Example 1:  Elder Poelman’s View of Divine Love:

About a month after McConkie’s speech excoriating George Pace for promoting the concept of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, Elder Ronald E. Poelman, a fairly new member of the First Quorum of the Seventy (one level below the apostles in the Church hierarchy) gave an address in General Conference which appears to have been carefully worded to imply the existence of a personal relationship with the Lord, without crossing any of the lines that McConkie had drawn.  Elder Poelman’s talk included the following statement:

By disobeying the laws of God and breaking his commandments, we do offend him, we do estrange ourselves from him, and we don’t deserve his help and inspiration and strength. But God’s love for us transcends our transgressions.

–God’s Love for Us Transcends Our Transgressions, General Conference speech, delivered April 3, 1982

It’s possible that I am reading too much into Poelman’s choice of words in this talk, but I note that he used concepts commonly reserved for personal relationships, like “estranged”, “reconciled”, “God wants us to return to Him”, and “God’s love for us, his children”, without using the actual word “relationship”. He also used the words “Lord” and “God” interchangeably, blurring the line between “God the Father” and “Jesus Christ”, a line McConkie had been very careful to draw in his BYU smackdown speech. Poelman suggested a concept of God’s love that was like a parent’s love: liberal, unconditional, and independent of any sins or disobedience we may engage in. This concept effectively takes God’s love out of the control of the Church by removing the possibility that conditions could be placed upon it by Church authorities.

If George Pace’s experience is any indication, Elder Poelman was skating on thin ice with this concept. But would Poelman’s status as a General Authority of the Church (rather than a religious educator) save him from the harsh correction of the top leadership? Well, McConkie didn’t crucify him for the speech, if that’s what you’re wondering about.  Years later, however, Poelman’s concept of divine love as unconditional in nature was definitively superseded by a 2003 article written by Apostle Russell M. Nelson, which places God’s love back in control of the Church by explicitly conditioning it on obedience:

While divine love can be called perfect, infinite, enduring, and universal, it cannot correctly be characterized as unconditional.

***

Why is divine love conditional? Because God loves us and wants us to be happy. “Happiness is the object and design of our existence; and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it; and this path is virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God.”¹

–”Divine Love”, Ensign, Feb 2003, p. 20 (emphasis added)

I’m not saying that Elder Nelson’s article was specifically prompted by Elder Poelman’s view of God’s love (I don’t think Poelman’s 1982 talk was especially influential in 2003), rather, Poelman’s view is symbolic of the very common belief among members of the LDS Church that God has unconditional love for them. They aspire to model their own love for others based on this unconditionality. The persistence of that belief is what, I think, prompted Elder Nelson’s article, which puts an official stamp of disapproval on the concept, reclaiming for the Church (and its leaders) its traditional place between the Latter-day Saints and God.

Example 2:  Elder Poelman’s View of the Gospel and the Church:

On October 7, 1984 (an appropriately Orwellian year), Ronald E. Poelman’s General Conference talk became the most famous casualty to date in the ongoing battle for control over the lifeblood of the Church.

His talk was titled “The Gospel and the Church”, and it was about recognizing distinctions between the Church and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Poelman emphasized, among other things, that following the Gospel makes members of the Church less dependent on the Church for fulfillment, and that concepts of Mormon “orthodoxy” and conformity should be founded on the eternal laws of God, like free (moral) agency, rather than the institutional Church.  Prior to publication and distribution of the talk (in print and video format) to members of the Church worldwide, the talk was drastically rewritten, and the new talk was refilmed (and spliced into the conference program tape as if originally delivered there).  The edited talk now focused on the harmonious “essential relationship” between the Church and the Gospel, and it emphasized the members’ dependence on the instruction of the Church and its leaders in order to correctly follow the Gospel.  The original version of the talk, as far as the Church was concerned, disappeared down the memory hole.

Fortunately, however, people had recorded the original television broadcast of the talk (see [Part 1] and [Part 2]), and in November 1984, when the Church published the altered version of the talk, people transcribed the original talk and compared the two versions.²  For a side-by-side comparision of the entire talk, Click Here.  Below are some highlights:

1)         Original quote (deletions marked):

As individually and collectively we increase our knowledge, acceptance, and application of gospel principles, we become less dependent on Church programs. Our lives become gospel centered.

Edited quote:

As individually and collectively we increase our knowledge, acceptance, and application of gospel principles, we can more effectively utilize the Church to make our lives more gospel centered.

2)        Original quote (deletions marked):

The conformity we require should be according to God’s standards.  The orthodoxy upon which we insist must be founded in fundamental principles and eternal law, including free agency and the divine uniqueness of the individual.

Edited quote:

Therefore, as we live the gospel and participate in the Church, the conformity we require of ourselves and of others should be according to God’s standards.  The orthodoxy upon which we insist must be founded in fundamental principles, eternal law, and direction given by those authorized in the Church.

3)        Original quote (deletions marked):

When we understand the difference between the gospel and the Church and the appropriate function of each in our daily lives, we are much more likely to do the right things for the right reasons.

Edited quote:

When we see the harmony between the gospel and the Church in our daily lives, we are much more likely to do the right things for the right reasons.

4)        Original quote (deletions marked):

Institutional discipline is replaced by self discipline.  Supervision is replaced by righteous initiative and a sense of divine accountability.

Edited quote:

We will exercise self discipline and righteous initiative guided by Church leaders and a sense of divine accountability.

The details of how a completely new version of Poelman’s talk came about are not publicly known, and it is doubtful that the folks involved in the censoring will ever explain what happened, as Elder Poelman was, and continues to be, a loyal General Authority of the Church.  Clearly, however, the edits made by the Church to Poelman’s talk demonstrate Church leaders’ insistence on asserting themselves into the middle of the relationship between Church members and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  By doing this, the Church leaders retain control over Hope, the lifeblood of the Church system.

-PWM

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1. As an aside, this statement quoted by Elder Nelson comes from a letter written by Joseph Smith to 19 year-old Nancy Rigdon, in an attempt to persuade her to be his secret polygamous bride, using the rationale that anything God commands is automatically moral and right. She was ultimately unconvinced, and showed the letter to her father, Sidney Rigdon (Joseph’s second-in-command). Joseph allegedly told Sidney that the letter had just been a test of his daughter’s virtue. The episode remains one of Joseph Smith’s creepiest alpha-maleish abuses of power.  With that context in mind, Elder Nelson’s use of the quote raises questions. What kind of “happiness” was Elder Nelson thinking of? The kind that comes only through fully submitting to the authority of Church leaders? Very clever, Russ.
2. The incident was reported in Sunstone Magazine.

In the early 1980’s, a BYU professor named George Pace had previously given speeches and written a book promoting the idea that people should “center their lives on Christ and…develop their own personal relationship with Him.” Even though Pace was simply echoing ideas recently taught in General Conference by then-apostle (and future First Presidency Counselor) James E. Faust, his “taking out the middle man” approach to interacting with the Savior prompted a humiliating public rebuke from Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, which included the following counsel:

The proper course for all of us is to stay in the mainstream of the Church. This is the Lord’s Church, and it is led by the spirit of inspiration, and the practice of the Church constitutes the interpretation of the scripture.

And you have never heard one of the First Presidency or the Twelve, who hold the keys of the kingdom, and who are appointed to see that we are not “tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14)–you have never heard one of them advocate this excessive zeal that calls for gaining a so-called special and personal relationship with Christ.

***

I wonder if it is not part of Lucifer’s system to make people feel they are special friends of Jesus when in fact they are not following the normal and usual pattern of worship found in the true Church.

–Our Relationship with the Lord, BYU Devotional speech, delivered March 1, 1982

George Pace’s idea had (inadvertantly or not) removed the Church and those leaders “who hold the keys of the kingdom” from their position as mediators between Church members and the Savior, and in doing so, had given Church members a means of independently obtaining Hope, through their personal connection with Jesus Christ. Elder McConkie put Pace, and the rest of his Lucifer-inspired (possibly unintentional) populists in their place. In McConkie’s view, only the prophets and apostles have the right to a special or personal relationship with Christ. Only the prophets and apostles have the power to prescribe the proper way for mankind to approach God and obtain salvation.  Hope is managed and apportioned through them.

After McConkie’s rebuke, Pace apologized for his impertinence:

I mean to stay in the mainstream of the Church, urging any with whom I have influence to listen to the words of our leaders, to pray earnestly for guidance, and to grow spiritually in our capacity to be obedient to the will and mind of God for us, giving full and appropriate reverence to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

-PWM

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Every blessing we have is predicated upon a law. You break the law, the blessing is gone.

There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated— And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated. (D&C 130: 20-21)²

One must be intelligent not to confuse administrative actions with the Gospel of Jesus Christ (i.e. truth) in its purest mode. There is a different between administration of earthly issues, the Truth of the Gospel, and, and what I call the “Doctrine of the Culture,” that some people cling to instead of the doctrine.

As a Mormon, I struggled with the legalistic LDS belief that all blessings a person receives from God are actually dependent upon his or her obedience to a specific Law (or body of Laws) of Heaven.  The reason I struggled is that I could never pin down exactly what the Law was, despite the fact that I was desperate to follow it.  (That seems to be a common theme in the LDS Church.) I studied the teachings of Mormon prophets over the 150+ year life of the LDS Church and found that certain Laws (or doctrines) they emphasized as “eternal” and “fundamental” to God’s plan for humanity had changed over time.  This was very distressing to me, as I had been taught my whole life that God’s Laws are eternal and unchanging, because they are based on Truth, which is eternal.  I was taught that the doctrines of Mormonism embody the sum of those unchanging Laws.  Clearly, however, doctrines had been changing and evolving the whole time.³

Once I realized this was the case, the contradiction between reality and what I had been taught and always believed about the LDS Church caused me to lose much of my confidence in the Church as the one true organization of God on Earth. I tried to figure out ways to reconcile the contradictions, trying to make distinctions between them that allowed both to be true at the same time.  My mind was working in ways similar to Deep Throat above, conceptually separating “doctrine” and “Truth” from “Mormon culture” and “folklore” in an effort to define the consistent Laws in LDS teachings upon which all blessings are predicated.⁴  Despite my best efforts, I was largely unsuccessful at convincing myself that the contradictions weren’t really contradictions, and that there was a consistent Law of the Gospel buried in Mormon beliefs.

When the believers in my family learned of my confusion, they pulled all of the strings they could to get me some help.  They put me in contact with Max Anderson, an LDS apologist, who had published a book defending mainstream LDS beliefs by deconstructing Mormon Fundamentalist claims to divine authority.  Max and his wife were very kind to me, and they had me over to their house on several occasions to sit in their living room and talk through my concerns.  A few times, Max invited other apologists to join us and discuss issues they had researched.  These meetings presented me with various ways of parsing the contradictions so that they made more sense.

One meeting in particular really blew my mind.  At that meeting, Eldon Watson, who had compiled a book of Brigham Young’s writings, attempted the mindbending feat of explaining how everything Brigham Young taught is in harmony with mainstream LDS beliefs about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I was flabbergasted to learn that what made it all fit together for him was to draw a distinction between “LDS doctrine” and ”Truth”.  The key, he explained, is to understand that Truth is eternal and unchanging, but LDS doctrine is only an expression of the Church’s acknowledged beliefs at a specific moment in time.  Thus, LDS doctrine when Brigham Young was alive included polygamy as a requirement to get into the highest part of heaven, but current LDS doctrine does not.

This idea was shocking to me because, despite its (semi)effectiveness as a logical solution to the problem of contradiction in authoritative LDS teachings, the concept is clearly heretical.  All LDS Church leaders I know of, and regular members alike, have talked about LDS doctrine as embodying “the fullness of the Gospel”.  Any past changes have been carefully characterized as adding more previously unrevealed Truth to the doctrine, because Truth is what LDS doctrine is all about.  Watson was explaining that doctrine freely changes with the needs of the Church at the given moment–things that are Truth, like the divine nature of polygamy, can be taken out and disavowed.

I’m pretty sure that Watson, in offering up his idea, was mainly just trying to accommodate the fact that Church President Gordon B. Hinckley had recently blurted out, on international television, that polygamy is not doctrinal⁵ when it had clearly been doctrinal (though not always practiced) during the previous 100+ years of LDS Church existence.  I think, however, that drawing a distinction between doctrine and Truth is just an apologetic invention, and has never been part of Church teachings. As far as I know, President Brigham Young never made that distinction, and Apostle Boyd K. Packer (currently the next in line to be President of the Church) doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo either, because he has taught that Some things cannot be changed. Doctrine cannot be changed. And understandably so.  Malleable doctrine undermines the authority of Church leaders, because it means that at least sometimes what they teach is not the real Truth, and therefore need not be obeyed.  This is also the reason why Mormons almost never admit (with any specificity) that Church leaders make mistakes.  Changing doctrine is just a slow-motion mistake.

Funny, though, because now that I have apostatized, I agree with Elden Watson.

-PWM

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1. Yeah, the irony of an apparently straight-laced Mormon naming him or herself Deep Throat hasn’t escaped me.  I assume the name is referring somehow to the Watergate informant, rather than the classic porn movie from which the informant’s pseudonym was derived.  Then again, either reference is kind of random.
2. By the way, this section of the Doctrine & Covenants (which is LDS scripture on par with the Bible or the Book of Mormon) is a treasure trove of canonized Mormon oddities, like Joseph Smith’s unfulfilled prediction about growing unrest in the American South (that eventually developed into the Civil War) being a precursor to the second coming of Jesus Christ, his cautiously hedged prediction that Jesus Christ’s second coming would happen prior to his 85th birthday (1890), his explanation for why the Holy Ghost is incorporeal, his insight into the planets that God and the angels live on, his view of what the afterlife is generally like, and other fun stuff.  Definitely worth a read, since these things are part of the “meat” of the Gospel that Mormons don’t share with outsiders very often (the “milk” always comes first).
3. For example, the importance of polygamy in attaining the highest glory in the Celestial Kingdom, the meaning and importance of Doctrine & Covenants 89 (the “Word of Wisdom”), the role of Blood Atonement in the Gospel, the meaning and importance of Joseph Smith’s First Vision, the role of seer stones and other implements of folk magic in the Gospel, the role and meaning of race in determining worthiness to hold the Priesthood, the ancestral origins of the American Indians, the location of lands and people featured in Book of Mormon, the eternal and unchanging nature of LDS temple ceremonies and other Priesthood ordinances, etc.
4. I never went as far as Deep Throat has, however, in making distinctions between “administration of earthly issues” and “the Gospel of Jesus Christ (i.e. truth) in its purest mode”, probably because that contradicts the basic Mormon belief that God doesn’t give any exclusively “earthly” rules–they are all applicable to spiritual matters (see D& C 29:34-35).
5. Larry King: You condemn it [polygamy].

   Gordon B. Hinckley: I condemn it, yes, as a practice, because I think it is not doctrinal. It is not legal. And this church takes the position that we will abide by the law. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, magistrates in honoring, obeying and sustaining the law.

   –1998 Larry King interview of Gordon B. Hinckley, prophet and President of the LDS Church

Mormon Woman Wondering asked:

Please help me understand how you…speak with your children, with integrity to your beliefs and with sensitivity to their need for something to hold onto in this world.

This is a tough question, particularly for somebody like me, with a spouse who is active in the Church, and who wants our kids to be active too. Obviously, my solution is a compromise, and could possibly have been different if she felt differently.  But I think this solution does take into account the potential need for kids to have something to hold onto as they develop their own worldview.

As background, I think it is useful to note that my wife and I share the opinion that childhood is a key time for a person to learn basic lessons about how the world works, and the older a person gets, the more costly those lessons will generally become (e.g., getting caught cheating on a test when you are eight years old is less costly than getting caught cheating on a final exam in college).  As parents, we have a chance to control, to a significant extent, the circumstances under which our children get their lessons, in order to best help them prepare for adulthood and the real world.  The issue my wife and I are dealing with, then, is deciding which circumstances are best for teaching our kids the lessons.

My wife believes that going to church is a good way for the kids to get some of those lessons, and at the age the kids are at right now (5-9 years old), I agree.  At this age, the church teaches kids simple lessons about gratitude, sharing with others, respect for other people, honesty, obedience, and other basic concepts that help them get along in society.  The fact that these lessons are often taught in the context of myths and legends about Joseph Smith, or characters in the Book of Mormon or Bible, is not that big of a deal to me.  I think children are well-equipped to learn through stories that are presented as true, whether they actually are or not.  It is not much different to me than using any other more conventional fairy tales to teach morality and ethics (i.e. Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or Santa Claus), so I have gone along with the process, limiting my input to questions meant to gauge their understanding of the lessons they learn in church.

I don’t go to church, and my kids notice that.  But just like times when they notice that Santa doesn’t being me very many presents, I refrain from completely leveling with them.  My response so far has been to say that I have graduated from church, just like I graduated from school.  I can say this with sincerity, because it is the truth, from my perspective.  It works as an answer for my kids and my wife, because, just like school, I am not giving them a reason to give her trouble about staying home.  They go and learn their lessons, just like their mom and I went when we were their age, and they will have a chance to “graduate” when they are old enough to make that decision.  We have stayed vague about the details of graduation.

Of course, as our kids get older, the focus of the lessons taught in the Church will gradually change from teaching them basic moral and ethical concepts to indoctrinating them into the LDS worldview (regarding gender roles, sexuality, sin, Truth, religious authority, non-LDS beliefs, etc.).  I do have serious concerns about that, but my wife and I haven’t formally developed a game plan for dealing with it yet.  I might write more about the issue in a future post.

-PWM

Mormon Woman Wondering asked:

Please help me understand how you bore the gut-hole created by losing your faith.

I am not sure I understand what “gut-hole” means in this context. I have some guesses: Is it the psychological turmoil a person goes through when the philosophical basis for her lifestyle and choices is revealed to be deeply flawed and unreliable, and needs to be replaced? Is it the anxiety that accompanies the realization that she doesn’t know what to replace it with? Is it the nagging worry that she has set her children up to fail–to trust people and ideas that are not trustworthy? Is it the disappointment at finding that so much of her life has been spent earnestly pursuing and investing in what is ultimately a high-stakes fantasy?

I think I relate to each of these possibilities, but the intensity of my experience has probably been tempered by the fact that I could never really fully commit to the social aspects of the LDS Church. I grew up in Salt Lake City, but never went to a stake dance, never attended a single’s ward, and never had friendships that started at church. In fact, a large proportion of my friends were not active members of the Church, and I spent my weekends with a mother who left the Church when I was four years old. The social experience was not why I went to Church every week, so changing my mind about Mormonism didn’t require much of a change in my lifestyle (i.e., I didn’t lose any important social outlets, business relationships, etc.). As an adult, I went to church in an effort to test and prove Mormonism as an exceptional and holy way of life–I lived my life as if Mormonism was everything it claimed to be, but I never forgot that I was making assumptions about it that needed to be confirmed. I also took a few years to gradually scale back my participation, and I left while my kids were small (all below 5 years old). I think all of that has taken an edge off of the angst that other people who stop believing have to deal with.

Even if my angst was tempered by the happy accident of my personality and life circumstances, I’ve still had my share of inner turmoil as I considered my terribly flawed reasons for making huge life decisions (marriage, kids, career, etc.), and the likelihood that they would turn out to be bad risks and huge mistakes. I’ve found a bit of comfort, however, in a very strange place (for a Mormon). In high school, I read Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, and a central theme of the novel has always resonated with me: paths we take in life, things we commit to, choices we make, situations we find ourselves in, even if they end in disaster, are experiences that give us more insight into reality. Thus, neither successes nor failures are wasted experiences–we gain wisdom and understanding from both.¹ Once I accept that idea, it’s hard for me to get too worked up about having spent a couple of decades in an authoritarian religion. The experience taught me valuable lessons that apply to broader aspects of humanity (business organizations, government, etc.), and have helped me better understand how the world works.

-PWM

___________________________

1. Mormonism actually teaches a species of this concept too, in D&C 122:5-7.

By “civilly divorced”, I don’t mean to say that the divorce process was completed in a civil manner, without petty bickering (though I believe that is true). I mean they were legally divorced. Free, in the eyes of the state, to remarry and move on with their lives.

This is an important point, because their divorce was not fully recognized by the LDS Church. Their marriage in the temple was both a civil marriage and a religious marriage–a ritual (or “ordinance“) in which my mom and dad had been “sealed” to each other, not just “till death do [them] part”, but “for time and all eternity.” From the perspective of the LDS Church, they continued to be sealed together for eternity as husband and wife, despite the civil divorce.

I think there is a similar dynamic at play in Catholic “sacramental” marriages that end in divorce–the divorce isn’t recognized by the Catholic Church, and any remarriages occur with that in mind. In the Catholic Church, if the marriage is sacramental, neither of the divorcees will be married in the Church again. In the LDS Church, it’s a bit different. My parents’ story continues:

For those of you keeping score, in the eyes (and the records) of the LDS Church, my dad was now simultaneously eternally married to two living women, and both of those women were eternally married to my dad, and nobody else.

Around the year 2000, decades after my parents’ civil divorce, my mom’s new husband realized that in the Mormon world, she had been living as my dad’s “spiritual” wife the whole time. He was thoroughly creeped out, and very dismayed that there had been no “temple divorce”. He asked my mom to make sure that the temple divorce was made official, so she looked into it.

Surprisingly (to me, at least), the polygamous union was not just a record-keeping anomaly, and dissolving it wasn’t a mere formality that the Church could take care of right away. No, here is what had to happen for the Church to acknowledge that she was no longer my dad’s wife:

1. She had to obtain, from her local LDS bishop, an application form asking the First Presidency to cancel her sealing to my dad;
2. The application form required a letter from her, addressed to the First Presidency, explaining why she wanted to have the sealing canceled;
3. The application form also required a letter from my dad, also addressed to the First Presidency, agreeing to cancellation of the sealing;
4. The completed application could only be submitted for First Presidency review by the senior local ecclesiastical authority, the stake president, who was required to interview her and attach his own written approval before sending off the application.
5. The First Presidency, in its sole discretion, would decide whether or not to cancel the sealing.
6. She would receive written confirmation of the First Presidency’s decision.

To dissolve the polygamous sealing, my mom had to get the permission of not only five different leaders of the Church, but also her already remarried ex-husband. And it wasn’t a quick process. Step 6 was completed a full nine months from the time that my mom initiated Step 1 (and it was on the desk of the First Presidency for six of those months).

If, as President Gordon B. Hinckley (whose signature, incidentally, is on my mom’s sealing cancellation letter) once asserted, in the LDS Church the practice of polygamy is “not doctrinal”,¹ then what do we call the doctrine supporting the LDS Church practice of sealing my dad to both my mom and my stepmom?

-PWM

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1. Larry King: You condemn it [polygamy].

   Gordon B. Hinckley: I condemn it, yes, as a practice, because I think it is not doctrinal. It is not legal. And this church takes the position that we will abide by the law. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, magistrates in honoring, obeying and sustaining the law.

   –1998 Larry King interview of Gordon B. Hinckley, prophet and President of the LDS Church

As a new missionary, I was in the (common?) position of having never really leveled with my local bishop back home about grave sins like masturbation and/or looking at pornography. Before the MTC, I had convinced myself that looking at my dad’s erotic photography books (or Showtime: After Hours) in the privacy of my own bedroom (or mom’s TV room) and/or masturbating, was a victimless crime–if a crime at all, and certainly not something that required shouting from the rooftops, for goodness sake. After a couple of weeks in the MTC, however, I was convinced that I had to confess my adolescent sins to somebody with authority from God to make the sins go away. I tried to find an opportunity to discreetly meet with a member of my missionary branch presidency, and found that there was a line of male missionaries waiting, outside an empty classroom, for a meeting with him. I decided that I would just blend in with them and wait my turn.

While I stood there, my mind began racing. “What if I what I’ve done is actually really bad? Have I broken my temple covenants? What will happen to me? Can I be sent home from my mission for this? How will I face everybody back home? What will I do? Is confession worth it? I definitely won’t ever masturbate again–do I even need to confess? Should I just get up and leave?”

Too soon, it was my turn. I entered the classroom to find the first counselor in the branch presidency waiting for me. He was a tall skinny man with wire-rimmed glasses, completely bald on top. He seemed like a nice enough guy. He exuded confidence and wisdom. He seemed comfortable talking to me, but I was not comfortable. I was worried that my life was going to suddenly go sideways, spinning off in the wrong direction.

He made an attempt at small talk. He asked how I was doing, whether I was used to the schedule, learning a new language, getting along with my companion. I played along. After a minute, he asked me why I wanted to meet with him. Was there anything he could do for me?

I was brave. I didn’t cry or anything. I confessed to (most of the) bad stuff. He asked me how often I had masturbated. I told him. He asked me if the pornography and the masturbation had ever happened at the same time. I told him yes. I braced for the consequences of my awful deeds.

He smiled and told me that he was glad I had confessed. He told me that he generally considered habitual masturbation or pornography viewing to be sins requiring confession to a church leader. He told me that when masturbation happened while viewing pornography, that was a sin that must be confessed, even if it happened only once. He told me that my repentance was now underway, and that the next step was to never do it again. I told him I was already there.

I walked out of the meeting feeling light and happy. I wasn’t going to be sent home, humiliated. In fact, I was now actually worthy of the companionship of the Holy Ghost. It was now possible for me to be a decent missionary. I would never masturbate again.

(And I didn’t do it even once for the balance of my mission. Two+ years of perfect sexual “purity”. Been there, done that.)

-PWM

In case you are wondering, the right answer is always “Nephi”.

When my professor heard that answer from us, he laughed. He told us that if a guy like Lehi were to tell us to leave our homes and go camping with him for an indefinite period of time to escape the evils of our community in Provo, Utah, we–along with most other Mormons–would refuse out-of-hand, saying something like

My professor thought that we students, and most other mainstream Mormons, would probably not have seriously considered following Lehi, because we were already convinced that our church leaders, and LDS culture along with them, were on the right path. We fully bought into the mainstream LDS idea that if we stick with the herd, we cannot be led astray.¹²³⁴

Nephi, on the other hand, was not dogmatic about the perfect safety of sticking with the Lord’s chosen people. Even Laman and Lemuel, despite their complaining, still abandoned the chosen people of God to follow Lehi into the wilderness.

My professor’s point was that we shouldn’t give Laman and Lemuel such a hard time for their difficulty conforming to the expectations of their highly non-conformist father Lehi. To ignore or discard the expectations of one’s culture is abnormal and often imprudent. Laman and Lemuel were normal and prudent, operating within the paradigm in which they were raised. They had firm concepts of right and wrong, and they believed the religious dogma they were taught when they were young. Just like most Mormons.

-PWM

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1. “The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray. It is not in the programme. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that, the Lord would remove me out of my place, and so He will any other man who attempts to lead the children of men astray from the oracles of God and from their duty.” –President Wilford Woodruff, Sixty-first Semiannual General Conference of the Church, Monday, October 6, 1890, Salt Lake City, Utah. Reported in Deseret Evening News, October 11, 1890, p. 2.; see also D&C Official Declaration — 1
2. “Joseph the Prophet … said, ‘Brethren, remember that the majority of this people will never go astray; and as long as you keep with the majority you are sure to enter the celestial kingdom.’ ” –Apostle Orson Hyde, Deseret News: Semi-Weekly, June 21, 1870, p. 3.
3. “I have heard the Prophet speak in public on many occasions. In one meeting I heard him say: ‘I will give you a key that will never rust,—if you will stay with the majority of the Twelve Apostles, and the records of the Church, you will never be led astray.’ The history of the Church has proven this to be true.” –William G. Nelson, in “Joseph Smith, the Prophet,” Young Woman’s Journal, Dec. 1906, p. 543; paragraph divisions altered.
4. “I heard the Prophet Joseph say that he would give the Saints a key whereby they would never be led away or deceived, and that was: The Lord would never suffer a majority of this people to be led away or deceived by imposters, nor would He allow the records of this Church to fall into the hands of the enemy.” –Ezra T. Clark, “The Testimony of Ezra T. Clark,” July 24, 1901, Farmington, Utah; in Heber Don Carlos Clark, Papers, ca. 1901–74, typescript, Church Archives.

A very popular LDS scriptural example of this process is found in the Book of Mormon, in the story of a man called “the brother of Jared”, who lived at the time the Tower of Babel was built, and who was commanded by God to build a fleet of submersible ships to cross the ocean. The problem was that no light could reach the inside of the ships, and windows couldn’t be installed. The brother of Jared climbed a mountain and talked to the Lord about it :

23 And the Lord said unto the brother of Jared: What will ye that I should do that ye may have light in your vessels? For behold, ye cannot have windows, for they will be dashed in pieces; neither shall ye take fire with you, for ye shall not go by the light of fire.

25 …Therefore what will ye that I should prepare for you that ye may have light when ye are swallowed up in the depths of the sea?

See Book of Ether 2:23, 25

The brother of Jared then set out to answer the Lord’s question. His solution was to melt a rock (don’t ask me how) into 16 small stones that were as transparent as glass and ask the Lord to touch them and make them glow. The Lord obliged, and Jared had his solution to the problem :

2 For it came to pass after the Lord had prepared the stones which the brother of Jared had carried up into the mount, the brother of Jared came down out of the mount, and he did put forth the stones into the vessels which were prepared, one in each end thereof; and behold, they did give light unto the vessels.

3 And thus the Lord caused stones to shine in darkness, to give light unto men, women, and children, that they might not cross the great waters in darkness.

See Ether 6:2-3

Among Mormons, the brother of Jared story is considered a classic example of working with the Lord–and invoking his divine power–to solve real-world problems that might normally impede a person from doing the Lord’s will. The Covenanting with the Lord concept applies that process to missionary work in a fairly straightforward way. It should have worked–and I had a testimony that it would work, and was right for me–but it didn’t.

My Covenanting with the Lord missionary experience is not unique; it has been implemented in many missions, with similar results. Despite its universally spotty success record, the principles behind it are solid, mainstream Mormon beliefs about God’s way of working with people, so it is very hard for Mormons to reject. See, for example, this By Common Consent blog post, in which the author acknowledges the general failure of the concept in LDS missionary work, yet blames only abusive and “destructive” implementation (rather than a problem with the underlying concepts) for the failure, and expresses the belief that “when done out of personal volition [the program] does work”.

I don’t know precisely what he means by “personal volition”, but when I covenanted with the Lord, I felt like I was trying the program of my own volition (despite there being obvious external pressure to get results). I think I employed as much of my own volition as the brother of Jared did when all of his friends’ and family’s futures depended on him solving their lighting problem. I was a willing participant in the process.

Several commenters to the BCC blog post go further than the original poster does in trying to marginalize the Covenanting with the Lord concept. Some dismiss the entire premise and attack (criticize!) the judgment of the mission presidents and General Authorities of the Church who allow the program to resurface from time to time. The general critique is that “you can’t tell the Lord what to do”. Another recent BCC blog post adopts the pejorative descriptor “manipulationist” for people who subscribe to this mainstream LDS concept. The critique, however, misapprehends how the concept works–at least as I experienced it. The idea is to confirm, through the Holy Ghost, what criteria the Lord would have you follow in order to bind him in a personal covenant. Thus, the Lord isn’t being told what to do, rather, he is dictating the terms in essentially the same way that he does through any other divine covenanting process found in Mormonism.

Covenanting with the Lord is not “manipulation” of God, it is a test of the Mormon concept of the Holy Ghost as the messenger of God, and a person’s ability to communicate with the Holy Ghost. It tests the LDS concept of personal communication with God. That is the most interesting part to me.

-PWM

When I had been proselyting as a missionary for just about three months, my Mission President (the volunteer LDS clergy supervising the activities of the entire mission) assigned me to work in a new city with a partner (i.e., a “companion”) who was in the final month of his two-year term of missionary service. The Mission President met with me to tell me I was chosen for the assignment because this missionary needed a faithful, enthusiastic companion to try a new method of proselyting that had the potential to usher in a surge of baptisms in the mission. It was called “Covenanting with the Lord”.

The idea behind Covenanting with the Lord was the fact that Heavenly Father has a system in place for helping people achieve their righteous goals. Jesus Christ touched on it in Luke 11:9-13 when he said “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” But for Mormons, the concept has another dimension–the Lord explicitly promises that if a person has faith in him, that person shall have power to do whatever “is expedient” for the Lord. And the Lord is obligated to make good on his promises when people hold up their end of the bargain. We had answered Jesus Christ’s call to be missionaries, so clearly our desire to be the best (i.e., “most successful”) missionaries we could be was expedient for him. All we had to do was properly ask for Heavenly Father’s help and demonstrate our unwavering faith in him. We would pray, asking Heavenly Father to send the Holy Ghost to tell us what we needed to do in order to strengthen and demonstrate our faith and invoke the Lord’s obligation to make us successful (i.e., “baptizing”) missionaries. Once the Holy Ghost told us what we needed to do, we just had to take up the challenge and covenant to do it, and the Lord would have to give us people to baptize.

I learned that the Mission President had taught the whole mission to follow this Covenanting with the Lord program just a couple of weeks before I had arrived in the mission, and my new companion had been one of his shining examples of success in following the program and finding people to baptize. Now the Mission President and my new comp were looking at me to get in gear and continue the process.

The day I arrived in my new apartment, my companion told me how the program worked, and how I needed to join him in covenanting with the Lord for baptisms. I needed to sit down with him and prayerfully determine (through the guidance of the Holy Ghost) how many Book of Mormons we needed to distribute, and how many missionary lessons (i.e., “discussions”) we needed to teach people each week in order to demonstrate the level of faith necessary to bind the Lord in granting us success.

I was honored that the Mission President had chosen me, of all the new missionaries, to take up the challenge. I was also taken aback by the audacity and ambition inherent in developing a formula for calling down the power of God to serve our desires as missionaries. It made sense to me, though–we were on the Lord’s errand, so he’s got to support us; this could be how.

My companion and I fasted for 24 hours, prayed, and wrote up a plan laying out, in addition to a commitment to be perfectly obedient to all mission rules, all of our performance goals for the next four weeks. Each week, we figured, our faith would need to increase, and that increased faith would show forth in increased statistics–more Book of Mormons given out, and more discussions taught. The first week contained pretty ambitious numbers, and each week those numbers increased, until, by the last week, the numbers were ridiculously high–equal to a month’s worth of work for most missionary companionships. This was my companion’s last month as a missionary, and he was going to go all out.

We prayed together for the Holy Ghost’s confirmation of our plan, and my companion received that confirmation. I, on the other hand, did not feel anything I considered communication from the Holy Ghost. My comp was absolutely convinced that our plan was right, and as the senior companion, he could have just told me to go along with it, but he was also convinced that the plan wouldn’t work if I wasn’t fully on board. We went back to our apartment and he waited in the front room while I retreated, plan in hand, to the study, where I was to pray until I got my answer.

After about 15 minutes of continuous pleading with the Lord for an answer, I started to feel a light, almost tingling sensation in my spine that grew into a wave that passed through my whole body. I took that as confirmation from the Holy Ghost that our plan was approved of the Lord, and his promise of success would have to be fulfilled as we completed our plan.

The details of the plan and how we went about completing it are the subject of another post, but for the purpose of this post, I’ll just say that we worked like crazy each week, meeting our goals–miraculously, it seemed, as the goals got bigger. The third week, we achieved our goal with five minutes to go before the end of the week. The Lord seemed to be helping us meet our goals–rewarding our faith and tenacious desire to do his will. The fourth week, we were worn down from weeks of non-stop working, but kept at it through the end. After giving our all, we were both very disappointed to find we had come up just barely short of our final week’s goals.

After covenanting with the Lord, we put up what were easily the biggest numbers of any companionship in the mission, but in the end, we baptized nobody during that month (not even close), had no additional serious investigators, and to my knowledge, nobody we met with during that month was baptized at some later date either. We had absolutely zero success, despite our testimony that our plan was a divinely approved path to baptisms. The Mission President never talked to me, or the rest of the mission, about Covenanting with the Lord again. It was abandoned as if it never existed.

-PWM