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

This seems like a neat and tidy way to avoid conflicts between science and religion–just treat the religious view as a divinely-inspired metaphor only.
The strategy carries forward to other events described in the Bible that conflict with science (e.g., Noah’s Ark (and the flood) , or even the Exodus). Once science has persuaded you that the events probably didn’t actually happen the way the Bible says (and perhaps you were taught to believe), you simply thank science and conclude that they’re just metaphors.

It’s actually easy for a Mormon to do this with the Bible, because Mormons believe the Bible to be the word of God only to the extent that it has been translated correctly, and the current version of the Bible is missing many “plain and precious things” that were removed or otherwise corrupted since the books were first written. In the mainstream LDS view, the Bible is already a potential minefield of half-truths and uninspired poetry, so relabeling seemingly literal elements as metaphorical in light of new scientific knowledge is no big deal.

But what about taking that same approach with the Book of Mormon?

Such an approach is rarely seen in the LDS Church, if ever. Joseph Smith once said that the Book of Mormon is “the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion.” That quote is proudly printed in the introduction of every copy of the Book of Mormon published by the LDS Church, as is the following challenge to the world: “We invite all men everywhere to read the Book of Mormon, to ponder in their hearts the message it contains, and then to ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ if the book is true.” Now, as a Mormon with those sweeping declarations ringing in your ears and permeating your concept of the religion, which Book of Mormon stories are you going to declare to be not literally true? I didn’t think so.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that events and facts depicted in Book of Mormon stories don’t conflict with the discoveries of science. In fact, I would assert that under scientific scrutiny, the Book of Mormon fares significantly worse than the Bible (which is saying a lot, considering the Bible’s track record). Here are a few clear opportunities to label Book of Mormon stories as metaphors that mainstream Mormons never take:

1. The American Indians, who the Church (until 2006) believed were descended principally from large Semitic nations that dominated the Americas for about 1000 years (Nephites and Lamanites), as chronicled in the Book of Mormon,¹ are actually genetically Asian. Their ancestors came from Siberia to the American continent via a land bridge that existed anciently.
2. Crucial Book of Mormon animals (horses, domesticated cattle, elephants, domesticated sheep, goats, swine)? No trace.
3. Crucial Book of Mormon ores and alloys (iron and steel)? No trace.
4. Millions of Jaredites and hundreds of thousands of Nephites and Lamanites (numbers rivaling the size of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans) who died on the same battlefield, years apart? No trace.
5. The Book of Mormon’s Jaredite civilization is supposed to have formed in the wake of the miraculous confounding of human languages at the Tower of Babel. LDS apologist John L. Sorenson places the date of that event at the unreasonably early date of 3100 BC². Even accepting this strained, faith-accommodating date as the best estimate for the event, it is still right around the generally accepted date of the emergence of the Sumerian writing system (3100 BC), which developed long after humans were already speaking Sumerian and any number of other languages, not the mythical “Adamic” language.

For somebody taking the “inspired metaphor” approach, just the few conflicts between the Book of Mormon and scientific consensus listed above seem to place the entire Book of Mormon narrative in the category of metaphor. It’s no wonder this approach is not accepted in mainstream Mormonism–as applied to any LDS Scripture, including the Bible and the Book of Mormon. This rejection of the “inspired metaphor” approach places mainstream Mormons in the same camp as the creationists and intelligent design proponents.

Definitely not my camp.

-PWM

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1. For example, the Nephites and Lamanites “did cover the whole face of the land, both on the northward and on the southward, from the sea west to the sea east“
2. I think 3100 BC is early because the Book of Mormon indicates that only about 30 generations of Jaredites lived prior to the civilization’s demise sometime after 600 BC, which requires an unthinkable 80+ years per generation, if we take Sorenson’s early date. With this in mind, the more mainstream Christian/LDS date (acknowledged by Sorenson) of around 2200 BC seems early too (50+ years per generation). Using Sorenson’s dates, about 125 generations (20 years per generation) would be more reasonable, but possibly still a bit low. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that as far as science is concerned, the chronology of Middle Earth is just as real.

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.

Jack Mormons, despite having left the Church, continue to view the world essentially through the lens of Mormonism, and maintain the essential beliefs of the mainstream LDS Church. They are basically orthodox (i.e., correct in their religious beliefs), but they are not orthoprax (i.e., correct in their religious practices). Jack Mormons and mainstream members of the LDS Church get along pretty well, because Jack Mormons confirm and support LDS religious beliefs; their only problem is failing to obey the rules. They agree that they aren’t doing what they are “supposed” to do, and they can often be coaxed back into participation.

Apostates are a different story. Apostates and mainstream members of the LDS Church generally have a much harder time getting along, because Apostates are often neither orthodox nor orthoprax–they have knowingly discarded the essential LDS paradigm and beliefs, and that is why they do not obey the rules. The dynamic of the relationship is different from the relationship with Jack Mormons–it’s not merely about participating (”active”) vs. non-participating (”inactive”) Mormons, it’s about believing vs. non-believing Mormons. When believing Mormons engage Apostates, they come dangerously close to questioning their own beliefs, and becoming Apostates themselves. Not surprisingly, the LDS Church openly demonizes and belittles people it considers to be Apostates, and teaches that they are covenant-breaking servants of Satan (see, for example, this 2007 adult Sunday school lesson, titled “Beware the Bitter Fruits of Apostasy”, which was recently presented in LDS congregations worldwide).

Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland recently publicly belittled people who don’t believe in the literal historicity of the Book of Mormon. He called them “foolish”, “misled”, and “deceived”, and derided their attempts to explain the origins of the Book of Mormon in naturalistic terms as “pathetic”. He likened people who leave the Church for intellectual reasons to insects or vermin of some sort who have to “crawl over, or under, or around the Book of Mormon to make that exit.” Jeffrey R. Holland apparently likes to pontificate about the awful fates and consequences that await intellectual dissenters from the Church (and their children). I wrote more about that here.

Obviously, if you want to leave, but still maintain relatively positive contact and open relationships with members of LDS communities, it is easier to be a Jack Mormon than to be an Apostate.

-PWM

I attended Brigham Young University, and within a few of years of fairly intense study there, I found that current LDS beliefs and practices didn’t match up with past LDS beliefs and practices, and that both the present and the past Church left much to be desired as God’s beacon of Truth, wisdom, and enlightenment. I graduated from “the Lord’s University” with a BA, a pregnant wife, a kid, and very little religious faith in Mormonism. I tried hard to find an explanation for the state of the LDS Church that could reassure me that God was involved somehow in running the show, but reassurance never came. I dealt with my severe disappointment by resolving to not take Mormonism so seriously, and to focus on the good that the LDS Church was about as a social institution, rather than its Truth, which I found had a tendency to crumble under scrutiny.

In spring of 2003, after I graduated from BYU, I listened to an address delivered by LDS Church Apostle Jeffery R. Holland, titled A Prayer for the Children. In it, he said:

I speak carefully and lovingly to any of the adults of the Church, parents or otherwise, who may be given to cynicism or skepticism, who in matters of whole-souled devotion always seem to hang back a little, who at the Church’s doctrinal campsite always like to pitch their tents out on the periphery of religious faith. To all such—whom we do love and wish were more comfortable camping nearer to us—I say, please be aware that the full price to be paid for such a stance does not always come due in your lifetime. No, sadly, some elements of this can be a kind of profligate national debt, with payments coming out of your children’s and grandchildren’s pockets in far more expensive ways than you ever intended it to be.

As friendly and gentle as Holland tried to make his words sound, the curse (or threat) they carried rang harshly in my ears. He was telling me that I must exchange my reticent skepticism and critical thinking for an outward show of “whole-souled devotion” to the LDS Church, or there would be hell to pay. I almost laughed when, a moment later, he declared that in the process of learning about the Gospel, “there is no place for coercion or manipulation, no place for intimidation or hypocrisy.” (Coulda fooled me, Jeffrey!) Over the course of his talk, Holland’s clear expectation of conformity at all costs marked the first (and not the last) time the rhetoric of an LDS Church leader rubbed me the wrong way. I was sincere in my skepticism; I had good reason for it. This Apostle was asking me to be insincere about my beliefs with my own children.

Hearing that manipulative pap from a man who was supposedly one of Jesus Christ’s key representatives on Earth was a monumental experience for me. It marked the moment that I realized there may no longer be a place for me at the LDS campfire, and I decided then to embrace my skepticism and critical thinking and set up camp at the periphery of Mormonism. And here I have remained, a poor wayfaring man of sorts, not really welcome in my own culture.

Who am I?

You might actually know me. I may have been an anonymous member of your ward, trying my best to blend into the background, biting my tongue in Sunday School, or maybe even serving in a bishopric. Don’t worry, even if I do happen to be living in your ward, I generally steer clear of the whole-souled devotees now. All of the inauthenticity I’m required to hide behind at church has made the LDS Sunday experience very tedious for me, so I prefer not to participate. But my wife and children still go to LDS Church meetings nearly every Sunday, and that keeps Mormonism on my mind.

You will probably hear more from me.

-PWM

What lesson does this song teach? Well, the central message appears to be that everything the narrator did to help the beggar actually earned the narrator serious capital in the economy of the afterlife; he is now destined to be a big shot–the ruler of a kingdom in Heaven. The song, of course, does not present this lesson in so many words. It is actually a first-person reformulation of a lesson Jesus is reported to have taught (in Matthew 25:31-40), which culminates in the famous line, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” This lesson establishes that Christian behavior, however uncomfortable or difficult to engage in, will be richly rewarded in the afterlife.

This song was a favorite of the Prophet Joseph Smith–the founder of Mormonism (and the LDS Church’s ultimate big-shot). The song was sung a couple of times, at Joseph’s request, on the day of his 1844 murder. It’s no surprise that he liked it, given its central message, which Joseph used to great advantage in motivating the Latter-day Saints to action (or submission) during his time as their prophet and leader.

Okay, maybe the connection to Joseph Smith is just trivia, since it’s not really why I picked the hymn for the name of this blog. The reason for the name is that this blog features an author who isn’t the most attractive person to devout Mormons. I imagine his lack of faith and generally negative attitude toward the doctrines and certain cultural features of the LDS Church (which he was raised in) probably permeates the air of Mormon religious and social gatherings, in the same way the stench of a homeless person or a leper (true “poor wayfaring” folks) would. Maybe I’m not right about that, but I think the spiritual “illness” that afflicts me is considered every bit as scary and dangerous for a faithful Mormon as leprosy used to be for the unafflicted. The fact that I don’t really have any friends in the Mormon community where I live seems to support my theory. And the fact that people who I do interact with have never even come close to inquiring about my…er…shaken faith syndrome or any other reasons for not going to church on Sundays, seems to lend further solid support, but I admit I’m working with limited data here, and could be wrong.

As someone who grew up in Mormon culture, who has always been fascinated with Mormonism’s history and teachings, I have not found it easy to just disengage completely from the topic (as many mainstream Mormons would prefer). Also, my wife and kids are active participants in the local LDS community, so I am interested in finding ways to explain my own perspective and personal choices to them without being insensitive to their point of view. This is part of what I plan on doing with this blog.

It may be easy to see this collection of thoughts as yet another faceless unorthodox Mormon blog. Maybe I look like just one of many anonymous strangers wandering the wild internets, panhandling for your attention. But give this Poor Wayfaring Man a chance, and you just might get a little something in return. (You never know–I may actually be a big shot, giving you a chance to earn some heavenly real estate for yourself.)

-PWM