church. It can be time consuming (and perhaps impossible in some cases) to thoroughly investigate all the claims that challenge orthodox Mormonism. But for me at least, the list of concerns and improbabilities began to grow so long and comprehensive that it seemed ever less plausible that Mormonism as a complete package could accurately reflect ultimate truth.
I’ve beat up on Mormonism a fair amount in this post. However, I think it is important to discuss these weaknesses because they are seldom articulated in Church settings. I ask my readers to interpret my criticisms as manifestation of many years of frustration finally venting a little in a public setting, not as blanket condemnation of the Church. Personally, I spent too many hours being silent in church when I was uncomfortable with the certainty, skeptical about the miracles, or dissatisfied with the conformity. My cynicism here doesn’t reflect the totality of my experience with Mormonism; I’ve written briefly about some positives here. Optimism, hard work, service, honesty, sacrifice and a knack for attracting highly motivated and generous individuals are the better fruits of Mormonism.
In this series of posts I’ve discussed tensions between religion and science. Both endeavors make positive contributions to humanity. Belief is a powerful force in the human experience. It can inspire acts of charity. It can bring people together and fuel the flames of optimism. But when incongruent with the truth or used as a social or political weapon, it can lead to dark manifestations of human behavior. When religious tenets and empiricism are in conflict, I’ll side with science with the understanding that it too changes and grows with time and new discoveries. More so than the data it uncovers, it is the method of science that I think has the most to offer all of us seeking truth. The scientific method is self-correcting, progressive, and democratic. Because there is the tendency to hold tightly to the past, religion can use some good housecleaning. It is time to refurbish the improbable and unscientific rooms of religion for a less cluttered and more useful place for the soul to take refuge.
Notes:
1. Somewhat arbitrarily-chosen number. :)
2. See the Lectures on Faith and this article by President Monson.
3. For example, in 1985 Elder Oaks cautioned against “criticiz[ing] or depreciat[ing] a person for the performance of an office to which he or she has been called of God. It does not matter that the criticism is true.” He stated the following year that, “The counsel against faultfinding and evilspeaking applies with special force to criticisms of Church leaders.” Lavina Fielding Anderson chronicled this and other similar statements by Church leaders that discourage intellectual non-conformity or criticism of Church leadership.
4. Censorship is institutionalized to a small degree in the Church as well. At least when I served in the 1990s, missionaries were encouraged to read only from the scriptures and a few pre-approved religious texts. Church members leading classes are admonished to only use a very limited set of Church-approved materials in their instruction. Such homogenization of Church instruction across the world is known as “correlation”, a somewhat Orwellian term and process that may be administratively efficient but one which may significantly suppress theological diversity within Mormonism.
5. Rose, P.M. 1999. The Zion university reverie: A quantitative and qualitative assessment of BYU’s academic climate. Dialogue 32:35-50. An eye-opening statistic from this report: when asked if “BYU professors should not conduct even sound research that may draw into question church or university procedures”, 66.1% of respondents from a randomly-selected sample of faculty answered that they agreed or strongly agreed.
09 September 2012
When the improbable is compelling (Part III)
As I discussed in part I of this post, belief in irrational and improbable stories are part of virtually all religious traditions. Why do many believe in the improbable, the irrational and the miraculous? Does it serve a purpose individually or collectively for groups of believers? What is the mental and spiritual price one pays when the choice is made to no longer believe? Full treatment of these questions requires considerably more thought and discussion that I am able to give presently, but I want to explore a few ideas below.
One general advantage of belief is the social benefits it accrues. Common belief can be a nucleus around which shared identity is formed and maintained. Tight social cohesion is a major benefit of identification with a specific religious group. Belief in a common mythology sets a group of individuals apart from others and gives them a shared social identity. I understand and appreciate this benefit of religion. It is one manifestation of our clannish nature as human beings – much like club membership, sports allegiance, political affiliation, or even sexual identity.
But why are miracles – events that are irrational, untestable, and, for most of us, foreign to our individual experiences – such a consistent part of religion? Why does religious sociality incorporate the supernatural? Miracles seem to be a way for the human mind to deal with the unknown. I suppose there is a natural human aversion for uncertainty. After all, the unknown is unsettling and disturbing. We can easily imagine how unsettling ancient uncertainties were for our ancestors: When and where will the herds return next season? When will a natural calamity strike next? Will this illness kill me or my family? In our modern world, we have exerted such a degree of control over nature that food, water, shelter and safety are consistently available for most of us. But even so, the psychological landscape in our more affluent societies still remains full of unknowns today: employment stability, financial strains, relationship troubles, and health care, for instance.
Of course uncertainty is a certainty in life. But for the religious mind, miracles point to God, who is the lone unassailable place of safety. God is a rock, a lighthouse, a Savior, a refuge, a comforter. These kinds of descriptions of God, devoid of uncertainty, abound in Christian scriptures. God ultimately may not remove the uncertainty inherent in our lives, but rather overshadows it. Without the link to God, the inexplicable can be too unsettling. Linked to God, uncertainties point to a power and understanding greater than our own. God renders death, illness, separation, loss, pain, and cruelty tolerable.
Interestingly, superstition (and religion more generally) may have evolved in connection with humankind’s long struggle over millennia of evolution to wrestle control over an unsympathetic natural world. In a fascinating history, Kirkpatrick Sale outlines the cultural advances in prehistoric Homo sapiens (starting about 70,000 years ago) and argues that art and magic may have evolved out of a need or desire for humans to exert further control over their environment (1). Over thousands of years, loss of prey populations (over-hunting) and continued changes in environmental conditions (a massive volcanic eruption ~71,000 years ago; loss of hunting grounds or prey abundance due to advancing Ice Age glaciers) brought stresses to human populations that were developing culturally and were increasing in population size.
As an ecologist, I find Sale’s connection between the history of human cultural development and external environmental changes intriguing. Here is how he summarizes the religious implications of the explosion of art in southern Europe starting some 35,000 years ago: “Whatever kinds of magic and ritual were practiced with the sculptures and paintings, of which we can only have a small idea today, they all involve some form of human effort to have control over nature … with symbolic art, and particularly the charged rituals in deep caves, humans became involved in a new relationship to the animal world, or at least were attempting to extend their old relationship in a new way … How fateful, that: the attempt to be independent, or to think of oneself as independent, from an ecosystem on whose bounty one is entirely dependent for sustaining life itself is delusional, and can be maintained only by tortuous ideas of self-importance and wrathful practices of self-enhancement.” If Sale’s argument about the ecological context in which religion evolved is reasonably accurate, I find the resulting irony fascinating: though religion’s initial function may have been to increasingly dominate the outside natural world, it eventually became a system of beliefs that emphasized its actual inferiority to even higher powers.
Many thousands of years after the explosion in cave paintings by Stone Age humans, there still seems to be a near universal pull in humankind to the divine. Most Americans today, for instance, still believe in a higher power. While the modern American religious landscape is diverse and complex, a surprising percentage of people, in fact, cannot bring themselves to accept the scientific evidence for evolution. In our scientific age, many of the answers to the ancient mysteries that religion supposedly once addressed can now be found in natural phenomena. Science may not have erased the need for spirituality, but it does offer compelling alternatives to many of the old religious explanations. Why then does belief in improbable miracles persist when such events are more reliably explained by natural phenomena?
Perhaps the strongest reason may just be tradition, cultural inertia if you will. Miracles were born in times when scientific explanations were much less available to most people. They became incorporated into religious texts and became part of the narratives written about the divine. They served some utility too, because they could be a way of enhancing God’s greatness and our ultimate dependence on him. But in more recent times, they may come more as appendages to the more meaningful body of religious ideas – mythology, ethics and self-empowerment – we may tend to focus on today.
Another answer, I suppose, may be provided by a simple psychological phenomenon I learned about as an undergraduate in an introductory psychology class: confirmation bias. This is the tendency to pay particular attention to new information that sustains a person’s belief systems. We all do this. The mind creates a filter on incoming information. We seek out, remember, and transmit information that confirms beliefs that we already have formed. On the other hand, new information that contradicts our current belief structure is dismissed, forgotten, trivialized or ignored. If, for instance, we grow up learning that evolution is an evil and erroneous theory from a young age, we are likely to pay particular attention to any pieces of evidence that confirm our belief in this viewpoint.
But tradition and confirmation bias cannot explain it all. Though there are likely many people who uncritically accept religious claims, many religious adherents are also deeply aware of the contradictions that sometimes arise between elements of their faith traditions and more scientific sources of information. They realize that their religious worldview is not always congruent with our modern understanding of history, anthropology, or cosmology. For some followers, the compulsion to continue belief in the improbable may then come from a deeper need to stay connected with a religion that permeates family life, community life, or perhaps even employment. Any threat to such a deeply held belief structure is more that just a challenge to an academic understanding of some remote facet of the universe; such threats can be threats to family cohesion, individual identity or purpose, or one’s place in a faith community. For a few people, it may be easier to sacrifice some measure of rational thinking than to abandon a belief system that brings other social and psychological benefits.
This thought process presupposes than an individual views his or her religion as a single package that one is to accept or reject in totality. In all likelihood, this may not be a very common way of thinking for most modern religious adherents. I assume that there are many people who are comfortable accepting much of their religious tradition while rejecting ideas that are improbable (like miracles) or otherwise unacceptable (like sexism) to them. But blanket (or near universal) acceptance of religious doctrine is relatively common in Mormonism. I’ll explore this phenomenon more in the upcoming final post in this series.
Notes:
(1) Sale, K. 2006. After Eden. The Evolution of Human Domination. Duke University Press, (quotation is from p.61).
One general advantage of belief is the social benefits it accrues. Common belief can be a nucleus around which shared identity is formed and maintained. Tight social cohesion is a major benefit of identification with a specific religious group. Belief in a common mythology sets a group of individuals apart from others and gives them a shared social identity. I understand and appreciate this benefit of religion. It is one manifestation of our clannish nature as human beings – much like club membership, sports allegiance, political affiliation, or even sexual identity.
But why are miracles – events that are irrational, untestable, and, for most of us, foreign to our individual experiences – such a consistent part of religion? Why does religious sociality incorporate the supernatural? Miracles seem to be a way for the human mind to deal with the unknown. I suppose there is a natural human aversion for uncertainty. After all, the unknown is unsettling and disturbing. We can easily imagine how unsettling ancient uncertainties were for our ancestors: When and where will the herds return next season? When will a natural calamity strike next? Will this illness kill me or my family? In our modern world, we have exerted such a degree of control over nature that food, water, shelter and safety are consistently available for most of us. But even so, the psychological landscape in our more affluent societies still remains full of unknowns today: employment stability, financial strains, relationship troubles, and health care, for instance.
Of course uncertainty is a certainty in life. But for the religious mind, miracles point to God, who is the lone unassailable place of safety. God is a rock, a lighthouse, a Savior, a refuge, a comforter. These kinds of descriptions of God, devoid of uncertainty, abound in Christian scriptures. God ultimately may not remove the uncertainty inherent in our lives, but rather overshadows it. Without the link to God, the inexplicable can be too unsettling. Linked to God, uncertainties point to a power and understanding greater than our own. God renders death, illness, separation, loss, pain, and cruelty tolerable.
Interestingly, superstition (and religion more generally) may have evolved in connection with humankind’s long struggle over millennia of evolution to wrestle control over an unsympathetic natural world. In a fascinating history, Kirkpatrick Sale outlines the cultural advances in prehistoric Homo sapiens (starting about 70,000 years ago) and argues that art and magic may have evolved out of a need or desire for humans to exert further control over their environment (1). Over thousands of years, loss of prey populations (over-hunting) and continued changes in environmental conditions (a massive volcanic eruption ~71,000 years ago; loss of hunting grounds or prey abundance due to advancing Ice Age glaciers) brought stresses to human populations that were developing culturally and were increasing in population size.
As an ecologist, I find Sale’s connection between the history of human cultural development and external environmental changes intriguing. Here is how he summarizes the religious implications of the explosion of art in southern Europe starting some 35,000 years ago: “Whatever kinds of magic and ritual were practiced with the sculptures and paintings, of which we can only have a small idea today, they all involve some form of human effort to have control over nature … with symbolic art, and particularly the charged rituals in deep caves, humans became involved in a new relationship to the animal world, or at least were attempting to extend their old relationship in a new way … How fateful, that: the attempt to be independent, or to think of oneself as independent, from an ecosystem on whose bounty one is entirely dependent for sustaining life itself is delusional, and can be maintained only by tortuous ideas of self-importance and wrathful practices of self-enhancement.” If Sale’s argument about the ecological context in which religion evolved is reasonably accurate, I find the resulting irony fascinating: though religion’s initial function may have been to increasingly dominate the outside natural world, it eventually became a system of beliefs that emphasized its actual inferiority to even higher powers.
Many thousands of years after the explosion in cave paintings by Stone Age humans, there still seems to be a near universal pull in humankind to the divine. Most Americans today, for instance, still believe in a higher power. While the modern American religious landscape is diverse and complex, a surprising percentage of people, in fact, cannot bring themselves to accept the scientific evidence for evolution. In our scientific age, many of the answers to the ancient mysteries that religion supposedly once addressed can now be found in natural phenomena. Science may not have erased the need for spirituality, but it does offer compelling alternatives to many of the old religious explanations. Why then does belief in improbable miracles persist when such events are more reliably explained by natural phenomena?
Perhaps the strongest reason may just be tradition, cultural inertia if you will. Miracles were born in times when scientific explanations were much less available to most people. They became incorporated into religious texts and became part of the narratives written about the divine. They served some utility too, because they could be a way of enhancing God’s greatness and our ultimate dependence on him. But in more recent times, they may come more as appendages to the more meaningful body of religious ideas – mythology, ethics and self-empowerment – we may tend to focus on today.
Another answer, I suppose, may be provided by a simple psychological phenomenon I learned about as an undergraduate in an introductory psychology class: confirmation bias. This is the tendency to pay particular attention to new information that sustains a person’s belief systems. We all do this. The mind creates a filter on incoming information. We seek out, remember, and transmit information that confirms beliefs that we already have formed. On the other hand, new information that contradicts our current belief structure is dismissed, forgotten, trivialized or ignored. If, for instance, we grow up learning that evolution is an evil and erroneous theory from a young age, we are likely to pay particular attention to any pieces of evidence that confirm our belief in this viewpoint.
But tradition and confirmation bias cannot explain it all. Though there are likely many people who uncritically accept religious claims, many religious adherents are also deeply aware of the contradictions that sometimes arise between elements of their faith traditions and more scientific sources of information. They realize that their religious worldview is not always congruent with our modern understanding of history, anthropology, or cosmology. For some followers, the compulsion to continue belief in the improbable may then come from a deeper need to stay connected with a religion that permeates family life, community life, or perhaps even employment. Any threat to such a deeply held belief structure is more that just a challenge to an academic understanding of some remote facet of the universe; such threats can be threats to family cohesion, individual identity or purpose, or one’s place in a faith community. For a few people, it may be easier to sacrifice some measure of rational thinking than to abandon a belief system that brings other social and psychological benefits.
This thought process presupposes than an individual views his or her religion as a single package that one is to accept or reject in totality. In all likelihood, this may not be a very common way of thinking for most modern religious adherents. I assume that there are many people who are comfortable accepting much of their religious tradition while rejecting ideas that are improbable (like miracles) or otherwise unacceptable (like sexism) to them. But blanket (or near universal) acceptance of religious doctrine is relatively common in Mormonism. I’ll explore this phenomenon more in the upcoming final post in this series.
Notes:
(1) Sale, K. 2006. After Eden. The Evolution of Human Domination. Duke University Press, (quotation is from p.61).
31 August 2012
When the improbable is compelling (Part II)
Science and religion, perhaps more than any other disciplines of the human mind, concern themselves with the search for truth. Sometimes they often come to radically different conclusions. Yes, they sometimes ask different questions, but their differing destinations can also be explained in large part by different processes of inquiry.
Science is based on empirical research. The process begins with a question, usually born of some set of observations made about the natural world. Humans are generally curious creatures and have long asked about natural phenomena. In science, these questions, which initially may be narrow or wide in scope, are later framed as testable hypotheses. Hypotheses themselves are usually quite specific. They are educated guesses about the mechanisms that create observable patterns. As an illustration (using my field of ecology), one might ask why a tree species is distributed only at certain elevations in a particular mountain range. Hypotheses are then developed: seasonal snowpack limits its upper distribution or competition with another tree species sets its lower distribution. One or more experiments (a set of observations or manipulative interventions) are designed so as to lend evidence to two or more alternative outcomes to the experiment. Ecologists like me love to do field work, so given the hypotheses mentioned above I might set up a clearing experiment to test for evidence of competition or add or remove snow to test for its effects on seedling success (a challenging experiment indeed given the size of the organisms of interest!).
Importantly, good experiments are not structured to automatically favor one alternative hypothesis over another. They are also most helpful when their results can be cleanly interpreted. My mountain experiments with the tree species would need to be conducted so that the experimental methods do not bias the outcome or so that my interpretation is inadvertently stymied by some confounding factor. Broadly speaking, science is not supposed to start with an a priori answer to which subsequent inquiry must be subservient.
Science is guided by a few other key principles. First, science proceeds as hypotheses are rejected. Technically, hypotheses are never proven, rather they are rejected. Second, data and conclusions obtained by good science are repeatable. Incorrect hypotheses will be repeatedly rejected by independent experimentation. A series of experiments testing the same phenomenon with the same approach and under the same conditions should yield the same result. If results differ, the original ideas need to be modified. There are limits to our ability to repeat experimentation, such as the impossibility of rewinding the clock to replicate the exact conditions of a previous time period. But if not for every tiny detail, there are abundant opportunities to verify the general phenomena elucidated by scientific inquiry. Third, science is based heavily on probabilities because it frequently relies on statistics to reach conclusions. Since probabilities govern interpretation, again, hypotheses are not technically irrefutably proved.
Finally, science is pretty democratic. By this I mean that the process of scientific inquiry and the discoveries of science are available to everyone. Limitations of access to expensive instrumentation being one exception, anyone can design and conduct an experiment or gather a set of observations to address a question of interest. Likewise, much of science is conducted in an open manner so that the results of experiments, mathematical models, and observational studies are accessible to all. Scientific results are often published following peer-review (an imperfect though workable process) and then are made available to other scientists and the public for scrutiny, further evaluation, rejection, or modification.
Those basics form the backbone of the scientific process. From here, there are minor philosophical variations on how hypotheses are treated and how science proceeds. Previous theory and data informs the scope of experimentation and the methodology used to address specific inquiries in science. However, the best scientists are open to new results that challenge their existing knowledge about the world. Data are always > theory. In this sense, science has less of a tendency to create a hierarchy of truth: a sound experiment that overturns a well entrenched idea would be accepted even if the original idea came from a scientific superstar. There are no prophets in science with an unassailable conduit to truth. Although incorrect paradigms can persist for some time in our understanding of the natural world (the rejection of continental drift in geology until about the 1960s is a good example of stalled progress), science can also be punctuated by paradigm-shifting breakthroughs that rapidly push forward inquiry by providing a new framework of understanding (1). Creativity, hard work, collaboration and intelligence are generally the main ingredients of successful science.
Empirical research, like any human endeavor, has limitations. One fundamental issue concerns limits to observation. Tools such as microscopes, telescopes, satellites, and high speed computational statistics extend our capacity to measure and model phenomena at smaller and larger scales than are possible with human senses, but they only extend perception so far. Another limitation to empirical science is that some concepts are largely untestable. “Hypotheses” such as the existence of supernatural beings or miracles cannot be adequately addressed with typical scientific techniques. Even for many natural phenomena rarities abound. It may be logistically impossible to repeat experimentation or observation of extremely rare events. Yet this does not mean that all religious claims about the supernatural are off the hook intellectually; the lack of ability to test certain religious ideas empirically also means that we can never reject natural explanations in favor of the supernatural.
Religion seeks knowledge by a wide diversity of means. In many religions, ancient scriptural texts derived through others’ interactions with the divine form the basis of acquiring truth about life, history, human purpose and moral responsibilities. Many religions place importance on a living authority – a prophet or teacher – whose role is to transmit divine information. Yet other religions, particularly Zen Buddhism, focus on individual experience with truth. Meditative practices enable direct communion between the religious student and the divine (truth). Mormonism has pieces of all of these basic means of discerning truth.
While religion can have deep inspirational value for human beings, its several pathways to knowledge each suffer from significant weaknesses. First, ancient religious texts have cultural biases and tend to have limited scientific rigor because they were composed in less scientific times. Add to these translation issues, indeterminable textual origins, uncertain dating, and incongruence between textual claims and empirical findings and their reliability as a source of infallible truth becomes very suspect. Moreover, we generally know nothing about the authors of ancient religious texts outside of the information presented in the works themselves; are these people reliable sources of information? Have their words and experiences been changed by others unintentionally or intentionally? At best, concepts in religious texts should be treated as hypotheses, subject to debate or scrutiny like any other claim.
Individual experience and spiritual teachers are also common means of acquiring religious truth, but they suffer heavily from the vagaries of subjectivity. The experiences, thoughts and inspiration each religious seeker obtains are invariably influenced by culture, individual circumstance, and personality. Religious seekers and proponents can hold more ennobling traits like compassion, selflessness and mental discipline, but they can also be subject to greed, deception, the quest for power and jealously like the rest of us. In my view, I assume that spiritual experiences are principally cerebral experiences, so how can the inner thoughts of another person ever be verified? There is no ability to challenge spiritual interpretation that comes through authority the way that an open scientific process allows. For these reasons, accepting others experiences as divine truth of direct relevance and applicability to me, something I am hesitant to do.
Theoretically, any of the fundamental features of the scientific process – observation, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and replication – can be applied to some religious questions. In fact, in the Book of Mormon a notable series of passages encourages non-believers to “give place that a seed may be planted in your heart …”, a sort of experimentation with faith in religious concepts (see Alma 32:27-42). The reasoning is sound: if the religious claims are true, then they experimentation should yield consistent and positive fruits. But caution is still warranted: if in taking a placebo, I feel better, without careful scrutiny I would not know that there was some mechanism other than the substance of the pill itself that had its effect on me.
More to the heart of a skeptic’s point of view, there are instances where scientific approaches can be applied to religious claims. I find these exciting, because they are one way to evaluate the reliability of religious sources. The most prominent of these questions in Mormonism are specific historical events. Claims in the Book of Mormon such as Israelite journeys to the Americas and cataclysmic destruction of ancient cities are subject to verification by archaeology and studies of human phylogeny. A subject better left for its own post, scientific evidence seems relatively scant for many traditional Book of Mormon claims. DNA evidence, for instance, is highly unfavorable towards the popular LDS view that many of the Native Americans descended from Middle Eastern populations several thousand years ago (2).
Religion need not have antipathy towards science. Skepticism about supernatural claims is healthy. Unfortunately, some elements in religion are hostile to scientific inquiry. Some biblical literalists, for instance, hold that scripture comes directly from God, and is therefore intellectually unassailable. Scriptural teachings are like a perfect scaffolding around which other elements of truth must eventually fit. Such scaffoldings can often demand a lot of mental gymnastics. If they are not based on truth, they will eventually fall. In my view, science and religion best co-exist when religion humbly accepts that many questions about life and human experience are better addressed by empirical inquiry. Religion can be a powerful force in teaching ennobling ethics and encouraging the human spirit to flourish. It oversteps its bounds however, when it deals with evolution and not ethics, linguistics and not love.
Notes:
1. See Kuhn, T.S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
2. Simon Southerton presents a very interesting discussion of DNA and the origins of Native Americans in this Mormon Stories podcast. Similar information can be found on his blog. The DNA issue, in my view, is extremely troubling for many of the traditional claims of Mormonism.
Science is based on empirical research. The process begins with a question, usually born of some set of observations made about the natural world. Humans are generally curious creatures and have long asked about natural phenomena. In science, these questions, which initially may be narrow or wide in scope, are later framed as testable hypotheses. Hypotheses themselves are usually quite specific. They are educated guesses about the mechanisms that create observable patterns. As an illustration (using my field of ecology), one might ask why a tree species is distributed only at certain elevations in a particular mountain range. Hypotheses are then developed: seasonal snowpack limits its upper distribution or competition with another tree species sets its lower distribution. One or more experiments (a set of observations or manipulative interventions) are designed so as to lend evidence to two or more alternative outcomes to the experiment. Ecologists like me love to do field work, so given the hypotheses mentioned above I might set up a clearing experiment to test for evidence of competition or add or remove snow to test for its effects on seedling success (a challenging experiment indeed given the size of the organisms of interest!).
Importantly, good experiments are not structured to automatically favor one alternative hypothesis over another. They are also most helpful when their results can be cleanly interpreted. My mountain experiments with the tree species would need to be conducted so that the experimental methods do not bias the outcome or so that my interpretation is inadvertently stymied by some confounding factor. Broadly speaking, science is not supposed to start with an a priori answer to which subsequent inquiry must be subservient.
Science is guided by a few other key principles. First, science proceeds as hypotheses are rejected. Technically, hypotheses are never proven, rather they are rejected. Second, data and conclusions obtained by good science are repeatable. Incorrect hypotheses will be repeatedly rejected by independent experimentation. A series of experiments testing the same phenomenon with the same approach and under the same conditions should yield the same result. If results differ, the original ideas need to be modified. There are limits to our ability to repeat experimentation, such as the impossibility of rewinding the clock to replicate the exact conditions of a previous time period. But if not for every tiny detail, there are abundant opportunities to verify the general phenomena elucidated by scientific inquiry. Third, science is based heavily on probabilities because it frequently relies on statistics to reach conclusions. Since probabilities govern interpretation, again, hypotheses are not technically irrefutably proved.
Finally, science is pretty democratic. By this I mean that the process of scientific inquiry and the discoveries of science are available to everyone. Limitations of access to expensive instrumentation being one exception, anyone can design and conduct an experiment or gather a set of observations to address a question of interest. Likewise, much of science is conducted in an open manner so that the results of experiments, mathematical models, and observational studies are accessible to all. Scientific results are often published following peer-review (an imperfect though workable process) and then are made available to other scientists and the public for scrutiny, further evaluation, rejection, or modification.
Those basics form the backbone of the scientific process. From here, there are minor philosophical variations on how hypotheses are treated and how science proceeds. Previous theory and data informs the scope of experimentation and the methodology used to address specific inquiries in science. However, the best scientists are open to new results that challenge their existing knowledge about the world. Data are always > theory. In this sense, science has less of a tendency to create a hierarchy of truth: a sound experiment that overturns a well entrenched idea would be accepted even if the original idea came from a scientific superstar. There are no prophets in science with an unassailable conduit to truth. Although incorrect paradigms can persist for some time in our understanding of the natural world (the rejection of continental drift in geology until about the 1960s is a good example of stalled progress), science can also be punctuated by paradigm-shifting breakthroughs that rapidly push forward inquiry by providing a new framework of understanding (1). Creativity, hard work, collaboration and intelligence are generally the main ingredients of successful science.
Empirical research, like any human endeavor, has limitations. One fundamental issue concerns limits to observation. Tools such as microscopes, telescopes, satellites, and high speed computational statistics extend our capacity to measure and model phenomena at smaller and larger scales than are possible with human senses, but they only extend perception so far. Another limitation to empirical science is that some concepts are largely untestable. “Hypotheses” such as the existence of supernatural beings or miracles cannot be adequately addressed with typical scientific techniques. Even for many natural phenomena rarities abound. It may be logistically impossible to repeat experimentation or observation of extremely rare events. Yet this does not mean that all religious claims about the supernatural are off the hook intellectually; the lack of ability to test certain religious ideas empirically also means that we can never reject natural explanations in favor of the supernatural.
Religion seeks knowledge by a wide diversity of means. In many religions, ancient scriptural texts derived through others’ interactions with the divine form the basis of acquiring truth about life, history, human purpose and moral responsibilities. Many religions place importance on a living authority – a prophet or teacher – whose role is to transmit divine information. Yet other religions, particularly Zen Buddhism, focus on individual experience with truth. Meditative practices enable direct communion between the religious student and the divine (truth). Mormonism has pieces of all of these basic means of discerning truth.
While religion can have deep inspirational value for human beings, its several pathways to knowledge each suffer from significant weaknesses. First, ancient religious texts have cultural biases and tend to have limited scientific rigor because they were composed in less scientific times. Add to these translation issues, indeterminable textual origins, uncertain dating, and incongruence between textual claims and empirical findings and their reliability as a source of infallible truth becomes very suspect. Moreover, we generally know nothing about the authors of ancient religious texts outside of the information presented in the works themselves; are these people reliable sources of information? Have their words and experiences been changed by others unintentionally or intentionally? At best, concepts in religious texts should be treated as hypotheses, subject to debate or scrutiny like any other claim.
Individual experience and spiritual teachers are also common means of acquiring religious truth, but they suffer heavily from the vagaries of subjectivity. The experiences, thoughts and inspiration each religious seeker obtains are invariably influenced by culture, individual circumstance, and personality. Religious seekers and proponents can hold more ennobling traits like compassion, selflessness and mental discipline, but they can also be subject to greed, deception, the quest for power and jealously like the rest of us. In my view, I assume that spiritual experiences are principally cerebral experiences, so how can the inner thoughts of another person ever be verified? There is no ability to challenge spiritual interpretation that comes through authority the way that an open scientific process allows. For these reasons, accepting others experiences as divine truth of direct relevance and applicability to me, something I am hesitant to do.
Theoretically, any of the fundamental features of the scientific process – observation, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and replication – can be applied to some religious questions. In fact, in the Book of Mormon a notable series of passages encourages non-believers to “give place that a seed may be planted in your heart …”, a sort of experimentation with faith in religious concepts (see Alma 32:27-42). The reasoning is sound: if the religious claims are true, then they experimentation should yield consistent and positive fruits. But caution is still warranted: if in taking a placebo, I feel better, without careful scrutiny I would not know that there was some mechanism other than the substance of the pill itself that had its effect on me.
More to the heart of a skeptic’s point of view, there are instances where scientific approaches can be applied to religious claims. I find these exciting, because they are one way to evaluate the reliability of religious sources. The most prominent of these questions in Mormonism are specific historical events. Claims in the Book of Mormon such as Israelite journeys to the Americas and cataclysmic destruction of ancient cities are subject to verification by archaeology and studies of human phylogeny. A subject better left for its own post, scientific evidence seems relatively scant for many traditional Book of Mormon claims. DNA evidence, for instance, is highly unfavorable towards the popular LDS view that many of the Native Americans descended from Middle Eastern populations several thousand years ago (2).
Religion need not have antipathy towards science. Skepticism about supernatural claims is healthy. Unfortunately, some elements in religion are hostile to scientific inquiry. Some biblical literalists, for instance, hold that scripture comes directly from God, and is therefore intellectually unassailable. Scriptural teachings are like a perfect scaffolding around which other elements of truth must eventually fit. Such scaffoldings can often demand a lot of mental gymnastics. If they are not based on truth, they will eventually fall. In my view, science and religion best co-exist when religion humbly accepts that many questions about life and human experience are better addressed by empirical inquiry. Religion can be a powerful force in teaching ennobling ethics and encouraging the human spirit to flourish. It oversteps its bounds however, when it deals with evolution and not ethics, linguistics and not love.
Notes:
1. See Kuhn, T.S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
2. Simon Southerton presents a very interesting discussion of DNA and the origins of Native Americans in this Mormon Stories podcast. Similar information can be found on his blog. The DNA issue, in my view, is extremely troubling for many of the traditional claims of Mormonism.
26 August 2012
When the improbable is compelling (Part I)
Diving into any religion reveals some eye-opening beliefs and history. Angels, demons, virgin births, visions, healings and the like accompany other components of faith traditions like love, commitment, honesty and ritual.
The supernatural is as much a part of Mormonism as it is of most other religions conceived before science had a broader influence in society. In principle, one can have a practical Mormonism without the supernatural – a religion of family, Christian values, and patriotism – but the Church wouldn’t even exist today without the supernatural. The fluid communion between Joseph Smith’s mind and a foreign universe of gods and angels is the genesis of everything else that has emerged in Mormonism during the last two centuries.
The biblical tradition is rich in miracles and the supernatural. On top of these, Mormonism has added other miraculous events. Miracles from the Book of Mormon and early Church history include ocean crossings by ancient prophets traveling to the Americas, epic battles, angelic visitations, and golden plates translated by divine inspiration. In fact the Book of Mormon, not to be outdone by the long established preeminence of the Bible in the improbable, has perhaps even more miraculous events than its companion scripture. For instance, whereas Christ’s birth in the Old World was met by a new star appearing the sky, in the Americas it was also announced by a night of continuous illumination even though the sun set that evening before his birth (3 Nephi 1:15-21).
I grew up loosely as a Catholic with little pressure from my family or community to dive deeply into Biblical literalism. I knew about miracles but felt little compulsion to give them too much deference. When I thought about it, of all the Biblical miracles I was probably most accepting of those tied to Jesus because I was always impressed by his character and divinity. As a kid I was inclined towards science, biology and paleontology especially. That interest later matured into degrees in science. A short time before college, however, I learned about Mormonism and joined the Church. It was my first encounter with an intense theology that doubled as a way of life. I liked the focus on truth and certainty in the LDS Church and the impressive fruits I observed in my friends. It was not too long, however, before I encountered the miracles and literalism of Mormonism. Right from the start, in fact, investigators learn about Joseph Smith’s miraculous vision of God and Jesus as a 14 year old boy because this event is central to Mormon belief in the need for a restoration of Christian authority. Being impressed with the Mormon promise of access to truth and a community of well-intentioned and accomplished individuals, I was inclined to give the Church the benefit of the doubt regarding miracles and literalism as I became a new convert.
If I could have sculpted Mormonism at this time, I think that I would have probably regarded at least some of the miraculous in Mormonism figuratively – almost surely so with creationism and the Garden of Eden. But it was not my church. With more experience, I learned that the Mormon supernatural was literal, not just symbolic. Adam and Eve were real individuals who lived on a paradisiacal earth 6000 years ago; God really did send a flood that covered the whole earth in the days of Noah; and Joseph Smith actually did see a resurrected Jesus Christ with a tangible body in a forest in New York State in 1820. Joseph and his successors wrote of these Biblical, Book of Mormon, and more modern miracles with the same certainty as they would tell you of the sun rising each morning from the east. To be sure, these supernatural events often also held deeper symbolic importance in Mormon theology, but fundamentally they were and are also regarded as literally true historical events.
As a maturing Church member, to deal with this uncomfortable literalism, I needed a strategy. I would have a hard time being a devout Mormon if I dismissed each of these miracles as figurative events, so my mind seemed to have developed two mechanisms. The first was to spend less time thinking about scriptural events that seemed unlikely to me. Instead, in my religious commitment, I wanted to focus on the comfortable doctrines: love, self-improvement, and the intellectual components of LDS theology. As I read scripture, I found that I wanted to interpret passages in such a way as to make them more consistent with more rational beliefs. I often read them more with the mindset of an academic.
The second strategy involved some intellectual acquiescence on my part. To illustrate, I would meet a miracle with the following kinds of thoughts: ‘That seems improbable, but it certainly could have occurred. With God anything is possible.’ Considering each miracle in isolation, this strategy worked reasonably well since I thought it would be virtually impossible to disprove specific events that transpired such a long time ago. They may not have seemed rational and they may not occur today, but I could make some mental space for their possibility. I could also maintain more belief if I did not look too much to outside sources for alternate interpretations of miraculous phenomena. Though it could work for one passage of scripture at a time, taken in sum however, this strategy of miracle excuses eventually became unsustainable. A few too many improbabilities accumulated can look much more like outright impossibility. The intellectual compromises I entertained to accept literalism promoted a fractured view of reality and caused me to spend too much time straining at details while the broader landscape was ignored.
My trouble with literalism came to a head once on my mission, about two years after I joined the Church. Growing up with a strong interest in biology and fossils, belief in biological evolution was natural for me. I could not have foreseen how much trouble evolution was going to cause me in my attempts to be a faithful Mormon. I had had faith crises before during my first year in the Church, but such intellectual-spiritual clashes become intense on an LDS mission. Your job as a missionary for most waking hours of each week is to continually proclaim, with no uncertainly, your witness of the Church’s divine origins and to do all you can to convert new members and help current members retain their faith. There is very little room for doubt.
I am unsure exactly what triggered the evolution crisis, but I vaguely recall it being something I read in a Church periodical. Perhaps it was some flippant dismissal of evolution that appears in Church discourse from time to time (1). At some point I took my evolution trouble to my mission president. The mission president was a retired dentist, a grandfatherly man who had both a compassionate demeanor and a surprising streak of fire and brimstone zeal. I don’t know what I expected to hear from him about the Church’s position on evolution – maybe a confirmation of what I had heard during a talk by a Church authority in the Missionary Training Center at the very start of my mission – that indeed the Church had no official position. After all, my new-found church supposedly embraced all truth regardless of its origins. Why would it oppose a theory for which so much evidence existed?
My hopes were dashed with the mission president. In our conversation I learned that he was a full fledged creationist – of the variety that believes not only in the fallacy of evolution, but in an earth aged in thousands, not billions, of years. He even mentioned the old non-sense that the extinction of the dinosaurs occurred because of Noah’s flood. He directed me to a book in his office downstairs written by a former Church leader, Joseph Fielding Smith. Smith, son of the 6th president of the Church and grand-nephew of Joseph Smith, would later also become president of the Church briefly in the early 1970s. In the 1950s, as a member of the Church’s high-ranking Council of the Twelve, he wrote a scathing denunciation of biological evolution in “Man, His Origin and Destiny”. This book had no sympathies for belief in a 4.6 billion year chronology of earth history or any intimation that modern humans descended from earlier hominids. As his son-in-law Elder Bruce R. McConkie, another prominent Mormon leader, would also believe, before the days of Adam and Eve there was not even death for any living organism (2). I read some of Elder Smith’s book and was deeply disheartened. Was this the official position of the Church? Was this the “appropriate” framework in which I had to interpret biology? (3)
In connection with this spiritual crisis, I had two divergent experiences. The first occurred in a church building adjacent to the Mission Home where I lived at the time. One Monday evening I was caught up in this internal debate about evolution that had been swirling around in my mind. Not having the resources or lengthy Church experience to better research the position of the Church, I seemed to have been stuck reconciling poignant anti-evolutionary views, my natural instinct to believe in evolution, and the overarching Mormon imperative to be obedient to the teachings of Church leaders. In the conflict on this one night in the church building, I made a painful decision that I would accept belief in a young earth even though it seemed repugnant and humiliating. It was a sacrifice I would have to make to be in favor with God. Perhaps in this one moment – one that would not last very long at all – I had fully acquiesced to orthodox Mormonism.
The second experience was in the mission home some time later, on the same floor where Smith’s dreaded book was kept. It was the redemption from my own intellectual fall. Alone in prayer, I felt that God accepted my belief in evolution. There was a warm feeling and a restoration of calm. I cannot recall many more details than that, but the result seemed to be that I felt accepted as an exception to what at least some other Mormons believed. Though anti-evolution remarks made in Church classes or found in more formal Church publications would bother me for years after my mission, from this point, I felt more secure in my own belief on this issue.
Evolution was a warning to me of the strength of Mormon gravity on the intellect. It was a huge issue for me during my early days in the Church, but one I was able to better resolve with time. In spite of this small victory, I perhaps became complacent about the other abundant improbabilities that I would encounter with orthodox Mormonism. In my brief intellectual acquiescence to creationism, I was following a pattern that I would also unfortunately do with my sexuality: I deferred to faith and authority more than conscience or evidence.
Notes:
1. See, for example, a BYU address given by Elder Russel M. Nelson in 1987: “…some without scriptural understanding….have deduced that, because of certain similarities between different forms of life, there has been an organic evolution from one form to another. Many of these have concluded that the universe began as a ‘big bang’ that eventually resulted in the creation of our planet and life upon it. To me, such theories are unbelievable. Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary? It is unthinkable!”. Elder Nelson repeated his analogy as recently as April 2012: “Yet some people erroneously think that these marvelous physical attributes happened by chance or resulted from a big bang somewhere. Ask yourself, ‘Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary?’”.
2. Elder McConkie’s popular book, “Mormon Doctrine” can be found in many Mormon households. It contains both anti-evolutionary and anti-gay teachings. I believe that Elder McConkie also played a role in crafting the current version of the Bible Dictionary in the LDS scriptures. That dictionary also makes reference to lack of any death before Adam’s fall.
3. Pronouncements about evolution by Church authorities do vary, though most leaders have viewed evolution unfavorably. Many such statements have been compiled into a book, “Mormonism and Evolution” by W.E. Evenson and D.E. Jeffrey, 2005, Greg Kofford Books. I was unaware of the detailed history of the debate over evolution in the church as a young member and missionary in the 1990s.
The supernatural is as much a part of Mormonism as it is of most other religions conceived before science had a broader influence in society. In principle, one can have a practical Mormonism without the supernatural – a religion of family, Christian values, and patriotism – but the Church wouldn’t even exist today without the supernatural. The fluid communion between Joseph Smith’s mind and a foreign universe of gods and angels is the genesis of everything else that has emerged in Mormonism during the last two centuries.
The biblical tradition is rich in miracles and the supernatural. On top of these, Mormonism has added other miraculous events. Miracles from the Book of Mormon and early Church history include ocean crossings by ancient prophets traveling to the Americas, epic battles, angelic visitations, and golden plates translated by divine inspiration. In fact the Book of Mormon, not to be outdone by the long established preeminence of the Bible in the improbable, has perhaps even more miraculous events than its companion scripture. For instance, whereas Christ’s birth in the Old World was met by a new star appearing the sky, in the Americas it was also announced by a night of continuous illumination even though the sun set that evening before his birth (3 Nephi 1:15-21).
I grew up loosely as a Catholic with little pressure from my family or community to dive deeply into Biblical literalism. I knew about miracles but felt little compulsion to give them too much deference. When I thought about it, of all the Biblical miracles I was probably most accepting of those tied to Jesus because I was always impressed by his character and divinity. As a kid I was inclined towards science, biology and paleontology especially. That interest later matured into degrees in science. A short time before college, however, I learned about Mormonism and joined the Church. It was my first encounter with an intense theology that doubled as a way of life. I liked the focus on truth and certainty in the LDS Church and the impressive fruits I observed in my friends. It was not too long, however, before I encountered the miracles and literalism of Mormonism. Right from the start, in fact, investigators learn about Joseph Smith’s miraculous vision of God and Jesus as a 14 year old boy because this event is central to Mormon belief in the need for a restoration of Christian authority. Being impressed with the Mormon promise of access to truth and a community of well-intentioned and accomplished individuals, I was inclined to give the Church the benefit of the doubt regarding miracles and literalism as I became a new convert.
If I could have sculpted Mormonism at this time, I think that I would have probably regarded at least some of the miraculous in Mormonism figuratively – almost surely so with creationism and the Garden of Eden. But it was not my church. With more experience, I learned that the Mormon supernatural was literal, not just symbolic. Adam and Eve were real individuals who lived on a paradisiacal earth 6000 years ago; God really did send a flood that covered the whole earth in the days of Noah; and Joseph Smith actually did see a resurrected Jesus Christ with a tangible body in a forest in New York State in 1820. Joseph and his successors wrote of these Biblical, Book of Mormon, and more modern miracles with the same certainty as they would tell you of the sun rising each morning from the east. To be sure, these supernatural events often also held deeper symbolic importance in Mormon theology, but fundamentally they were and are also regarded as literally true historical events.
As a maturing Church member, to deal with this uncomfortable literalism, I needed a strategy. I would have a hard time being a devout Mormon if I dismissed each of these miracles as figurative events, so my mind seemed to have developed two mechanisms. The first was to spend less time thinking about scriptural events that seemed unlikely to me. Instead, in my religious commitment, I wanted to focus on the comfortable doctrines: love, self-improvement, and the intellectual components of LDS theology. As I read scripture, I found that I wanted to interpret passages in such a way as to make them more consistent with more rational beliefs. I often read them more with the mindset of an academic.
The second strategy involved some intellectual acquiescence on my part. To illustrate, I would meet a miracle with the following kinds of thoughts: ‘That seems improbable, but it certainly could have occurred. With God anything is possible.’ Considering each miracle in isolation, this strategy worked reasonably well since I thought it would be virtually impossible to disprove specific events that transpired such a long time ago. They may not have seemed rational and they may not occur today, but I could make some mental space for their possibility. I could also maintain more belief if I did not look too much to outside sources for alternate interpretations of miraculous phenomena. Though it could work for one passage of scripture at a time, taken in sum however, this strategy of miracle excuses eventually became unsustainable. A few too many improbabilities accumulated can look much more like outright impossibility. The intellectual compromises I entertained to accept literalism promoted a fractured view of reality and caused me to spend too much time straining at details while the broader landscape was ignored.
My trouble with literalism came to a head once on my mission, about two years after I joined the Church. Growing up with a strong interest in biology and fossils, belief in biological evolution was natural for me. I could not have foreseen how much trouble evolution was going to cause me in my attempts to be a faithful Mormon. I had had faith crises before during my first year in the Church, but such intellectual-spiritual clashes become intense on an LDS mission. Your job as a missionary for most waking hours of each week is to continually proclaim, with no uncertainly, your witness of the Church’s divine origins and to do all you can to convert new members and help current members retain their faith. There is very little room for doubt.
I am unsure exactly what triggered the evolution crisis, but I vaguely recall it being something I read in a Church periodical. Perhaps it was some flippant dismissal of evolution that appears in Church discourse from time to time (1). At some point I took my evolution trouble to my mission president. The mission president was a retired dentist, a grandfatherly man who had both a compassionate demeanor and a surprising streak of fire and brimstone zeal. I don’t know what I expected to hear from him about the Church’s position on evolution – maybe a confirmation of what I had heard during a talk by a Church authority in the Missionary Training Center at the very start of my mission – that indeed the Church had no official position. After all, my new-found church supposedly embraced all truth regardless of its origins. Why would it oppose a theory for which so much evidence existed?
My hopes were dashed with the mission president. In our conversation I learned that he was a full fledged creationist – of the variety that believes not only in the fallacy of evolution, but in an earth aged in thousands, not billions, of years. He even mentioned the old non-sense that the extinction of the dinosaurs occurred because of Noah’s flood. He directed me to a book in his office downstairs written by a former Church leader, Joseph Fielding Smith. Smith, son of the 6th president of the Church and grand-nephew of Joseph Smith, would later also become president of the Church briefly in the early 1970s. In the 1950s, as a member of the Church’s high-ranking Council of the Twelve, he wrote a scathing denunciation of biological evolution in “Man, His Origin and Destiny”. This book had no sympathies for belief in a 4.6 billion year chronology of earth history or any intimation that modern humans descended from earlier hominids. As his son-in-law Elder Bruce R. McConkie, another prominent Mormon leader, would also believe, before the days of Adam and Eve there was not even death for any living organism (2). I read some of Elder Smith’s book and was deeply disheartened. Was this the official position of the Church? Was this the “appropriate” framework in which I had to interpret biology? (3)
In connection with this spiritual crisis, I had two divergent experiences. The first occurred in a church building adjacent to the Mission Home where I lived at the time. One Monday evening I was caught up in this internal debate about evolution that had been swirling around in my mind. Not having the resources or lengthy Church experience to better research the position of the Church, I seemed to have been stuck reconciling poignant anti-evolutionary views, my natural instinct to believe in evolution, and the overarching Mormon imperative to be obedient to the teachings of Church leaders. In the conflict on this one night in the church building, I made a painful decision that I would accept belief in a young earth even though it seemed repugnant and humiliating. It was a sacrifice I would have to make to be in favor with God. Perhaps in this one moment – one that would not last very long at all – I had fully acquiesced to orthodox Mormonism.
The second experience was in the mission home some time later, on the same floor where Smith’s dreaded book was kept. It was the redemption from my own intellectual fall. Alone in prayer, I felt that God accepted my belief in evolution. There was a warm feeling and a restoration of calm. I cannot recall many more details than that, but the result seemed to be that I felt accepted as an exception to what at least some other Mormons believed. Though anti-evolution remarks made in Church classes or found in more formal Church publications would bother me for years after my mission, from this point, I felt more secure in my own belief on this issue.
Evolution was a warning to me of the strength of Mormon gravity on the intellect. It was a huge issue for me during my early days in the Church, but one I was able to better resolve with time. In spite of this small victory, I perhaps became complacent about the other abundant improbabilities that I would encounter with orthodox Mormonism. In my brief intellectual acquiescence to creationism, I was following a pattern that I would also unfortunately do with my sexuality: I deferred to faith and authority more than conscience or evidence.
 |
| Evolutionary tree of life according to the influential and controversial biologist, E. Haeckel. 1866. Generelle morphologie der organismen. |
Notes:
1. See, for example, a BYU address given by Elder Russel M. Nelson in 1987: “…some without scriptural understanding….have deduced that, because of certain similarities between different forms of life, there has been an organic evolution from one form to another. Many of these have concluded that the universe began as a ‘big bang’ that eventually resulted in the creation of our planet and life upon it. To me, such theories are unbelievable. Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary? It is unthinkable!”. Elder Nelson repeated his analogy as recently as April 2012: “Yet some people erroneously think that these marvelous physical attributes happened by chance or resulted from a big bang somewhere. Ask yourself, ‘Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary?’”.
2. Elder McConkie’s popular book, “Mormon Doctrine” can be found in many Mormon households. It contains both anti-evolutionary and anti-gay teachings. I believe that Elder McConkie also played a role in crafting the current version of the Bible Dictionary in the LDS scriptures. That dictionary also makes reference to lack of any death before Adam’s fall.
3. Pronouncements about evolution by Church authorities do vary, though most leaders have viewed evolution unfavorably. Many such statements have been compiled into a book, “Mormonism and Evolution” by W.E. Evenson and D.E. Jeffrey, 2005, Greg Kofford Books. I was unaware of the detailed history of the debate over evolution in the church as a young member and missionary in the 1990s.
13 July 2012
A thought
Religion can be a useful stepping stone to compassion and truth. It tends however, to be a poor final destination.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)